‘You can change.’ Super Bowl-winning coach OK with proposed youth football changes.
Pete Carroll is all about safety.
The head coach of the Seattle Seahawks helped pioneer the use of “rugby style” tackling in American football through an instructional video he released in 2014 along with then-assistant Rocky Soto; the approach aims to eliminate contact a player’s head makes with an opposing player when tackling, and has started to take root at the youth and college levels.
The New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association this month voted to limit in-season practices to 15 minutes of contact. A bill currently in the Massachusetts legislature has proposed a ban on tackle football in the state for kids through their seventh-grade year. Carroll, who led the Seahawks to the 2014 Super Bowl championship, wasn’t immediately familiar with either proposal but expressed solidarity with others looking to make football safer.
“Anything that’s directed in terms of safety for the players is a good idea, as far as I’m concerned,” Carroll told reporters at the NFL Combine. “We have learned how to tackle without pads and to where you can minimize the contact but still, I hope, accelerate the technique. I know the conversation is out there across the country, everybody’s trying to figure it out and all that, so anybody that’s making the efforts — I know Dartmouth did some good things a few years back — and making some statements that, ‘You can change.’
“The hard challenge for the coaches is their old mind, that they’re stuck in the ways that we do things. You have to be able to adapt and to adjust to what’s going on. Anything that has to do with safety is the right idea, so I applaud the fact that they’re at least experimenting. And they’ll learn from here and they’ll adjust from there also.”
The Kentucky High School Athletic Association in 2015 amended its football-playing rules, based on recommendations from the National Federation of High Schools, to reduce allowable contact in practice to no more than 30 minutes in one day and 90 minutes in a week; previously there was no limit.
This story was originally published February 28, 2019 at 3:58 PM.
