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Posted on Mar 4, 2013 | Print |

By Gary Mihoces -- Athletic Business
March 4, 2013

Class is in session in the new school of football. The focus is on teaching kids a safer way to tackle, easing the fears of parents alarmed about concussions and ensuring that the thriving game has a future.

The faculty began taking shape over the weekend. It includes Chuck Kyle, who in 30 seasons as coach at St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland has won 11 Ohio state titles and twice was named USA TODAY Sports' national high school coach of the year.

"All of us feel that football is under attack a little bit right now with the concussion situation," Kyle says. "It's a game we all love, and I think there are a lot of coaches that say we're not going to stand back. We're going to fix it. We want to make sure that parents feel safe when they're sending their son to play the game."

Kyle was among 19 invitees, most of them current or former high school coaches, who attended a weekend workshop to become master trainers in the Heads Up Football program being expanded this year by USA Football, a national youth organization based here.

Read more at Athletic Business.


Posted on Nov 26, 2012 | Print |

Jon Saraceno -- Athletic Business
November 21, 2012

The blight is unmistakable, a feeling of despair palpable.

These days, so is the joy. "The City of Prayer" has found salvation in its high school football team.

Citizens of this small, economically ravaged southwestern Pennsylvania city are grateful for their Clairton High Bears -- a spirited, tough-minded bunch of at-risk teenagers who defy odds stacked higher than the smokestacks that line the Mon Valley. The Bears are a beacon of light amid the gloom, infusing a sense of community spirit and pride by virtue of the nation's longest high school football winning streak -- 59 games.

"In Clairton, if you don't play football, you are on the streets," team trainer Tammy Ridgley says. "The way I see it, this is all the city has left."

Read more at Athletic Business.


Posted on Nov 14, 2012 | Print |

By Michael Martinez -- Fox Sports
October 30, 2012

Football has its risks, a fact Braeden Benedict learned this season when he sustained a broken collarbone during practice with the Palos Verdes Peninsula High JV team. The injury was nothing new; he broke the same collarbone playing lacrosse in January.
 
Benedict knows all about sports injuries, perhaps too well. But because he has seen how they can affect his fellow athletes in contact sports, he's on a path to developing something that eventually may help detect one of the most sinister football injuries of all: concussions.
 
A small mechanical sensor he designed could eventually become a low-cost, mass-produced device that fits on the front of helmets and releases a liquid that is visible from the sidelines, warning coaches and trainers that a player should be checked for a possible head injury.

Read more at Fox Sports


Posted on Nov 1, 2012 | Print |

October 30, 2012

DEERFIELD BEACH, FLA. (AP)
Authorities have arrested nine people, including several coaches, they say were gambling on youth football games and setting point spreads.

Broward Sheriff's officials searched two alleged gambling houses Monday where they say people were betting on professional, college and youth games.

The nine men arrested were charged with bookmaking and some with keeping a gambling house. Authorities say the suspects had direct ties to the South Florida Youth Football League and several have extensive criminal histories.

Read more at Fox Sports.


Posted on Oct 22, 2012 | Print |

By Bryan Toporek -- Education Week
October 18, 2012

The National Football League released its first-ever Health and Safety report on Tuesday, and the league's swath of youth-safety and -fitness initiatives received more than five pages of coverage.

Not surprisingly, the report's main area of focus in the youth-safety realm revolves around concussions, which the league called "a serious public-health issue going well beyond the NFL."

The league promoted its advocacy work around pushing states to adopt youth-concussion laws, ideally mimicking Washington state's Zackery Lystedt Law. The NFL considers the Lystedt Law to be model youth-concussion legislation as it contains three main components: a student-athlete's parent or guardian must sign a concussion-information form before the student-athlete is allowed to participate in practice or games; any student-athlete who's suspected of having sustained a concussion must be immediately removed from play; and student-athletes who have been removed for a potential concussion can't come back until receiving clearance from a licensed health-care professional.

To date, 40 states and the District of Columbia have enacted youth-concussion laws, and Michigan appears not far behind. (Legislation has passed through the state House and Senate and now awaits Gov. Rick Snyder's signature.) Roughly 30 of those states passed their legislation within the last 18-24 months.

Read more at Education Week.


