Prep football participation is down. Will a partnership with the NFL increase it?
Myers Park coach Scott Chadwick thinks one of the biggest problems with high school football is the lack of promotion.
So when the NFL and the National Federation of High Schools announced Thursday that they are partnering to do just that, Chadwick was excited about what could come from it.
“I don’t think parents know about a lot of what’s going on in our sport,” Chadwick said. “The thought of football being a dangerous sport, I think, is greatly exaggerated.”
That’s some of the story the new partnership hopes to tell. The National Federation of State High Schools and the NFL will work together to promote the growth, understanding and support for football at the high school level.
The NFL will fund the partnership, which will involve the NFHS developing a plan to promote the game as well as surveying state administrators, athletes, parents, coaches and officials about the benefits of participation.
Every year since 1999, more than one million high school students have participated in 11-man football, according to NFHS figures, but in the 2018-19 school year, participation dropped to 1,006,013, a decline of more than 30,000. That was the lowest since the 1999-2000 school year and was the fifth straight year football participation had dropped.
NFHS data also shows that football participation in North Carolina has dropped more than 23 percent in the past 10 years.
The NFHS and NFL hope to use the partnership and the studies that come out of it to better understand those participation trends and identify areas to focus on.
Concussion rates in prep football
The NFHS is expected to hire a senior consultant for high school football promotion, who will be tasked with developing messaging around player protection efforts. That person will also help increase participation and improve the reputation of high school football.
“The NFHS and NFL will work together to promote player protection best practices and emphasize that high school football equips young people for success both in the classroom and in life by inspiring character, leadership, resilience, teamwork and other vital transferable life skills,” Roman Oben, NFL vice president, strategy and development, youth and high school football, said.
Still, the NFHS and NFL face an uphill climb. The American Academy of Pediatrics released a study in November that looked at 20 high school sports from the 2013-14 school year through 2017-18. The study found that football concussions had gone down in practice but had increased during games. The data for the study came from the National High School Sports-Related Injury Surveillance Study database.
Football game concussion rates increased for 33.19 to 39.07 per 10,000 athlete exposures. But practice-related rates dropped from 5.47 to 4.44 per 10,000 exposures.
Football’s declining participation numbers
Chadwick said the declining participation numbers in football are real but believes educating parents and potential players will go a long way towards curbing that.
“People need to hear that the way we practice and teach the game has changed,” he said. “There’s been major technology upgrades in equipment. So I don’t see how you can go wrong with something that attempts to educate people on things we’ve done to make the game safer and things we’ve done to try to keep kids in the game.”
Chadwick said high school practice rules have changed. He said there is much less contact. Some drills that leave players injury prone like “Oklahoma,” which the NFL banned last year, have been almost removed from the game; and rule changes preventing targeting and blind side blocks have also helped reduce injury risk.
He also pointed out that football’s national governing body, USA Football, has placed a focus on training coaches in recent years on things like how to block and tackle properly.
“All of those things need to be brought to the forefront,” Chadwick said, “and people need to be educated that we’re doing an awful lot to make this game safer, and a lot safer than the perception of it is.”
This story was originally published September 24, 2020 at 3:17 PM.
