Texas Youth Football and Cheer Program: Ten Ways It Is Walking The Talk On Safety
Participation in youth sports in general, and in youth
football in particular, is on the decline in some parts of the nation. One of the biggest factors driving the
decline is a concern about injuries.
Lots of youth sports programs say they
want to improve safety, but how many are actually making the effort to
implement best health and safety practices?
I can't speak for every program, but I know one that is
definitely walking the talk: the youth tackle and flag football and cheer program
in Grand Prairie, Texas, where I spent the first week of August in 100 degree
heat (the first thing I did when I arrived was to buy a pallet of water at a
local big box store!) working with a group of leading experts I invited in to
help educate and train 2,500 young tackle, flag and cheer athletes, parents, coaches, and administrators in the
program on ways to make football and cheer safer as part of our MomsTEAM Institute of
Youth Sports Safety's SmartTeamsTM | UNICEF International Safeguards of Children
in Sports project.
What are some of the ways to make youth football safer? Here
are ten specific steps I encouraged the Grand Prairie program, as an independent
youth football program not affiliated with USA Football or Pop Warner, to take
to provide a safer and more enjoyable experience for its players:
- Adopt
and periodically practice a comprehensive Emergency Action Plan: As I emphasized in my meetings with the Grand Prairie board,
one of the most important steps it could take to protect the safety of
athletes, spectators, coaches, and officials in case of a medical (serious
head, neck or spine injury , heat stroke \ or weather emergency (e.g. lightning , excessive heat ) was to develop,
implement, and practice an emergency action plan (EAP ). To emphasize the point,
we ran a mock emergency drill my last day in Texas. Because many youth sports programs, such as
Grand Prairie, lack the resources of school-based programs to pay a certified
athletic trainer to be at games and practices, I emphasized the need for Grand
Prairie to look for volunteers such as school nurses, RN's, LPN's, EMTs, or nurse
practitioners or medical doctors (either
parents with kids in the program or from the community) to help fill the gap.
- Strongly
encourage parents to make sure their child has a pre-participation physical
evaluation. In his
presentation to the Grand Prairie parents, Dr. Jim McDonald, a pediatric sports
medicine medical doctor at Nationwide Children's Hospital and Ohio State,
encouraged them to make sure their child had a pre-participation physical examination ,
including the taking of detailed cardiac and concussion histories, even though a PPE is usually not
required for participation in community-based sports. Experts agree that a PPE is the primary means
of identifying athletes at risk of sports injury and initiating preventative
measures.
- Teaches proper tackling and limit player-to-player contact during
practices. As I did in 2012 while I was working with the high
school football program in Newcastle, Oklahoma during the filming of my PBS
documentary, The Smartest Team: Making High School Football
Safer, I flew in Coach Bobby Hosea, the inventor of a revolutionary heads-free tackle training
system now being used at all levels of the game, to teach safe
tackling to the Grand Prairie players.
To the naysayers who believe teaching kids to tackle without using their
heads, or that sensible limits on full-contact practices at the youth level,
can't make the game safer, a new study in the Orthopaedic
Journal of Sports Medicine shows that they can significantly reduce
the number of concussions, not just in practices (where, in contrast to other
levels of football, most concussions occur at the youth level), but also in
games.
- Makes
sure that all helmets fit properly, and that used helmets have been properly
reconditioned. An important
part of my week in Grand Prairie, as was the case in 2012 in Newcastle, was a
helmet fitting session in which an expert made sure that every player in the
Grand Prairie youth football program started the pre-season with a properly
fitted helmet and reminded coaches to check helmet fit periodically during the
season. I also made sure that all
helmets were reconditioned prior to the season in accordance with the helmet
manufacturers' recommendations, and also supplied thirty of the younger,
smaller players with brand new, lightweight helmets to evaluate (citing a lack of data, the National
Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment ("Nocsae") said in June 2015 that it had no current plans to issue a separate
performance standard for youth football helmets; look for a future blog on that
subject).
- Requires
safety training. Most youth sports coaches are parent
volunteers with little or no safety training.
To fill that safety gap, I arranged for an instructor from the local
chapter of the Red Cross to hold training sessions for Grand Prairie parents
and coaches in first-aid, CPR and the use of an
AED .
- Mandates
comprehensive concussion education. As I discussed in a previous blog , state
laws requiring concussion education do not always cover community- based and
independent sports programs. I
encouraged parents and coaches to take the free 30-minute online CDC Heads Up Concussion
training courses , which MomsTeam Institute has endorsed. As a
longtime advocate for mandatory concussion education meetings before
every sports season, I walked the talk by flying in from Chicago a
top sports concussion neuropsychologist. Dr Elizabeth Pieroth, to talk to the
Grand Prairie parents and coaches about concussions, not just knowing the signs and symptoms but the importance
of creating an environment in which players feel
safe in reporting concussion symptoms to increase the likelihood that
they will be immediately removed from games and practices.
- Has
adopted conservative return to play guidelines. As required by law in every state for
school-based sports, independent and community-based programs should require
players to obtain written clearance by a medical professional with concussion
training and expertise before returning to play. Many experts recommend that, because their
brains are still developing, younger players should be held out of play longer
than older athletes, some suggesting a minimum of three weeks after a
concussion before returning to sports.
- Regularly
inspects practice and game facilities. All programs should
designate a parent or coach to regularly inspect practice and game facilities
to make sure they are safe, including the cleaning of locker rooms to minimize
the risk of communicable diseases (such as community-acquired MRSA . Athletes, parents, and officials should be
encouraged to immediately report any unsafe conditions.
- Conducts
detailed background checks of all volunteers and paid staff. It
is every parent's nightmare that their child might be a victim of a sexual
predator while participating in youth sports. Unfortunately sexual abuse of
young players has occurred in youth sports leagues of all kinds, as well as
with individual coaches in individual youth sports. Performing background checks on all
volunteers is a powerful tool for protecting each player in your league. This
safety measure is so important it needs to be required in all youth sports
leagues.
- Follows the International Safeguards for Children in Sport. Adopted at the Beyond Sport summit in South Africa in
2014, the Safeguards are designed to help create
a safe sporting environment for children wherever they participate and at
whatever level, provide a benchmark to assist youth sports organizations and
sports stakeholders to make informed decisions about safety, promote best
practices and challenge practices that are harmful to children, and provide
clarity on safeguarding children to all involved in sport. As the head of a pioneer organization designated by
UNICEF UK to help implement the Safeguards in the U.S, I will be
working with the Board of Directors of the Grand Prairie youth football and
cheer program on an ongoing basis to implement the holistic and
process-oriented approach to youth sport safety the Safeguards recommend.
I firmly believe that the best way to protect our children
in sports is for an independent non-profit serving the interests of all youth
sports stakeholders, not any special interest or group, to develop a program,
such as we are doing with SmartTeamsTM,
free to incorporate best practice recommendations from a wide variety of
sources, including UNICEF, leading medical societies, and governmental agencies
such as the CDC, adapted, where appropriate, for use by youth sports programs
that lack the resources of school-based programs.
If more sports programs, like Grand Prairie, were to
implement these kinds of safety measures, I am convinced that the safety
concerns of parents would be assuaged and the decline in youth sports
participation could be stemmed, even reversed.
During the next few weeks I will have more to say about
youth sports best safety practices and what weare doing with SmartTeams , but,
in the meantime, remember that to play safe, we need to be smart!
Brooke de Lench is Founding Executive Director of MomsTEAM Institute, Inc., Director of Smart Teams Play Safe, Publisher of MomsTEAM.com, author of Home Team Advantage: The Critical Role of Mothers in Youth Sports (HarperCollins), and Producer/Director/Creator of the PBS documentary, "The Smartest Team: Making High School Football Safer." Brooke is also a founding member of the UN International Safeguards of Children in Sports coalition.
She can be reached by email
delench@MomsTeam.com , and you can follow her on Twitter @brookedelench. and email her at
delench@momsteam.com
Note: This blog was first published on Huffington Post