Detroit coach tackles safety in youth football practices

'Hawk tackling' and other research-based methods help prevent head injuries

DETROIT – Altisha Dixson watches as her sons play football. She worries about players getting hurt.

"That's one of the reasons why I became team mom, so I can actually be out here to watch and see what's going on and to make sure that they are practicing safe skills and stuff with the boys on the field," Dixson said.

Eric Kirk, defensive coordinator for the Detroit Hurricanes Varsity team, is always thinking about the well-being of his players. Members of his team range in age from 13 to 15 years old.

More: Youth concussions: Questions for parents

"As coaches we always worry about the safety of our kids because football can be a very fast and violent game, even on the lower level, so I think that's a concern that we have every day," Kirk said.

Kirk says his team, like all Pop Warner football programs, uses the Heads Up football training program to teach players proper tackling techniques. They work on safety with all of their drills and all of their game preparation.  

"We've adapted a technique of tackling we use called hawk tackling; we actually got that technique from Pete Caroll of the USC Trojans now of the Seattle Seahawks," Kirk said. "They've actually taken a technique from the rugby players of how to keep your head up, shoulder tackle and roll."

"We start out by teaching the kids on their knees," Kirk said. "What we have them do is engage the other players thighs with their shoulders with their head up on the side and they squeeze and they roll. What this is it takes the head out of the impact zone."

"That's a great method. You basically want to avoid head-to-head impact, so tackling with your shoulder tackling to the body, I think we've come a long way recently in teaching kids not to lead with the crown of their helmet the most dangerous way, so the Seattle Seahawks that's the right way to coach is to really take the head out of the game" said Dr. Stefan Duma of Virginia Tech.

Scientists at Virginia Tech are focusing on youth football, saying despite growing concern about concussion risks, the majority of study on head impacts has focused on college and professional players.  

"There are more than 3 million youth football players in the U.S., but there's almost no research on this population. We believe that it's possible to engineer safer sports at every level, but first you need the data. There's an opportunity here to really make a difference," said Stefan Duma in a news release.

Duma is the Harry Wyatt Professor of Engineering in the College of Engineering, the interim director of the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science and an expert on injury biomechanics.   He said a lot has been done on how to reduce amount of practice time, but they're looking at exactly what's being done in practice.

Duma and his team followed players on two Blacksburg, Virginia, youth football teams.  The players were outfitted with helmets lined with spring-mounted accelerometers, so researchers could measure head acceleration.  

Their study was published in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics and it suggests limiting tackling drills during practice could reduce the serious head impacts exposure for youth football players.

"We looked at each practice specific drill and we found the ones that had high head impact accelerations and compared those to the games.  What we were able to show is that there is certain practice techniques that are much higher than you see in the game. So we'll work with leagues to try and remove those practice drills," Duma said.

In the study, researchers learned of the strongest 10 percent of impacts, the majority happened during tackling drills  even though the players spent relatively little practice time on these.  

"I think that study is very good because it actually falls in line with the Pop Warner study because we do limit our tackling to 25 percent of our defensive practices," Kirk said. 

The drill in the study with the highest rate of head impacts was the king of the circle drill, which Kirk said Pop Warner and his team outlawed years ago.

"That drill is very ancient and people still using it should be aware that's one of the main ones that can cause injuries," Kirk said.

Kirk said player safety is always on his mind and he focuses practices on teaching proper skills to his players.

"By using safe practice techniques by teaching them in practice what's the right way to do it vs. the wrong way to do it, the importance of doing it the right way and things of that nature because you can never predict when you're going to have a collision.  Tackling is actually like a controlled collision so you can never predict how one player is going to be compared to another player and bodies aligned and things of that nature so if you have the proper techniques in place and you get them to buy into those proper techniques it just eliminates the possibility of an injury," Kirk said.

"The drills that he (does) with the young people is really reassuring that they are getting the safety and using the safety tips," Latricia Williams said, a mom of one of the players.

Duma said parents need to make sure kids have the best equipment and that the coaches are teaching the right techniques.  Virginia Tech currently puts out a safety rating system for adult football helmets. It's working on a similar system for youth helmets and plans to have it out sometime next year.
 

 

 


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