Photo by Jon Anderson.
Coach Kent Jackson hands the ball off to Noah Gonzales as the Hoover Raiders kindergarten team in the Hoover Parks and Recreation flag football league practices in September 2018 in the Ross Bridge community.
In 2011, there were nearly 600 boys in Hoover’s youth tackle football program.
By 2015, that number had dropped to 464, and last year there were only 283 — a 39 percent decline in just three years, officials in the football program said.
Over the same time period, kids have been flocking to Hoover’s flag football program. Participation in youth flag football has increased from 266 kids in 2013 to 623 last year, said Brent Solberg, who manages flag football for the Hoover Parks and Recreation Department. He’s expecting 700 kids to play flag football this fall.
And those numbers don’t include kids in flag football leagues at the YMCA and Hunter Street Baptist Church. Hunter Street’s flag football league had more than 100 kids in it this past fall, almost double the number from 2014, Recreation Minister Carey Keiger said.
The biggest force pushing kids into flag football is parents’ fears of their kids getting injured, especially with concussions, said Scott Verner, president of the Jefferson Shelby Youth Football League, which includes teams from Hoover, Spain Park, Cahaba Valley, Chelsea, Helena, Homewood, Oak Mountain, Pelham, Thompson, Trussville and Vestavia Hills.
But parents also like that flag football tends to involve less time commitment and less expense than tackle football, which requires a helmet and pads. Tackle football also is losing players to other sports. There are more options for kids these days, such as lacrosse, and more kids are beginning to focus on a single sport instead of several, football officials say.
The decline in tackle football is not unique to Hoover. Nationally, the number of people age 6 and older who play tackle football has declined from 8.4 million in 2006 to 5.2 million in 2017, according to Statista.
Meanwhile, the number playing flag football nationally dropped from 6.33 million in 2011 to 5.51 million in 2014, but rose to 6.57 million in 2018, Statista records show.
INJURY RISKS
Dr. Larry Lemak, founder of the National Center for Sports Safety and American Sports Medicine Institute and a member of the medical advisory committee for Pop Warner Football, said parents are right to be concerned about the risks involved in sports, especially contact sports such as football.
Contact sports carry more risk, and the big concern now is subconcussive blows to the head, Lemak said.
A subconcussive blow, which occurs with most tackles and collisions on the football field, is where the brain is shaken but not so violently that symptoms are immediately visible.
Studies have shown that repetitive subconcussive blows — without time for healing in between — can damage physical connections in the brain, affect memory and attention, suppress brain function and may contribute to later life mood and behavior problems, according to the Concussion Legacy Foundation.
The foundation recommends delaying the introduction of contact and collisions in youth sports, eliminating contact when necessary and modifying contact where appropriate.
All levels of football have enacted rules for practices and games that decrease contact, Lemak said. Some have adjusted or eliminated kickoffs, and the Pop Warner league is getting rid of the three-point stance that requires players on the line of scrimmage to lower their heads, he said.
“We’re working hard to eliminate as much of that [risk of injury] as possible without changing the spirit of the game,” Lemak said.
So many people love the game, and there are benefits in its lessons of teamwork, competing, winning and losing, he said.
“It’s hard for me to tell people they should or shouldn’t play football,” he said.
His goal is to help make sure coaches, players and parents are educated about injury risks, prevention and what to do and not to do when an injury does occur, he said.
While flag football does carry less risk than tackle football, there can be head injuries in flag football, too, Lemak said. Players still can collide, and they can still fall and hit their head on the ground, he said.
Hoover’s flag football program requires kids to wear mouthguards, and Solberg tried to require a rugby-like helmet a couple of years ago, but “kids just hated wearing it,” he said.
CHANGES IN TACKLE FOOTBALL
Verner said he’s concerned tackle football has been made out to be a villain. Many people don’t understand all the changes that have taken place in youth football, he said. “The sport is much safer.”
Greg Blackman, vice president of the Jefferson Shelby Youth Football League and a coach of Hoover youth football for 24 years, said football is not taught the same way it was when today’s parents were growing up.
“It’s not the same old football with a coach dragging you around by a face mask and hollering and screaming,” he said.
In years past, if a kid got his “bell rung,” the coach might tell him to shake it off and get back out there, Blackman said. “We don’t do that anymore.”
Coaches are required to go through a three-hour class each year on how to identify and treat concussions, he said. If a player shows signs of a concussion, he is pulled out of the game and can’t return until cleared by a doctor, Verner said.
There are new restrictions on how much hitting can occur in practice, and there is probably 75 percent less hitting, Blackman said.
Up until four years ago, players practiced the first three days in helmets only and started hitting right after that for about an hour per day, Blackman said. Now, there is no hitting for the first four days, and then players can hit for only 20 minutes per day, every other day, he said.
“We teach kids how to tackle with blocking dummies. There’s hardly any hitting,” he said.
Blackman said there is a lot more focus on teaching kids the fundamentals of how to properly tackle and block to prevent injuries. He has always taught that, and in his 24 years, none of his players have had concussions, he said.
“I’ve been lucky maybe, but I pretty much stress not to use your head,” he said.
Coaches also pay much more attention to heat and hydration issues, he said.
There’s no question that football is a tough sport where you hit other people and get hot and sweaty, but “it’s a different sport in how it’s taught and coached,” Blackman said. “I don’t like to call it tackle football. I call it padded football.”
