Question
What is your opinion regarding the starting age for tackle football? Are you aware of any research in this area?
Answer
I would say at any age. I think they start at around 7 or 8 years of age. Know that children at that young age are not capable of producing the amount of force that it usually requires to sustain serious injury especially if you have the right coach who is teaching those children heads up tackling. I have a local football coach who takes his young football players and says, “Go at your athlete like you are going to bite them." This means, do not drop your head or shoulders. There is so much education that we can do with these young athletes starting at very young ages. But, I do think that football is a fairly risky sport.
I am not aware of any research in this area for football specifically. At such young ages, I like to focus on addressing the foundations of athleticism. Whether this is young football players or young soccer players, I like to look at promoting good power speed, strength speed, agility, flexibility, neuromuscular control and coordination. If you have a good football coach who is going to do that as well as teach the fundamentals of football, this is great.
Going out and playing a competitive game of football is cute, but I do not know how beneficial it is. I recently worked with a professional soccer athlete who signed with Manchester United on his 17th birthday. He said that they did not really play a competitive soccer game until they were about 18 years old growing up in England. All of the work he had done until that point was working on technique, skill development, learning the mental game and the technical game of soccer. They were out doing drills and playing soccer, but competition was not emphasized. I wish that competition was not such as big emphasis in all of our youth sports.
