Coach John Hart’s high school football practices look a lot different than they did 15 years ago. They contain no tackling to the ground and rarely last longer than 90 minutes. If John Hart from 15 years ago saw John Hart’s practices today, “I’d probably kick my own butt,” Hart, head coach at defending Indiana state champion Brownsburg High School, said this week.
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Hart, who’s 64, played and coached for decades under a trusted set of principles that, in recent years, suddenly threatened to doom the sport, as scientific evidence and shocking tragedies revealed the costs of football’s violence. Leagues, from Pop Warner to the NFL, have changed rules to eliminate the most violent collisions. Coaches take concussions more seriously. Players train to avoid helmet-to-helmet hits. Local governments in some states have passed laws limiting full-contact practice time. The sport’s survival may hinge on better protecting players, and anyone resistant to the changes now risks falling behind.
“The old school in you thinks you need more tackling, then you start finding out there’s a lot better ways of teaching it without full contact,” Hart said. “Most injuries happen in practice, and we’ve cut that way down.”
The urgent need to reform the game came under yet another harsh spotlight this week when a new scientific study, considered one of the most authoritative ever conducted, revealed that at least a quarter, and probably many more, of former NFL players to die in recent years suffered from CTE, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head impacts. The study, which points to the cumulative small hits rather than major injuries, instantly renewed the debate over whether and when children (or adults) should play tackle football, threatening to dull the sport’s recent rebound.
After a decade of decline, national tackle football participation has begun to tick back up in recent years. The percentage of kids ages 6 and up who play tackle football rose from 2021 to 2024 to match 2014 levels, according to data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Surveys from the National Federation of State High School Associations show the total number of high school players has rebounded from a 2018 low point to meet numbers from a decade ago.
Coaches cite a number of possible reasons. For a generation of children cooped up in pandemic lockdown, the sport offers a chance to bond with new friends before the school year starts. At a time of loneliness and fragmentation, football promises community, even tribalism. Deals for young athletes’ name, image and likeness, or NIL, can be paltry or life-changing secure income streams for a growing number of young athletes. And no sport offers more cultural cachet.
But above all, players, parents and coaches trust that the changes in football have reduced football’s risks.
“The way the game is taught is just safer,” said Justin Alumbaugh, head coach at perennial powerhouse De La Salle High School in Northern California. “As a parent, that alleviates a lot of the fear.”
It wasn’t long ago that concerns about football’s long-term consequences seemed severe enough to challenge the sport’s supremacy as the country’s favorite game. Starting in the mid-2000s, several studies discovered CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, in the brains of former football players who struggled with depression, memory loss, impulse control, emotional regulation and other mental health problems. Some showed symptoms associated with dementia by their 30s or 40s. Some killed themselves or others.
Neurologists advised against children playing tackle football until at least high school. In 2013, Pop Warner participation dipped for the first time in 80 years. A Washington Post analysis in 2023 found that while geography, race and politics made the sport’s participation decline uneven, it had been, for years, in obvious decline.
Coaches saw the impact. Even in football-loving Georgia, Buford High School head coach Bryant Appling said he “saw a little dip [in participation] in the early 2010s,” before a rebound “the last couple years.” Alumbaugh, at De La Salle, remembers fewer students were signing up for the school’s famed football team, to the point that his staff discussed consolidating the freshman and junior varsity teams. “That’s when things kind of became a little bit alarming,” he said.
Medical experts are still trying to fully understand the scale of football’s harms. This week’s landmark study, published in the British Medical Journal, included 878 former players who died between 2016 and 2021. It was anchored by posthumous brain examinations of 338 football players, more than 90 percent of which showed signs of CTE.
Because players who donated their brains were more likely to have suffered from symptoms of brain disease, the researchers reasoned that anywhere between about 25 percent and 97 percent of the players in the study had CTE. The real number, they said, was probably somewhere in the middle.
The youngest in the study were in the league by the 2010s, part of the final generation of gridiron warriors to grow up under the old ways. As long as there’s no way to diagnose CTE while a person is alive, the game’s risks remain a mystery in real-time.
But coaches and players and parents have reason to be optimistic. How could the game not be safer when it feels so dramatically different?
The reckoning “encouraged us to evaluate how we were doing things,” Alumbaugh said. “It led to not just self-reflection but reflection on culture.”
Maybe a coach shouldn’t chew out a player for “going out of bounds and not getting an extra yard,” Alumbaugh said. “There’s a little bit more reason in the game now. What’s the best-case scenario, he gains three more inches? Or he gets hurt.”
