Bill looks to ban tackle football before high school
SACRAMENTO — Hours after two California legislators unveiled a plan to outlaw tackle football until high school, angry coaches, parents and former players began mobilizing to protect America’s favorite sport from a notoriously “nanny” state government. They created a Twitter account,
@Save California Football, and a matching hashtag. One coach set up a meeting with a Sacramento lobbyist to learn how to engage lawmakers on bills. An online petition opposing the bill collected more than 30,000 signatures in a little over three days.
“At what point do we just bubble wrap our kids?” said Jason Ingman of Natomas, a parent and youth coach who launched the petition. “It’s not a perfect world. We’re never going to take injury out of sports. We can’t just abandon it because we can’t be 100 percent safe.”
Mike Wagner, a Pop Warner official in Los Angeles and an organizer of the growing opposition campaign, described the legislation another way: “It’s completely un-American.”
Sacramento Assemblyman Kevin McCarty hasn’t even formally introduced the bill yet.
“I knew we would strike a nerve,” McCarty said. “I knew it was a tough conversation.”
McCarty and Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, both Democrats, announced their intent last week to craft legislation to establish a minimum age to play contact football, comparing their proposed government intervention in the sport to previous public health measures that mandated car seats and vaccines for children.
Jeff Hood, director of Lodi Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services, which oversees Lodi Boosters of Boys/Girls Sports and the Lodi Colts youth football team, said if the bill became law, the department would make changes.
“I think people would just go to some other form of football. It’s a great sport, with the emphasis on stamina, strength, and teamwork, and it develops a lot of good characteristics and qualities,” Hood said. “However it is a valid concern, whether it’s injuries to joints and bones or the brain. We’re learning more and more about the risks, and people have to make that decision.
“We don’t take a position one way or another, we’re here to provide whatever people have an interest in.”
Hood said Lodi’s program had a flag football league until a few years ago, when independent youth programs in the area expanded their programs.
“There was a time when some of the high schools were more involved in flag football,” he said. “We have the Grape Bowl, we have a facility, and some of the other parks. Certainly if we saw a need and an interest for some alternative, we’d put something together.”
To McCarty, the science is clear: “Football in general has its risks and it’s especially dangerous to younger kids.”
McCarty cited a Boston University School of Medicine study released in September that found players who participated in tackle football before age 12 experienced more behavior and cognitive problems in life than players who started playing later.
The study showed those who participated before age 12 were twice as likely to have “problems with behavioral regulation, apathy and executive functioning” and three times as likely to experience “clinically-elevated depression scores.”
Approximately 53 percent of Americans believe tackle football is not safe for kids before high school, according to a poll of 1,000 adults released by the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Washington Post last fall.
“All across the country and all across California you’re seeing more and more parents say, ‘Maybe it doesn’t make sense,’” McCarty said.
Some argue McCarty should leave the decision to parents.
Joe Cattolico, the varsity football coach for the Sheldon High School Huskies, hails from a family that didn’t take participation in tackle football lightly — his father would not allow him to play until ninth grade.
Now he’s Dad to two boys in elementary school who play flag football. “My oldest one is actually unhappy with me that I haven’t let him do it yet,” he said. The coach thinks seventh grade may be the appropriate time for his son, now a fifth grader.
“I think that the bill is a well-intentioned attempt to
over-legislate and to take something that should be the choice of parents and take it away from them and put it in the hands of the government,” Cattolico said on the blacktop one day this week after school.
It’s a point reiterated by parents and coaches up and down the state.
Wagner, the executive commissioner of Southern California Conference Pop Warner, said he immediately received nearly two dozen emails from coaches and parents the day McCarty announced the bill. He pondered the best way to organize the opposition and contacted Chris Fore, a consultant and special-teams coordinator at Victor Valley College, for help.
Fore launched a Twitter account the next day. He met with a lobbyist on Tuesday to receive advice about strategy and speaking with lawmakers. Fore declined to name the lobbyist.
“We want to be careful to unify the many different youth football organizations, and have a clear mission, purpose and voice in this discussion,” Fore said. He’s setting up a press conference to voice concerns about the bill at a football clinic in Costa Mesa next week.
Youth football in California is spread across many organizations, from Pop Warner to regional leagues, which makes it difficult to determine how many children participate in the sport. The Sports and Fitness Industry Association estimates that 2.5 million children ages six to 17 play tackle football in the U.S.
Ingman said his 12-year-old son Kristian would have a void in his life without tackle football. Ingman, an assistant youth football coach for the Rocklin Junior Thunder 14and-under team, said his son will finish his eighth-grade season later this year and would not be impacted by the bill.
“If this conversation were happening five years ago, that might be the last straw for me to leave this state,” Ingman said. “We have safe heroin sites, but kids can’t play football?”