A high school football player recently had the misfortune of carrying something truly unexpected in his helmet: a two-foot-long potentially deadly venomous snake.
The strange incident occurred last week at Maumelle High School in Arkansas. The male student-athlete had been practicing on the field for at least an hour when he and his coach made the discovery. Animal services officials thankfully removed the snake without incident.
Snake helmet
According to the Associated Press, the player did feel some “unusual movement” in his helmet when he first put it on, but he thought little of it at first. Eventually, though, the sensation got so bothersome that he brought over the gear to his assistant couch to be examined. And that’s when they spotted a snake poking its head through the helmet’s padding.
Maumelle Animal Services officials were called to the high school to extract the snake, though it didn’t cooperate easily. Ultimately, they had to literally flush the slithery reptile out by dunking the helmet in water.
According to The Athletic, the players and coach initially thought the snake was a copperhead, a type of venomous pit viper widely found throughout the central and eastern U.S. But officials determined that it was actually a young adult cottonmouth, another commonly encountered kind of viper in the region. They also noted that the fairly big snake had likely eaten recently and may have just been looking for a secluded area to hunker down after its hard-earned meal.
“It probably was trying to find a dark spot to digest the food, and when it was coming across, it saw a helmet lying on the ground,” Chris Davis, Maumelle’s director of animal services, told The Athletic.
A happy ending
Perhaps fortunately for the boy, cottonmouths aren’t particularly aggressive and will usually only bite humans if they feel threatened. Their venom can be potentially life-threatening and may require antivenom treatment, but most attacks cause localized symptoms like pain and swelling around the affected bite. Still, even a typical bite can be very painful, and it might require weeks to fully recover.
In this case, the wayward snake was safely relocated to a wooded area far away from the school. And amazingly enough, the high school player didn’t take long to grab another helmet and return to practice.
Personally, I would have used the snake to at least take the rest of the day off.
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