Less contact in practice might be wave of future
Pending a second reading of a new proposal introduced Feb. 14, drastic changes could be coming to the way high school football practices are run in New Jersey.
If the proposal passes, in-season, full-contact practices will be reduced from 90 minutes per week to 15 minutes per week, while fullcontact practices in preseason will be reduced from an unlimited amount of time to six hours total, including scrimmages.
At first glance, these new rules
might seem designed to fundamentally change the way the game of football is practiced and played. But after hearing from a sampling of coaches in Pennsylvania, it turns out the new rules wouldn’t really change the way many practice after all.
“Once the season starts, we’re never live,” Pine-Richland coach Eric Kasperowicz said. “We haven’t live tackled to the ground in two and a half years. So I’m a big proponent of that. It’s 2019, things have changed. We need to keep up with the times. We need to keep our game growing and thriving, and the way it was played back in the [1970s] is not the way to do that, in my opinion.”
Tim Gushue is the coach at Shawnee High School in Medford, N.J., and a member of the NJSIAA executive committee that came up with the proposal. He said the idea came from several meetings with Terry O’Neil, the founder and CEO of Practice Like Pros, an organization that advocates for cutting back on full-contact practices in youth and high school football.
Gushue said the changes won’t affect the way he runs his practices at all.
“I know for me, I don’t think we’ve tackled to the ground in practice in at least 10 years,” Gushue said.
The hope in New Jersey is that limiting the amount of time players spend tackling each other will limit the amount of football-related injuries in practice — not just concussions, but broken bones and sprained or torn ligaments as well. According to Kasperowicz, preventing players from tackling to the ground has directly correlated with a lack of injuries in his team’s practices.
“In the past two and half years, I don’t remember having a kid get hurt in practice, knock on wood,” Kasperowicz said. “Maybe a turned ankle here and there, but as far as a contact practice injury, we haven’t had one since 2016.”
Franklin Regional coach Greg Botta employs a similar mentality to Kasperowicz when it comes to his full-contact practices. He said Tuesday and Thursday are his team’s “hitting days,” but very rarely do they take anybody to the ground during the week of practice.
“I know that in my 26 years as a head coach, I know I’ve changed a lot,” Botta said.
Meanwhile, Central Catholic coach Terry Totten acknowledged the shift toward less contact in practice “seems to be where things are going,” even if he doesn’t necessarily agree with it.
“I think some of the basic skills still need to be done with contact, tackling and blocking,” he said. “That seems pretty restrictive, but who knows? Maybe it will have a benefit to it.”
Pennsylvania’s current guidelines call for no more than three days and no more than 60 minutes total of fullcontact practice per week. That might not sound like a lot, but divided up into three days of 20-minute full-contact practices, Pennsylvania coaches would still have more time to practice live- action tackling drills in a day than New Jersey coaches will have in a week.
Most coaches seemed to agree that if drastically reducing or even eliminating fullcontact practices will help make football a safer game, then the changes are worth it.
“If we want to continue this game being here long after we’re here, we’ve got to do something about it or it’s going to go the way the dinosaurs did,” Kasperowicz said. “Nobody’s going to want to play any more if it’s not safe. It doesn’t mean you’re softer or any less tough or less physical, you’re just smarter about it.”