New Jersey Implements Major Changes Concerning Full-Contact Practices

[OldSchoolLion]

New Jersey’s high school sports governing body announced a sweeping rule change last month to dramatically restrict the amount of time football players can spend tackling their teammates in practice.  During in-season practices, players may only engage in full-contact drills for 15 minutes each week. During the three-week preseason, teams are allowed six hours of full-contact practice.

The New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association is heralding the move as the lowest level of contact codified by any major football jurisdiction, including the NFL, NCAA, Ivy League, USA Football and Pop Warner. Previously, Garden State teams were allotted 90 minutes of full-contact practice per week and an unlimited amount during the preseason. The changes come at the recommendation of football safety advocacy group Practice Like Pros and after approval by the New Jersey Football Coaches Association.  Michigan’s high school sports governing body will be voting in May to adopt the standards, as well.

The changes come as high school football participation in the state is plummeting. Nearly 2,500 fewer students played high school football in New Jersey in 2017, the last year for which data is available, than 2010, according to the National Federation of High School State Associations. That’s close to a 10-percent decrease, more than half of which came between the 2016 and 2017 seasons.  That far outstrips the pace of the national decline in high school football.

[Proseteye]

I'm curious what the purpose of this ruling is? Football, like boxing, is a "contact" sport. The more contact you have the better your contact abilities get. How can you block and tackle without contact? This is indicative of the protect from injuries at any cost crowd. The same crowd that prides themselves in giving participation trophies to all team members. New Jersey might just as well do away with regular football and go only with flag football. Should make the fans, players, and coaches ecstatic.

[OldSchoolLion]

44 minutes ago, Proseteye said:

I'm curious what the purpose of this ruling is? Football, like boxing, is a "contact" sport. The more contact you have the better your contact abilities get. How can you block and tackle without contact? This is indicative of the protect from injuries at any cost crowd. The same crowd that prides themselves in giving participation trophies to all team members. New Jersey might just as well do away with regular football and go only with flag football. Should make the fans, players, and coaches ecstatic.

Am not sharing this to defend the position...simply to make others aware that there is a body of people, including some successful coaches, who believes that practices can be just as effective without as much contact as is the norm in hs football today.  

http://stopcte.org/W/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Practice-Like-Pros.pdf

[Proseteye]

Well, obviously, more injuries are going to occur in practice rather than a game. If the players practice 3 hours per day for 4 days that's 12 hours. A game, once a week, is only a little over one and a half hours. Also, all of the players on the team are practicing for that 3 hours whereas in a game many of the players have little playing time and even the starters only play part of that one and a half hours on the field. So there is really no corollary here. As far as the NFL doing very little contact during practices, these are players that have had a few years of contact already and thus have learned most of what there is to know about how to black and tackle. Even in college the players have had the benefit of at least 4 and probably more years of learning the techniques of blocking and tackling. In High School it's all about learning how to play football. Repetition is the name of the game. The more you block and tackle the better you get at it. How is a youngster going to learn how to block and tackle, and how to do it effectively so that he doesn't get hurt doing it, by just going through the motions? I think that the powers to be have done enough to make football as safe and injury free as possible. Anything more will turn football into a game of volleyball or worse drive many players and coaches right out of football, at lease at the HS level.