Posted on Oct 16, 2012 | Print |

By Frank Schwab -- Yahoo Sports
Monday, Oct 15, 2012

Sometimes it's easy to criticize Alabama's Nick Saban, who comes off as a brilliant football coach but not always an endearing figure. But with the LaMichael Fanning incident, Saban gave a perfect example of what a college football coach's job should be.

Saban turned an ugly body slam of a Missouri player into a lesson for the freshman defensive tackle, and hopefully for the rest of his program.

Near the end of an Alabama blowout win, Fanning picked up running back Russell Hansbrough and gave him a wrestling-style suplex, dropping him on his head.

Read more at Yahoo Sports.


Posted on Oct 1, 2012 | Print |

By Bryan Toporek


As I'm busy gloating about the Philadelphia Eagles' win over the Baltimore Ravens to a Web team colleague today, I wanted to link back to a First Person piece posted over on EdWeekTeacher last week about what lessons teachers could learn from football coaches.

Kevin Mixon, a National Board-certified teacher, says that both great football coaches and great teachers make use of relevant statistical data to inform their game- or lesson-planning. Much like football coaches, teachers can also benefit from repeatedly practicing techniques and routines.

I won't give away everything here, but some of the similarities are uncanny.

"During football games, the spectators often focus on the showy, superstar players, even though consistent winning is a result of skill mastery by offensive linemen and other often unheralded players. Similarly, some teachers mistakenly gauge classwide competence merely by responses given by the star students who always eagerly raise their hands. By contrast, great teachers, like their coaching counterparts, employ a system whereby the competence and contribution of every single student is measured and improved."
Now, of course, teaching an academic subject and coaching student-athletes to play football are two very separate experiences. Mixon isn't suggesting that you can throw Joe English Teacher onto the gridiron and have him look like the next Mike Ditka in no time.

Please read more at Education Weekly.


Posted on Oct 1, 2012 | Print |

By Tom FarreyESPN

Gene Upshaw was ecstatic, Paul Tagliabue an engaged partner. It was 1998, and the NFL and its players union had just agreed to make one of the largest investments ever by a U.S. professional sports league to support players at the base of the pyramid upon which their lucrative enterprise was built: $100 million in all, through annual funding of the newly established NFL Youth Football Fund.

At the inaugural board meeting, Dan Goich, a former defensive tackle with the Detroit Lions and other teams in the 1960s and '70s who was at that point a school teacher, recalls asking Upshaw a defining question.

"Are we going to make a difference?"

"We have to try," responded Upshaw, the longtime executive director of the NFL Players Association, who passed away in 2008.

Soon, checks were being written to hundreds of organizations around the country. Grants went to NFL team foundations, urban high schools with glass-strewn fields, player development camps, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, even something called the Global Youth Championships. Goich's board was the Johnny Appleseed of sports philanthropy, except it roamed farther and planted more than one type of seed. By 2002, Tagliabue and Upshaw were so pleased about the impact of the NFL Youth Football Fund that they agreed to extend and increase their annual payments in 2004, committing another $75 million.

Then in 2007, abruptly, if quietly, the spigot shut off. The NFL, which controlled the money, stopped funding the fund.

"We certainly asked why," said Jason Belser, NFLPA spokesman. "They expressed that things weren't going well in the market. A couple of years later, we had meetings to fund it again."

But no contributions ended up getting made.

Now, with youth football in peril due to the health and safety concerns of parents, the piggy bank is almost empty. An ESPN review of tax forms for the non-profit NFL Youth Football Fund shows that nearly all of the $175 million endowment has been spent. Forced to dip into its reserves after NFL support was halted, the foundation saw its assets fall from $84 million in 2006 to $19 million in 2010, the most recent tax year on file. NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said another $13 million will be drawn from the fund this year.

Aiello declined to say how much money -- if any -- will be left in the fund after the latest checks are written, only that the NFL is in a period of "re-assessment" and will continue to support the grassroots program.

Read more at ESPN



Posted on Jun 27, 2012 | Print |

By Bryan Toporek- Education Week 
Brees_400.jpg

While he's busy negotiating a new contract this summer, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees will be pushing youth-athletes to take baseline-concussion tests before participating in sports.

The Dick's Sporting Goods Foundation announced Brees as the 2012 spokesperson for its PACE (Protecting Athletes through Concussion Education) program on Monday. The PACE program, which launched last summer, aims to provide 1 million free baseline screenings to youth-athletes across the country through a partnership with ImPACT Applications, which offers the ImPACT baseline test.

"As an athlete who has taken the ImPACT baseline as well as the post-injury test following a concussion, I can say firsthand how valuable the results can be in helping to properly determine a safe return to play," said Brees in a statement.

Please read more at Education Week


Posted on Jun 21, 2012 | Print |

By David Pevear- Lowell-Sun 
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Fighting for attention with other fast-growing sports and buffeted by reports of the risks of concussions, Massachusetts high-school football has seen the number of players suiting up decline steadily for five years.

According to the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, 19,888 students played football last year, the lowest since the 2002 season -- when 24 fewer schools had football programs.

Even successful programs such as Concord-Carlisle's have had problems maintaining high numbers. According to the MIAA survey, Concord-Carlisle had 86 participants last fall while going undefeated, including winning the Eastern Mass. Division 3 Super Bowl. That was six more players than Concord-Carlisle fielded in 2010, but nine fewer than eight years earlier.

"I think people are afraid of the concussion thing," suggests Tom Dalicandro, an assistant football coach and head lacrosse coach at Concord-Carlisle. "I think that, and kids playing only one sport, is holding back (football numbers). We won a state championship and our numbers are going down."

Read more at Lowell-Sun



Posted on Jun 13, 2012 | Print |

By Jamie McCracken- USA Today 
coach-pirates.png

In an attempt to cut down on concussion-related injuries, Pop Warner football announced Tuesday that it was banning head-to-head hits and limiting contact in practice to 40 minutes a day. But already there is debate among coaches about whether the measures go too far or not far enough.

Pop Warner has more than 400,000 children ages 5-14 participating in 43 states and overseas. When practice begins in August -- first with 10 hours a week and then six hours after Labor Day-- coaches will be required to follow new rules.

"I'm not as much concerned about my kid who has played for three years, but I am concerned about the kid who has never played before," said John Jackson, who is a coach in the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach and was a wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals and Chicago Bears from 1990 to 1996.

Read more at USA Today


Posted on May 23, 2012 | Print |

By Gary Mihoces- USA Today 
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The chorus of concussion concerns is growing with big names in the lead. Former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner has labeled the notion of his two school-age sons playing football a "scary thing" and says he'd prefer they didn't. Now, the father of three-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady is expressing reservations about how he'd handle it if his son were just starting out.

Meanwhile, registration is underway for the coming season of youth football across the USA. Parents face the question: Do you let your kids play?

More than 2,000 former players are suing the NFL alleging they weren't warned about long-term risks of concussions. The NFL has cracked down on bounties -- cash for knocking out foes. And Junior Seau's death has raised questions about whether he suffered from years of head hits.

Read more at USA Today


Posted on May 9, 2012 | Print |

By Jarrett Bell-USA Today
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Do football players die younger?

A records-based study of retired players conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) concludes that they have a much lower death rate than men in the general population, contrasting the notion that football players don't live as long.

The findings, emailed Tuesday to about 3,200 former players who retired before 1993, came less than a week after former linebacker Junior Seau's suicide death at 43, and renewed concerns for the long-term health of players.

Please read more at USA Today


Posted on May 7, 2012 | Print |

By Daniel Brown Contra Costa Times
junior-seau-article.jpg

In reacting to the suicide of Junior Seau, one of the game's most ferocious competitors, current and former players are doing something rarely seen on the rugged NFL landscape.

Dropping the tough-guy act.

"Note to all my former teammates and opponents: Swallow macho BS + go see a doctor," former 49ers lineman Randy Cross wrote on Twitter, part of a torrent of emotional pleas. "Seeking help isn't weakness. It's for all those that love you."

Seau's death at age 43 might prove to be a tipping point for the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell, who already were facing a legal challenge from more than 1,000 former players alleging that the NFL failed to properly treat concussions and attempted to conceal possible links between football and brain injuries.

Please read more at Contra Costa Times



Posted on Mar 21, 2012 | Print |

by Howard Fendrich, AP

NEW YORK--New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton was suspended without pay for the 2012 season by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, and former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams was banned indefinitely on Wednesday because the team's players were paid bounties for big hits on opponents from 2009-11.

The NFL said it is the first time the league has suspended a head coach. The explanation for Payton's ban indicates he tried to cover up what the Saints were doing.

