California Gov Jerry Brown signed a law on July 21 that prohibits full-contact (tackling) practices for more than 90 minutes a day or two days a week during the season and prohibits any full-contact play during the off-season for high school and middle school football, the Washington Post reports.
(Chiceaux Lynch via Flickr)
The new law will also restrict when players can return to play after a head injury is suspected: they must sit out for at least the rest of that day and get medical clearance to return.
The law’s “practice guidelines will reassure parents that their kids can learn football safely through three hours of full-contact practice … to maximize conditioning and skill development while minimizing concussion risk,” the Los Angeles Times quoted Ken Cooley, the Democratic assemblyman from Rancho Cordova who drafted the legislation, as saying.
Some high school coaches say the new law presents a challenge. “In the summer, we do need to have full contact,” the Times quoted one coach from a Los Angeles public high school as saying. “We do need to figure out who can play. That’s a very important part of our summer practice. That’s how we determine who our starters will be.”
I guess they’ll have to come up with a new way to find their starters.
As these laws were sweeping the country last year, I advocated for a one-year pause in football while states figure out how to protect kids from traumatic brain injury. I didn’t expect that to happen, but there are more important things in our schools than good football teams, I thought.
Some lawmakers in California objected to the bill on the grounds that the state legislature shouldn’t tell local school officials how to conduct football practice. On the contrary, the state authorities are exactly the people to do that. At least 19 states ban full-contact play during the off-season, according to the Times.
Last year, most states, including Maryland, restricted full-contact play, and national conferences have been held in an effort to produce national mandates to limit full-contact practices, the Post reported. After Mississippi passed a youth concussion law in January 2014—following a lawsuit there by the parent of a high school football player who had filed a concussion class action lawsuit against the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) and the NCAA—all 50 states have now enacted concussion laws to protect youth football players.
About 140,000 high school athletes suffered from concussions in 2012, according to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the number of kids who suffer head injuries every year, from all causes, at about 4 million.
