By: Scott Lancaster, January 11, 2023, co-founder of Whole Child Sports
I was hired by the NFL in 1995 to address the worrisome decline in youth football participation. The remarkable progress we made during that tenure involved setting up a series of programs that not only attracted more kids to play football, but, more importantly, made the game safer to play.
That’s why I was happy to read Daniel Kaplan’s, December 22, 2022 article in The Athletic, “NFL and flag football: Why the league has taken interest, invested heavily in it,” which spotlighted the success of the National Football League’s Flag Football Program. While I appreciate Mr Kaplan’s take, it’s important to point out that a flag football program is just the tip of the spear. The NFL has to do a lot more to make the game more inclusive and improve safety across the board. Especially after what occurred on Monday Night Football in front of a national television audience, when Buffalo Bill safety Damar Hamlin collapsed and suffered a cardiac arrest after making a routine tackle.
On the heels of that primetime shock, the media mill kicked into overdrive, with pundits offering up unqualified comments and poorly formed opinions about what they thought actually happened. The collective knee jerk reaction—that youth football is too dangerous for kids to play—is something I heard constantly, from the moment I was put in charge of youth football development at the NFL in1995 until I left in 2007.
I am quite proud to have been part of the team that brainstormed and launched NFL Flag back in 1996 and helped expand youth participation in football for the ensuing 12 years. NFL Flag was the first of a series of programs we developed and offered to kids and communities nationwide. These programs not only increased youth involvement in the game, but also provided more effective ways for both boys and girls to learn and play tackle football, the crown jewel being, Junior Player Development, a comprehensive instructional program we developed for players and coaches that was implemented in all 32 NFL cities.
A Historical Perspective:
In order to better appreciate the evolution and advancements made in youth football over the past 25 years, here’s a historical perspective.
I was hired away from US Soccer, where I worked as marketing director, to turbocharge youth football participation. Youth involvement in football had fallen behind youth participation in most major team sports. When I began at the NFL youth football was ranked 4th in organized team sport total participation behind basketball, baseball, and soccer according to the National Sporting Goods Association.
Working as the NFL Director of Youth Football Development, I dug deep into the numbers and discovered that the key issue was that youth football lacked an appropriate inclusive pathway for kids. There was no clear-cut program that was equal parts fun and and educational. Kids were simply not being taught how to properly play the game properly.
Tackle football participation was seriously frowned upon by millions of moms and soccer had a clear advantage as a relatively safe and fun sport that both boys and girls could play.
The kids I surveyed did not find the fun in playing tackle football. They saw it as too regimented and limited and too connected to their size and body type. Kids didn’t (and still don’t) like the fact that coaches immediately labeled them as lineman if they were big for their age, as that meant they would never get a chance to actually touch a football. They gravitated toward the excitement and continuous action and flow of other sports like soccer, basketball, hockey and lacrosse.
Soccer had an organized system to recruit, train and retain coaches. Youth football had (and continues to have) a broken, poorly organized structure: Pop Warner. And, in the late 1990s, action sports also emerged as a serious participatory option for kids and was buoyed by the launch of ESPN’s Winter & Summer X Games.
The youth sports world was changing and football simply did not keep up.
I was hired and charged with the responsibility of enlivening, popularizing and adapting American Youth Football, with the support of NFL Properties President, Sara Levinson, and NFL Special Events Vice President, and now Major League Soccer Commissioner, Don Garber. I relished my mandate and eagerly embarked on the development of a plan to modernize youth football, and create a more inclusive and exciting way to both learn and play the game.
This was not at all easy. I tried to convince NFL Owners, General Managers, Coaches and League Administrators that it was a critical time to rethink the game. I can only characterize their collective reaction with a single response, which still rings in my ears, “You want us to change our sport to look more like that communist sport? Soccer?”
Yes! And not just soccer! But also skating, snowboarding and other cutting-edge activities.
At this point the NFL youth football turn-around plan kicked in. We launched NFL Flag, the first step in a developmental plan designed to serve several important purposes:
- Execute a fan development & branding tool, providing every NFL Flag participant the opportunity to play for their NFL home market or favorite team. We accomplished this by providing reversible NFL Flag home & away jerseys, identified by the team Logo and colors of their favorite team.
- Fun athletic development program that introduced and emphasized the development of movement skills, such as Speed, Agility, & Balance.
- Develop a safe way to introduce and develop football techniques and strategy without the physical risk of taking or delivering a hit.
- Carve out an inclusive pathway for both boys and girls—no matter their size or initial athletic abilities—and teach team each and every one of the game’s skill positions.
We taught the game of tackle football through a progression of instructional steps and readapted playing methods. As a result, we better educated coaches that teach the game. They began to properly employ drills and skills that took into careful account age-appropriate stages of development, which in turn make the game much safer for everyone to play and enjoy.
The key point I want to make is this: there are many innovative ways to teach both boys and girls to learn about and enjoy the game of football that are as safe those employed in the instruction of any other sport kids play today.
The result of my team’s work? We added over 4 million participants to NFL Youth Football Programs before I left in 2007. Seven hundred thousand kids played NFL Flag Football, and more than two million participants registered for our Punt, Pass & Kick program, up from 250,000 the year I took the youth sports helm at the NFL. Furthermore, more than 300,000 kids participated in the NFL Junior Player Development Tackle Program.
To wit, a knee jerk reaction to an unfortunate incident that occurred during the adult version of football, and the hysterical clarion call for the end of youth tackle football, without careful consideration for how much safer the game has become and can still further be adapted, is a mega-mistake that will rob hundreds of thousands of kids of the many benefits of learning this historied American sport.
NFL Flag and other successful programs are detailed in Beyond Winning: Smart Parenting in Toxic Sports Environment, a book I co-authored with Luis Fernando Llosa (www.luisfernandollosa.com) and Kim John Payne (www.simplicityparenting.com) in 2013, as well as in my first book Fair Play: Making Organized Sports a Great Experience for Your Kids, which can be downloaded at our youth sports awareness website www.wholechildsports.com.