[CaptainCrunch]

Nope what you're doing is good coaching and protecting your players. Sometimes though parents need to be sold on this concept.


Tackling in football and soccer and rugby is all about technique. In football its all about your recognition zone, how you breakdown how you use your feet, how you effectively wrap and finish with your head out of the tackle.


There are still too many coaches that talk about the concept of flying around and leaving a smoking hole in your opponent. First of all athletes will always make a person with bad tackling technique look well bad. Second of all, you suddenly see the involvement of the head in the tackle.


A lot of coaches that I've talked to are advocates of the Seattle technique, but to me its a bad technique because not only does it involve your head being in the tackle lane, but you have your head horizontal to the ground.


I'm an advocate of spending 10 or 15 minutes in working on tackling. But I will say, I'm not a advocate of hitting builds character BS drills. If one of my coaches sets up a pit drill, I stop it. If one of the coaches players does dangerous or excessive tackling or attempts to saw a player in half during a drill, I lose my mind a bit.


contact sports can be safe as long as the coaches aren't dangerous and as long as the parents, and I hate to say this, don't countermand the coaches and what they're trying to teach.


I will also say that there are too many old style coaches with old style ideas that are causing problems, that don't want to teach safe contact because it goes against their bs creedo around hitting to kill.



At the end of the day, right now, in most sports, we're losing the public relations battle, parents don't feel like the sport is safe, and we're doing very little to convince them other wise.


In 10 or 15 years we might not see football, or youth lacrosse, or youth rugby because we didn't do enough to make it safe.