On the eve of the Super Bowl, football’s largest stage & most popular weekend in all of sports, I’m perplexed that very little has been featured in the press on this year’s most pressing issue, head injuries.

Helmet to helmet hits to the head. Our increased awareness of concussions. High school football teams forfeiting games due to rosters depleted by injuries. A college player left paralyzed from the neck down. The medical community warning parents that hits to the head may effect their children for the rest of their lives. Is that not enough for the football community to rethink the issue of safety at the youth level?

Yet every weekend in the fall millions of kids take to the football field, instructed to hit their opponent, separate the ball from the ball carrier, and take on a warrior mentality. Kids who have not yet reached puberty, and are stilled tucked in at night by their parents will take to the football field without the security and proper instruction of a many certified adult coaches.

If that does not make you pause to think, then let me pose this question. Would you take your child to a martial arts class, where the instructor’s only qualification was they enjoyed watching Kung Fu movies? Well, that’s exactly what you do when you place your son on a youth tackle football team. Most youth tackle football coaches qualify themselves to coach by the fact that they watch the NFL and college football every weekend on television.

As football parents, ARE WE CRAZY??? We allow our children to play a violent sport where you are asked to hit and knock someone over, with limited instruction on how to properly execute such a difficult physical task. Not to mention the fact that young kids below the age of 15, if not older, have not fully developed their bodies to appropriately execute complicated & coordinated movements in order to make a tackle correctly. Nor have they developed the neck strength to support the head when making a tackle.

The football community needs to quickly mandate coaches to be licensed and properly trained. Currently USA Football has an on-line test that certifies coaches. Anyone can pass that test without preparing for it! I’ve administered that test to people with no football background or knowledge that have passed that test. It’s time to follow the lead of sports such as soccer and require that youth tackle football coaches pass a comprehensive on-field test in how to properly teach all the fundamentals of the game, for every position. If the sport of ice hockey, including the NHL, USA Hockey, and Hockey Canada are now asking that youth hockey re-certify coaches and change their rules on contact before the age of 13, is it not time that football start certifying coaches, and rethinking how kids learn and play the game?

I applaud the sport of hockey for being proactive to protect the future generation of players and their sport. Football needs to do the same, despite their claims that they do, through posters and pamphlets designed to educate parents, players & coaches in regards to concussions. It all falls on deaf ears when you don’t require coaches to be trained to teach the game.

Wake up football!!