Players and coaches from Katy Youth Football completed their first of at least four safety training sessions Saturday to make sure all are properly educated on how to understand, as well as avoid, head trauma on the field.
Taking place at Cinco Ranch High School, Saturday’s seminar featured the “Heads Up” program, an initiative by USA Football — the sport’s national governing body — to certify that coaches know current standards for concussion awareness and equipment fit, as well as heat and hydration. Through “Heads Up”, USA Football is striving to create standards for terminology and technique from the little league level, up to the pro level.
“Where we’re seeing more concussions is actually during the tackle,” said Chad Hester, USA Football master trainer. “So we’re starting with ‘Heads Up Tackling’. We’re teaching them proper tackling techniques to get the head out of the game — where they should be making first contact, instead of the head.”
USA Football teaches players by advancing through “levels of contact”, where technique is learned through different types of resistance — beginning with air, to bags, designated winners and losers, with the final stage called “thud”. Thud is a term by USA Football used to designate an assigned drill where players stay on their feet, and all contact is above the waist — a quick whistle ending play.
KYF President Anthony Biello said 2014 is the second year for KYF to participate in Heads Up. Besides just learning technique, KYF is limiting the amount of “live-action” players participate in during practice. The 35-year old league, boasting 1,500 players, has adopted the UIL’s standard of no more than 90 minutes of full-contact per week, per player. Full-contact is defined as game speed, where players tackle and block to the ground.
“If we have coaches that are out there just banging kids into each other, we have talks with those coaches. In some cases, we remove those kinds of coaches,” Biello said. “If you’re lining two kids up, five or ten yards apart and tell them to run full-speed and hit each other head-on — we don’t want to see that happen on our fields.”
He said the league doesn’t endorse several old-school contact exercises, such as “Bull in the Ring”, where players line up in a circle around one player, targeting the man in the middle for hit after hit, or the “Oklahoma Drill”, where a blocker and ball-carrier are pitted against a defender head-on within a tight width of space.
Kenneth Podell, neuropsychologist from the Methodist Neurological Institute, came to KYF’s training to educate coaches and players on what concussions actually are, as well as how to recognize and treat them. Podell remembers when some football coaches didn’t actually consider concussions a legitimate injury.
“At one time, a concussion test might have been, ‘how many fingers am I holding up?” Podell said. He indicated that has changed, where now medical staff uses a Standardized Concussion Assessment Tool (SCAT), where players go through a variety of mental assessments, also participating in balance and coordination tests.
“We try to objectify this is much as possible,” he said.
However, if there’s even an inkling of head injury by game officials, training staff or coaches, Biello said KYF requires players to sit out for at least a week and to be cleared medically by a qualified physician before returning to play.
While lawsuits against the NFL by former players diagnosed with the disease called CTE — thought by some to be caused by multiple sub-concussive hits — have spurred the movement for concussion awareness, Podell said he considers this a different type of injury, and one that’s still being studied by doctors. At this point in time, Podell said he believes athletes from little league on to high school bare significantly less risk than college or pro players, but that every parent must access their own risk level.
Hester recommends that parents look for a USA Football certified league when signing their kids up to play, as leagues that aren’t aligned with USA Football may not have the same level of standards. He hopes through these types of trainings, players will develop muscle memory for the Heads Up techniques. USA Football is looking to add “Heads Up Blocking” to their current instruction in future years.
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