In the midst of a heat wave, high school football practices begin in Arkansas

Bauxite, Arkansas – The giant ball glowing in the sky is the main attraction on everyone’s mind as Friday night football gets ready for a new season, not the coach’s kid.

Every student at Bauxite and throughout the state on Monday is currently simply wearing a helmet; at the end of the week, they will add pads and a whole uniform. It’s just one of Coach Caleb Perry’s playbook’s many tools for dealing with the grueling heat of Arkansas.

Coach Perry said, “The kids have to go through each day before they can go to the next one just to be safe. This is the heat acclimation week.”

They consult the National Weather Service to determine when it is safe and how frequently to take breaks.

Among the few models produced by the NWS, Chris Buonanno, the scientific and operations officer, claims that the wet bulb global temperature is the most widely used in sports.

“It is intended for use by healthy individuals in outdoor environments, and it considers heat angle, something the heat index, for instance, does not,” said Buonanno.

Wet Bulb considers wind as well as the duration and location of all direct sunshine, allowing children and adults to play outside, as opposed to only measuring temperature and humidity as the heat index does.

Bauxite quarterback Elijah Perry, a sophomore, says his team takes the heat seriously in order to perform well both in practice and in competition.

“You know, we have to do it for our comrades. That’s how we encourage one another. We encourage one another in this heat, according to Perry.

Long-standing tools such as the heat index and wet bulb globe temperature are being replaced with a more recent one that the National Weather Service is testing and making public.

To safeguard humans, HeatRisk uses data from fields other than meteorology, such as climatology.

To illustrate various degrees of heat danger over a given area, the parameters include what is above normal for a specific place and time of year, the length of exceptional heat, the vulnerable populations within a given area, CDC death rates, and more.