Venomous snake hides in football player’s helmet during practice — while he wears it

On Aug. 6, a high school football player in Maumelle, Ark., practiced as he would any other day. Except that day, he had a passenger coiled inside his helmet.

A venomous one. For quite a while.

“You’ve seen them on movies and TVs and all that stuff. Snakes getting into peculiar places,” Chris Davis, Maumelle’s director of animal services, told The Athletic. “A helmet, so be it. It doesn’t sound like it’s out of the ordinary, but what’s shocking was this kid had worn the helmet for at least an hour, if not longer.”

The Maumelle High student-athlete initially felt something odd when putting the helmet on but continued practicing, Davis said. At some point, it felt unusual enough for him to bring it to a coach for examination when the snake’s head was discovered peeking through the padding in the helmet. Animal services was called.

What the coaches and players initially thought was a copperhead, one of the more commonly encountered venomous snakes in the U.S., was determined to be a 2-foot cottonmouth that had nestled behind the padding of the helmet.

Cottonmouths — semiaquatic snakes also known as water moccasins — are in the top three most commonly encountered venomous snakes in Arkansas,  Davis said.

Without the proper tools on site, animal services had to take it back to the shelter and flood the helmet to flush the snake out. Once it emerged, they quickly determined why they thought the “early adulthood” snake had made its way into the headgear.

“One of the officers noticed that it, due to it being big and fat, may have recently ate a couple of days before,” Davis said. “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.”

A cottonmouth snake hid behind the padding of a football helmet to digest a meal. (Chris Davis / Maumelle Animal Services)

A helmet isn’t a large space for a snake to burrow into, but they are adept at finding their way into tight spaces.

“That’s why we have weather stripping on our doors,” Davis said. “The smallest spots, they can slither in if they would like to.”

Davis assured that cottonmouths, though venomous, are not typically aggressive unless threatened.

Though the player was stunned by the intrusion into his protective gear, it wasn’t enough to bring him off the field. As far as Davis was told, once the ordeal was handled, the player simply asked for a different helmet and returned to practice.

He got his head back in the game — this time, without a visitor.