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ARLINGTON, Tex. — Raymond Kitchen had other places he would rather have been than in a big, empty football stadium at 7 a.m. on a Saturday. But there he was, three days before Christmas, with 450 other high school football coaches, attending a two-hour lecture on tackling at AT&T Stadium, the home of the Dallas Cowboys.
The lecture was a part of an ambitious effort to have all of the state’s 23,000 junior high and high school football coaches become familiar with, by August, a program that teaches rugby-style tackling. It emphasizes the use of the shoulder, not the head, in bringing down the player with the ball.
The program was created by Atavus, a company based in Seattle that says it can produce more effective tacklers by teaching defenders to square up before hitting a ball carrier and to use their shoulders and legs for leverage and power. Coaches like Kitchen seem receptive to the message Atavus is trying to popularize.
“It’s where to put your head that is the focus now,” Kitchen, a defensive coach at James Bowie High School in Arlington, said after he finished a written test that was a part of the certification. “Every year, with C.T.E., every coach is now, ‘Get your head out of it,’” he added, using the initialism for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/...lights&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront
The lecture was a part of an ambitious effort to have all of the state’s 23,000 junior high and high school football coaches become familiar with, by August, a program that teaches rugby-style tackling. It emphasizes the use of the shoulder, not the head, in bringing down the player with the ball.
The program was created by Atavus, a company based in Seattle that says it can produce more effective tacklers by teaching defenders to square up before hitting a ball carrier and to use their shoulders and legs for leverage and power. Coaches like Kitchen seem receptive to the message Atavus is trying to popularize.
“It’s where to put your head that is the focus now,” Kitchen, a defensive coach at James Bowie High School in Arlington, said after he finished a written test that was a part of the certification. “Every year, with C.T.E., every coach is now, ‘Get your head out of it,’” he added, using the initialism for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/...lights&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront
