For the past 2 years, due to the death and other permanent head and brain injuries
occurring to various high-profile athletes, many of which are parties to the pending class action lawsuit filed against the NFL, have officials at the youth football level taking firm action, which will hopefully lessen and safen the game for our kids. Officials of The Pop Warner League, the largest youth football organization have changed its rules.
Research over the past few years has sounded alarms about how repeated hits to the head can affect the brains of football players, from young people all the way up through NFL athletes. A condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is already a well-publicized concern for ex-football players, particularly in light of NFL players’ Junior Seau and former Chicago Bear safety Dave Duerson’s suicide. Duerson requested his brain be donated for study before he shot himself in the chest; scientists later discovered he was suffering from CTE.
Recent research has found that Owen Thomas, the 21-year-old captain of the University of Pennsylvania football team who committed suicide in April 2010, was in the early stages of CTE. He had never been diagnosed with a concussion.
This spring, Stone Phillips produced a video report for Newshour on a study by a team at Virginia Tech that measured hits in 7- and 8-year-old football players. They found that impacts that measured 40g or greater — when hits start to get dangerous — occurred much more often than expected. And they occurred most often during practice. The New York Times reports that Pop Warner officials decided to change their guidelines for tackling during practice because of a study showing that football players as young as 7 can suffer from collisions as severe as college-level players.
New findings and studies in the area of concussion and brain injury, show that young children, who are still physically developing, are particularly vulnerable to suffering traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and head trauma associated with high-impact or contact sports such as football. About 3,000 children die from brain injuries every year and another 400,000 are brought to the hospital due to brain and head injuries annually.
Pop Warner Little Scholars enrolls approximately 280,000 children ranging in age from 5 to 15 in its nationwide football leagues. More than 285,000 children ages 5 to 15 play in Pop Warner leagues, and they’ve produced two-thirds of the players now in the NFL, according to The New York Times. Pop Warner is the first youth football league to implement across-the-board regulations when it comes to head-injury prevention.
In a press release about the revamp, Pop Warner also reiterated that certain blocking and tackling techniques, including face tacking and spearing, remain prohibited. Pop Warner has banned drills that involve tackling that begins with players more than 3 yards apart, head-to-head contact, or full-speed, head-on blocking and helmet-to-helmet hitting, and only one-third of practice time per week can be devoted to drills that use contact, which breaks down to about 40 minutes per practice. The league is also in the process of updating its website to include easily accessible information about concussions and safety.