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From Son Up to Son Down: A Middle School Football Game-Day Diary

 

The big day finally has arrived! Who is ready for some Tuesday night football? After a summer of workouts, drills, and tournaments, it is finally time for my son to use all the skills he has learned on the football field.

After 8 years of playing against the other neighborhood school teams, the 7th grade is finally together as one team. The first game is a big one. The schedule has 7th grade as the away team, so it comes with the added bonus of traveling on a bus with 100 + of your favorite 12- and 13-year-old boys. Just bless the coaches right now!

So here is the game-day journal of just another football mom, navigating her way through the waters of 7th grade football!

After 8 years of playing against the other neighborhood school teams, a Texas youth football player begins 7th grade football. Want to know what it's like for his mom? Well, here's her game-day journal.

Limiting Contact Practices In High School Football: Proceed With Caution, Study Concludes

Limiting or eliminating contact practices in football would result in an 18% to 40% reduction in head impacts respectively over the course of a high school football season, reports a new study,  which urges policymakers to proceed with caution in imposing such limits.

Improving Football Safety: Is It Up To Parents?


Now that the concussion lawsuit filed by retired National Football League players has apparently been settled (remember: the judge still has to give her approval), it's time to focus on the upcoming football season, and working to make the sport safer at every level of the game. Missy Womack

Sincerest form of flattery

We could sit back and wait for the N.F.L., National Federation of High School Associations (NFHS), USA Football and Pop Warner to lead the way on football safety.

Football safety is largely up to parents, argues Brooke de Lench, working with all other groups in their community with a stake in making football safer, including independent football organizations, school boards, school superintendents, athletic directors, coaches, school nurses and psychologists, and other health care providers, to improve football safety at the grassroots level.

Coaches Can Play Important Role in Encouraging Athletes To Report Concussion Symptoms, Studies Find

A growing number of studies challenge the conventional wisdom that inadequate athlete concussion knowledge is the principal barrier to increased concussion symptom reporting.  Because educating youth about the dangers of concussion is unlikely to improve concussion reporting, they say other ways need to be found to increase reporting, among them being to enlist coaches to help create an environment where athletes feel safe in reporting.

High School Sports Participation Increases for 24th Consecutive Year

Participation in high school sports increased for the 24th consecutive year in 2012-13 and passed the 7.7 million mark for the first time, according to the annual High School Athletics Participation Survey conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS).

Two-A-Days: Are You Ready For Some Football?


Mid-August in Texas can only mean one thing: it is time for football season, finally!

Before we can start school and focus on the upcoming schedule, we tune up with "two-a-days."  In its purest form, that means teams practice in the early morning, take a break, and come back in the evening for a second practice, thus avoiding practice during the hottest part of the day. Football player hydrating

A Texas mom of two teenagers - a son in his first year of middle school football and a daughter on the high school drill team - slogs through an  endless series of two-a-days in preparation for another year of school and sports.

NOCSAE and Helmet Sensors: An Ounce Of Prevention

There is still confusion about the recent position, or should I say positions, taken by NOCSAE over the past month, first deciding that the certification of any helmet with a third-party add-on would be viewed as automatically void, then, this past week, making a 180-degree U-turn and leaving it up to the helmet manufacturers to decide whether affixing impact sensors to the inside or outside of a helmet voided the certification.  Unless you read my article on NOCSAE's original decision and Lindsay Barton's this past week on its clarification, and perhaps even if you did, you are probably scratching your head and wondering what the heck is going on!

Well, I am scratching my head, too.

With all the controversy surrounding NOCSAE's recent rulings on the effect of third-party add-ons on helmet certification, what Brooke de Lench and others are wondering is why NOCSAE isn't asking the helmet manufacturers to explain to them and the rest of us how a 2-ounce piece of plastic stuck to a 4+ pound football helmet has them so worried?  Whether the NOCSAE rulings were intended to put the brakes on the market for helmet sensors to give the helmet manufacturers time to catch up, it is hard to see how it won't have exactly that effect, she says.

PBS Premieres "The Smartest Team: Making High School Football Safer" August 14th & 20th, 2013

The Brooke de Lench documentary, "The Smartest Team: Making High School Football Safer," will have its world television broadcast premiere on the Oklahoma Educational Television Association (OETA)(PBS) on Wednesday, August 14, 2013 at 10:00 p.m. CDT.

Impact Sensors: Brain Sentry

Brain Sentry was founded by a team of award-winning product developers with backgrounds in aerospace, medical products and sports.The result of Brain Sentry's efforts has been the development of an innovative helmet-mounted device that alerts when an athlete suffers a potentially dangerous impact. We help coaches, parents and safety monitors identify players that should be evaluated for a concussion.

NOCSAE Voiding of Certification For Sensor-Equipped Helmets: A Big Blow To Player Safety

Last week many of the technology manufacturers who have been working diligently to produce products to make helmeted sports such as football safer were dealt a severe, if not crippling, blow by the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) when, out of the blue, it decided to view modification of helmets with third-party after-market add-ons as voiding its certification, which could only be regained if the helmet is retested with the add-on. Newcastle Racers wearing three different football helmets

Brooke de Lench believes that the new NOCSAE ruling voiding the certification for sensor-equipped helmets could not have come at a worse time, just as football - from the youth level to the NFL - is gearing up for the 2012 season. If not reversed or modified, de Lench fears that it will have harsh real-world consequences; not just on sensor manufacturers but on player safety and consumer choice.
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