Ivy League football coaches have made a decision to take the extraordinary step of eliminating all full-contact hitting from practices during the regular season, the most aggressive measure yet to combat growing concerns about brain trauma and other injuries in the sport.
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One leader of the effort to limit college players’ concussion risks is Dartmouth College’s head football coach, Buddy Teevens, who last season introduced a robot tackling dummy developed by engineering students at the Hanover, New Hampshire, school. The Ivy League as a whole had already significantly reduced the amount of contact in practice in recent years and now will just make the move to eliminate it completely. While some players were anxious the ban on tackling in practice would hurt the team, Dartmouth’s track record-the team shared the league title in 2015-suggested otherwise.
“At this stage in their careers, these guys know how to hit and take a hit”, Teevens told The Times.
While the season is going on, teams can hold full contact practices nor more than two times in a week.
The goal is simple: Reduce the number of hits the players give and take to cut down on concussions, subconcussive hits and injuries over the course of the week.
The Ivy League could formalize a no contact policy in June 2016 and go into effect as early as the 2016 football season, Rogers wrote. “People look at it and say we’re nuts”. The number of neck, back and shoulder injuries also declined noticeably, he said. Teevens said his defense misses less than half as many tackles as they used to.
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The policy will officially begin when the league’s athletic directors, the policy committee and presidents from the member teams – Havard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Penn – agree, the New York Times reported.
