Minimizing Injuries in Youth Football
March 30, 2010
By its nature, football is a rough sport fueled by a strong passion to win. As a youth football coach, determining how you expose your team to these aspects of the game is extremely important. Fortunately, there are a few basic guidelines that you can apply to help reduce the chance of injury, and to ensure players develop a sense of respect for themselves, their team, and the opposing team.
Youth Football Equipment
Ensuring the safety of your players and staff is the primary duty of any youth football coach. The most obvious area a coach should focus on it the players safety equipment. Because of the rough nature of football, it’s especially important that all players have a good set of equipment that is in good functional shape. Here’s a list of equipment that every player should have:
Football helmet with face mask- Mouthpiece (with anti microbial case)
- Shoulder pads
- Football neck roll
- Athletic supporter with cup
- Football pants with pads (thigh and knee)
- Back pad
- Shoes with short cleats
- Sweat socks
- Jersey
Because equipment does wear out over time, it’s important to stress to your players and their parents, that purchasing inexpensive equipment or using their older siblings equipment, is not always an ideal. To help ensure the safety of your players, setup an equipment checkoff at the beginning of the season. This may take the place of the first practice of the year, and you should encourage the parents to participate. This way you can interact with them directly and explain the importance of having good quality football equipment. Make sure to have plenty of copies of your leagues rule book on hand for this meeting. Make sure every parent and player gets a copy and ask that they read it over before the next practice.
Managing a Safe Game
In many cases, youth football games are setup to be similar to high school football. Games are usually officiated by at least two adults who are very knowledgeable in the rules and guidelines of the game. Most leagues do have a predetermined pool of officials to select from. Often times licensed high school officials are utilized, usually at a cost that your league will cover.
As you begin the season, make sure that you work with your support staff, and even parents if they are involved, to ensure that they have not only read the rule book, but that they have a clear understanding of the rule book. Also make sure to review your leagues safety procedures so that everyone involved knows what to do in the event of an injury.
Keep the Game Simple
In youth football, you often times are working with children who have never played contact football. Your goal as a coach is to teach the basics of the game. In doing this, it’s often easier to eliminate violent plays from the game than it is to overwhelm the players with appropriate procedures.
Kickoffs and blitzing, for instance, require special attention at practice and diverge from traditional purist first-step fundamentals of football. Kickoffs, in particular, appears difficult for novices to carry out. Due to this fact the use of it should be put off until the players have mastered ability in down-field blocking and tackling. In many cases leagues will create a rule eliminating these plays for players under a certain age. In the case of a kickoff, it is often replaced with a rule that places the call on the opposing teams thirty-five yard line.
There will always be enough of time, later on, to incorporate plays like this into the game. The lesser they have to keep in mind, in this early stage, the easier it is for them to progressively learn the valuable fundamentals at a latter stage. Football is a sport of spotting keys and responding to them. The more uncomplicated the surroundings get at the start, the easier it becomes for the youth to learn, react and retain.
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Photo courtesy of Brian J. McDermott, licensed CC BY 2.0
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