According to the NFL, Payton ignored instructions from the league and Saints ownership to make sure bounties weren't being paid. The league also chastised him Wednesday for choosing to "falsely deny that the program existed," and for attempting to "encourage the false denials by instructing assistants to `make sure our ducks are in a row.'"

via boston.com




Posted on Mar 1, 2012 | Print |

By Kathleen Raven- UGA Today

Athens, Ga. - Heat-related deaths among football players across the country tripled to nearly three per year between 1994 and 2009 after averaging about one per year the previous 15 years, according to an analysis of weather conditions and high school and college sports data conducted by University of Georgia researchers.

The scientists built a detailed database that included the temperature, humidity and time of day, as well as the height, weight and position for 58 football players who died during practice sessions from overheating, or hyperthermia. The study, published recently in the International Journal of Biometeorology, found that for the eastern U.S., where most deaths occurred, morning heat index values were consistently higher in the latter half of the 30-year study period. Overall, Georgia led the nation in deaths with six fatalities.

Read More at UGA Today


Posted on Mar 1, 2012 | Print |

chicago_tribune.jpgBy Todd Lighty, Chicago Tribune reporter

The family of former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson sued the NFL on Thursday over his suicide last year, claiming that the league had known for decades that concussions from playing football cause brain damage but deliberately concealed that information from players, coaches and fans.

Duerson, a Pro Bowl safety, sustained at least three concussions during his 11-year playing career and suffered from progressive, advanced brain damage known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, according to the lawsuit.

"If the NFL would have taken the necessary steps to oversee and protect Dave Duerson by warning him of the dangers of head traumas ... then (he) would not have suffered dangerous repetitive head trauma, would have recovered more rapidly and would not have sustained permanent damage to his brain which contributed to cause his death," according to the suit.

Read more at chicagotribune.com


Posted on Mar 1, 2012 | Print |

by Emily Attwood, athleticbusiness.com

The results of a study of youth football players conducted by Virginia Tech in conjunction with Wake Forest are drawing attention to how practice drills are conducted. The study, published in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering, used helmets embedded with sensors to track hits among a team of 7- and 8-year-old players and found that some of the hits were as strong as those experienced by college players. Unlike college and high school players, however, the frequency of severe hits was higher during practice than during games.

Thumbnail image for 2_22VTFootball.jpg
Directed by Stefan Duma of Virginia Tech (pictured), the study used sensor-embedded helmets to collect data among youth players. Photo Courtesy Jim Stroup / Virginia Tech

The practice drills, researchers say, go beyond what a player would realistically experience during a game situation. Moreover, younger players lack the same neck strength as older players and thus are more susceptible to injury from hard hits. The authors of the study recommend restructuring of practice drills to eliminate high-impact hits, focusing instead on proper tackling techniques and emphasizing fundamental skill sets.

Read more at athleticbusiness.com


Posted on Mar 1, 2012 | Print |

usa_today_logo.gifby Sergio Bichao, The Courier News

He measured 6 feet 6 inches, weighed 280 pounds, and was light on his feet.

The Somerville High School senior had been groomed for the varsity team since his freshman year and was excited to play "quick guard" and offensive tackle for the Pioneers.

But instead of helping his team to victory and impressing college recruiters, the student athlete spent most of the season on the bench and on a psychiatrist's couch, according to a lawsuit that claims the school's longtime coach bullied and retaliated against the player when he refused to play with an injured leg.

The lawsuit, filed by the family in state Superior Court in Somerville in December, names the Somerville Board of Education and head coach Greg Arakelian as defendants.

Read more at tusconcitizen.com



Posted on Jan 18, 2012 | Print |

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by Rick Reilly, espn.com

I've come to believe in Tim Tebow, but not for what he does on a football field, which is still three parts Dr. Jekyll and two parts Mr. Hyde.

No, I've come to believe in Tim Tebow for what he does off a football field, which is represent the best parts of us, the parts I want to be and so rarely am.

Who among us is this selfless?

Every week, Tebow picks out someone who is suffering, or who is dying, or who is injured. He flies these people and their families to the Broncos game, rents them a car, puts them up in a nice hotel, buys them dinner (usually at a Dave & Buster's), gets them and their families pregame passes, visits with them just before kickoff (!), gets them 30-yard-line tickets down low, visits with them after the game (sometimes for an hour), has them walk him to his car, and sends them off with a basket of gifts.

Read more at espn.com






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