De La Salle defenders started tackling differently after Alumbaugh saw an instructional video of coach Pete Carroll demonstrating demonstrating the rugby-style technique the Seattle Seahawks had mastered to great success, leading with their shoulders instead of heads.
“That was a really good Seattle defense, and well, they’re doing it,” Alumbaugh said. “If you’re going to take the profession seriously you gotta look at other ideas and better ways of doing it. We tried it and saw a decrease in concussions.”
He said his team suffered two concussions last year, fewer than the baseball team. This year, around 160 players are in the program, around 30 more than at the lowest point several years ago.
Football culture tends to trickle down from the top. When leagues outlawed the sort of hits that used to make highlight reels, teams trained players to avoid them. “Even if you’re a coach who doesn’t care about safety, you care about the 15-yard penalties,” Hart said.
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He described a “gradual” evolution that came “the more that we learned as a profession.” When the current generation of coaches was growing up, there was no higher virtue in football than toughness, and conventional wisdom dictated that the more a player suffered, the better equipped he was to handle the game’s brutal rigors.
The downside: “Your best players would get injured in a practice,” Hart said. “If you’re a conscious coach, you look at it like, what could we have done to prevent that?”
Hart, the only coach to win an Indiana state title at three schools, said he began to rethink how he conducted practice after speaking with college coaches who prioritized efficiency over repetition, and watching an Indiana practice under Curt Cignetti. Hart trimmed his practices down from two and a half hours to 90 minutes. He barred tackling, focusing training on angles and positioning.
“Everything is built around rest,” he said. “We probably spend an extraordinary amount of time on recovery in our process so we can go significantly hard when we go.”
At reigning Georgia state champion Buford High School, players practice with helmets strapped with cushioned Guardian Caps and wear GPS sensors that track their movements. If a top player hits a certain distance threshold, raising the risk of a pulled muscle, Appling instructs him to “take the second half of practice off,” he said, something his own high school coach back in the day “never would have said.”
“The more you read and the studies that come out, you take things back,” said Appling, who has coached for more than 25 years and has two sons in middle school. “When I was growing up, I wouldn’t believe I’d be doing all this stuff, but it makes sense.”
A player’s trajectory today, he said, “is a lot higher now than it was 25 years ago.”
You can strip away only so much risk from tackle football before it ceases to be tackle football. The most violent knock-out blows might reflect the sport at its most brutal, but sports medicine experts have found that the main driver of CTE is the accumulation of subconcussive blows unavoidable for most players.
Carl Ehrlich remembers first hearing about those early studies before his final year as a defensive lineman at Harvard. In the trenches, he banged helmets on every snap. “I saw stars every practice,” he said. He tried not to think about “all these subconcussive hits” until after the season.
A few years later, in 2014, Ehrlich founded a youth flag football league in the D.C. metro area. Around 160 kids signed up the first year, more than 300 the second, and around 7,000 this year, including about 2,000 girls. Nationwide within the past decade, flag has surpassed tackle football among children ages 6 to 12.
For many parents, Ehrlich said, it’s a way of “diverting” a football-loving child away from tackle, letting them explore their interest in the sport without risking brain trauma.
“Eight years ago, the idea of sending your kid into tackle football had the same stigma as smoking a cigarette at restaurants,” Ehrlich said, and he wasn’t sure that could ever change without the sport losing its appeal. But his perspective has shifted as the game has become safer.
“When the rules started changing, part of you was worried about it corrupting the purity of the sport,” he said. “I’ve been surprised over the last 10 years. The game is the same, and it turns out you didn’t need all of those massive, dangerous collisions.”
When parents ask his recommendation, Ehrlich, a father of young children, tells them that if it were his kid, “I would keep them in flag through elementary school, and then maybe in seventh and eighth grade let them get a year in of tackle before high school,” he said.
Compared with a decade ago, the percentage of children who play any organized sport has dipped across the board, according to one analysis of youth sports data. Tackle football shrunk more than basketball and soccer but less than baseball and volleyball. The two fastest-growing games are individual sports, tennis and golf.
Flag football is the only team sport with a growing participation rate over the past five years. The number of girls playing high school flag football has risen from around 11,000 to 68,000 over the past decade, almost exactly matching the loss of boys tackle football players, according to data collected by the National Federation of State High School Associations. Combining flag and tackle, more children are playing high school football than at any point since 2009.
“People thought flag was going to take people away from tackle,” Ehrlich said, “but it has brought more people into the sport in general.”
The best boys’ flag football players, he noted, usually go on to play tackle football. And even in aftermath of this week’s study, he expects that to continue.
“Tackle is coming around a little more again,” Ehrlich said. “People are getting more comfortable with it.”
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