PARENT DECISIONS
Hoover resident Bart Batson said he grew up playing tackle football, loves the sport and didn’t have reservations about his boys playing. His oldest son, now a freshman at Hoover High, played a couple of years of flag football when he was 7 or 8 to get introduced to the game but then switched to tackle football. His youngest son went straight into playing tackle football around age 9 or 10.
With all the restrictions, he said, “I feel like they’ve made it as safe as they possibly can.”
Marcus Chatterton, a Bluff Park resident, chose flag football for his son, Ian, who’s played two seasons with Hunter Street Baptist Church’s fall league, three with the YMCA spring league and three years with the city of Hoover’s league.
But safety wasn’t his biggest concern with tackle football, he said. He just felt the level of intensity and commitment expected out of 6-year-olds was too much.
“It felt really overblown for kids of that age,” Chatterton said. “Sort of too serious, too fast.”
His son is competitive, but he had heard too many stories of kids getting burned out on sports and wanting to quit by the time they got to high school. He and his wife are happy with their decision to start with flag football, which gave Ian a chance to learn some of the basics of the game.
Now, Ian is 11 and will be heading into sixth grade in the fall. Chatterton and his wife are considering letting him play tackle football one year before he gets into middle school football in seventh grade.
Brian Sparks, a Ross Bridge resident, said his 8-year-old son, Glavin, has been in Hoover’s flag football program for three years and loves it.
“It’s fun. It’s a great sport,” he said. “And it’s an environment that’s very safe.”
He’s a flag football coach, and he believes flag football actually is better at introducing kids to the “skilled” positions such as running back, quarterback, receiver and defensive back. There is more throwing in flag football, and the players learn about receiving routes and how to read defenses, Sparks said.
Hoover’s flag football program has a recreational league with one 90-minute practice and one game per week, but there also is an eight-week “competitive” league with games on Sundays for those who want a little more. The recreational league is just for Hoover teams, but the competitive league plays teams from Homewood, Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills, Solberg said.
Hoover also hosts a Southeast All-Star flag football tournament every fall that has grown from 12 teams in 2014 to 50 in 2018, he said. Sparks’ 7U team won the Southeast regional last year and competed in the national flag football championship in Orlando in January.
Solberg said he’d like to start a girls flag football league for the metro area. There were about 20 girls playing this past year, he said.
In Florida, girls flag football is a sanctioned varsity sport in 230 schools, and Georgia likely will sanction it soon, he said.
Flag football also is popular with adults, with about 35 to 40 teams in Hoover per season, Solberg said. People travel from all over the metro area and Tuscaloosa to play, and some teams compete in cash tournaments. “They’re pretty serious about it.”
Solberg said Hoover’s youth flag football program is not trying to compete with or steal kids from tackle football — it’s just another option. He purposefully delays flag football registration until tackle football registration is almost over, he said.
PROS AND CONS
Blackman said he’s not saying that padded football is better than flag football, but he believes kids who play football with pads get some advantages. They learn the fundamentals of tackling and blocking earlier, before their bodies get big enough to where they can cause more damage, he said.
Verner said flag football has its place. It’s particularly good at helping kids with footwork, but it tends to give some of them a false hope that they’re going to play in a “skilled” position when they reach middle school because that’s all there is in flag football, he said.
Kids don’t understand the techniques of playing the other positions, Verner said, and he would prefer if flag football were offered in the spring and tackle football in the fall.
Blackman said he’s concerned the decline in participation in tackle football is working its way up to the middle and high schools and will impact the quality of play at those levels.
Staff photo.
Youth football players work on proper tackling technique during a July 2017 practice at Hoover Sports Park Central. Greg Blackman, vice president of the Jefferson Shelby Youth Football League and a coach in Hoover youth football for 24 years, said there are new restrictions on how much hitting can occur in practice, and there is probably 75 percent less hitting.
David Brizendine, a football coach at Simmons Middle School, said the teams at Simmons have seen only a small drop in numbers (maybe five to eight fewer players per team) in recent years, but Bumpus Middle School has lost more players.
Brizendine said he would never tell a parent whether their child should play tackle or flag football. “That’s totally their decision,” he said.
He feels comfortable with the safety of youth tackle football in Hoover because he knows the coaches are well-trained and do a good job of teaching the fundamentals, he said.
It helps when kids show up in middle school with at least one year of experience with tackle football, but he said he understands if parents want their children to wait. Some of those who have played only flag football are naturals and pick up tackle football quickly, but for others, it’s a tougher transition, he said.
Regardless, the Jefferson Shelby Youth Football League is adjusting to smaller numbers. Two to three years ago, the league had 65 teams across 11 parks, and last year there were only 45 teams, Verner said.
Hoover in 2006 started a more “recreational” football league, with fewer restrictions and rules that guaranteed kids a minimum amount of playing time. It was expanded to include teams from other cities and called the Over the Mountain Football League, but it’s being discontinued this fall because of the declining number of players, Blackman said.
The Jefferson Shelby Youth Football League has changed some its rules, and some of the parks have adopted minimum playing time requirements, so distinctions between the two leagues were fading anyway, Verner said.
Blackman said he’s concerned about the future of the sport.
“It really scares me that at the rate it’s going, five to 10 years from now, it won’t be here,” he said. “I don’t think people want to see this sport die. Too many of us love it.”
