Well, that's exactly the problem. While it's entirely possible that there are hordes of badass kids around and we just haven't seen them, it would be the exact bad writing we are talking about here. The author should have shown them occasionally. If we had seen them, we would have thought nothing of these particular kids. They would have just been the bottom of the barrel who lost their nerve, to put it bluntly. Just like the multitude of older players who even killed themselves because they couldn't take it.