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Originally Posted by Minnie
OMG, I have had that argument. "Oh we'll do soccer, no head issues." Um, what?! I was told I was a horrible parent for not removing my son from football after a concussion from a stinger (along with the rest of the ouches that came with that). People. It was the flukiest thing, and he didn't get the concussion the way you'd think a kid is going to get a concussion in football, at least not the way I had figured on, previously. One mom was going to remove her son from the team and the game that my son was injured in, after seeing his hit and that they removed him from the field by ambulance. I wasn't removing my kid, and he was the one hurt, FFS. It was a fluke. Nothing more. He sat out the specified time by the doctors and then went in to play a bit less frequently than before, because that's what his trainers and coaches decided on, and then eventually, right back to the regular game play as he'd done before.
I never could convince some moms that we saw far more concussions on kids, when ours played soccer, than I saw in the 3 years my kid played football in high school. Nope, football was the evil awful.
I miss having kids in sports sometimes. Football especially. It's one of my favorite sports to watch and we were very lucky, he had wonderful coaches and trainers which definitely had a huge part in the enjoyment factor. Really upstanding guys.
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that movie Concussion has done more damage to amateur sports then I think that the directors and Will Smith imagined it would.
Frankly youth football is really safe if its coached properly and the players play it properly. Are there injuries? Absolutely, but all sports have that. Is there a risk of concussions? Absolutely. But there's the deal.
Concussions are extremely preventable in collision sports, and I believe in football more then any sport.
Hows that you say? Football is hyper dangerous.
First and foremost teach safe contact. We're not teaching kids not to be fierce tacklers at all. You can be safe and still make big hits that both players walk away from. Teaching kids to keep their heads out of tackles is the toughest thing to teach, and frankly its got to be taught at every practice. As well beyond teaching it, you can't step on the field as a coach without being certified in it starting this year.
Most practices have gone away from a lot of hitting. We do teach them safe contact. But the days of the pit, king of the mountain and even hitting during a scrimmage are done. Now the kids only hit pretty much on game day.
Concussion protocol, making sure that kids who do get hurt go through the protocol from injury to back to play. I've become really cautious about players now, in that if they're taking off of the field with a suspected head injury, they're done for the day.
I've seen a sharp decrease in terms of concussions in football over the last 8 years that I've coached from my precious stint over a decade ago. I though still see the same kind of what I call non-preventable injury where a kid tears up a knee or breaks a limb. But you see those in every sport and there's nothing that you can do about it.
So why are we losing the public relations battle? Because frankly the pro game still has a concussion problem. Watch a game, technically most of the players there are bad tacklers. They lead with their heads, they're technique poor in a lot of ways, but because they're so well developed it looks amazing. Frankly once you get through highschool ball, that's probably the end of seeing any safe contact, so the current generation of college players and pro players are using far more dangerous tackling forms so we might see another 5 or 6 years of concussion problems in football.
On top of it, because college and pro football is money ball, we're seeing stars getting rushed back before they're 100% sure that they should be playing.
But we're going to see less and less kids coming out to play football, because we're losing that public relations battle and hockey and soccer and even basketball are winning it even though from an injury or concussion sense they're just as dangerous.