When the fall football season opens in Maryland schools, athletes will be using the “Heads-Up” program from USA Football, WBAL-TV (NBC affiliate) reports.
Two of the main features of the Heads Up program are
- A safety coach for each football team, whose only job is to monitor player safety and educate athletes and other coaches about concussion prevention
- No more leading with the head and helmet for tackles, a distinct change in the game back to a tackling style of the 70s and 80s: “an ascending blow, shoulder strike, head to the side and head up”
The program emphasizes education about concussion injury and has obtained remarkable coach, superintendent, and parent buy-in. “We need to make sure we protect ourselves as professional coaches, protect the kids that play, and ease the minds of parents who are letting those kids play so we can keep growing our sport,” the Washington Post quoted Patuxent Coach Steve Crounse, whose son plays quarterback for the Calvert County school, as saying. “I think this is a necessary step that we had to do, and I think everybody will jump on board.”
No other state high school athletic associations have adopted Heads Up, so Maryland will be the first. But the program has been endorsed by the NFL, Pacific-12, Big Ten, Big 12, and the National Federation of State High School Associations.
But Maryland public schools won’t be the first to adopt the Heads Up program. In the fall 2013 season, Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia adopted it, USA Today reports. More than 3,300 athletes at 25 high schools participated.
“It’s basically limited the amount of concussions that we’ve had this year,” said Alonzo Cliatt, head football coach at Hayfield High School, in a USA Football promotional video. “Because we have worked on Heads Up tackling from Day 1.”
We have a few doubts, but hope for the best
We have written extensively about concussion injury stemming from contact and collision sports, such as football (see the list here). “We renew our call to suspend football as a sanctioned sport in order to allow more research to be conducted and rules to be rewritten that will change the game into one that doesn’t cause permanent brain damage to our youngest citizens,” I once wrote.
To allow schoolkids to participate in an activity that we know causes permanent brain damage was just unimaginable to me, now that we can all but guarantee that brain damage is inevitable with certain types of collisions that slush the brain around in the skull.
But if athletes can change the way they tackle other players and the new tackling method reduces the chances of brain injury by taking the helmet-to-helmet collisions out of play, it might help.
I don’t completely understand how the new tackling method reduces brain slush, but USA Football has sold it to the Maryland Public Secondary School Athletic Association. I suppose we’ll see, but by way of full disclosure, USA Football spends a lot of effort on marketing and parent outreach. The organization is funded through a grant from an NFL foundation, the Washington Post reported.
It’s hard to argue against such a program, though. It allows kids to play competitive sports but to do it in a way that is mindful of their safety and long-term health. Injuries are down in Fairfax County, and if athletes are trained properly and the program shows positive results, it’s worth a look for now.
