Tackle football becomes embedded culturally with many children in the Central Ohio region at young ages. They practice and play during the week – it’s not hard to find tackle leagues as young as kindergarten – and then join their parents to watch the pageantry of major college football on fall Saturdays at Ohio State University.
But if Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith had his way, football would dramatically shift to flag as the only option until age 13, in order to protect children from brain injuries.
“If I was czar, I would eliminate tackle football until the age of 13,” Smith said in an interview with the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program. “I would be your worst enemy to the pee wee league. I don’t think anybody should be playing tackle football until they’re 13 years old. You learn all the requisite athletic skills that you need to learn through flag football.”
In a candid interview about the nature of football and the sport’s future, Smith spoke with the Aspen Institute in spring 2020 during research for its Project Play initiative and State of Play Central Ohio report, which was released in March 2021 and can be found here. The report offers an assessment of the state of youth sports, physical activity and outdoor recreation in Central Ohio, which was defined as Franklin County and the general Columbus area.
Through a survey of Central Ohio youth, the report showed that far fewer boys said they have ever played tackle football (36%) than basketball (71%) and soccer (61%). Tackle football was the No. 2 sport boys said they most want to try, slightly behind basketball.
Black youth in Central Ohio were twice as likely to have played tackle football and three times as likely to want to try the sport than White youth. Nationally, White children now account for 56% of high school football players, compared with 76% in 2006, according to The New York Times.
Among all of Aspen’s survey respondents, 16% of Central Ohio youth ages 6-18 said they have tried flag football, compared to 21% who have played tackle. Nineteen percent of the surveyed elementary school students said they have tried tackle. Nationally, 166,000 more kids ages 6-12 played flag than tackle in 2019, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. That continues a dramatic shift; tackle had 251,000 more age 6-12 players than flag in 2012. Tackle still has 810,000 more participants than flag at high school ages nationally.
‘We need to embrace flag football’
Increasingly, families are making different decisions on tackle football for kids due to health risks. Since 2015, Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center has published three studies that reached similar conclusions: Adults who played tackle football as children were more likely to deal with emotional and cognitive challenges later in life. In one study, kids who played tackle before age 12 experienced cognitive deficits and behavioral problems a full 13 years earlier than those who started playing at 12 or older.
“We need to embrace flag football,” said Smith, who has used his university’s famous horseshoe-shaped Ohio Stadium to host some youth flag football games. “I think the National Football Foundation has talked about it a little bit. The more we encourage it, the better. The more we give flag football a platform, it will probably help. But you’ve still got (youth tackle football leagues) that exist that are going to continue to promote their football programs, and some of them, there’s money in it for them. So, it’s a challenge.”
USA Football in recent years has promoted flag football, though its entry points into the sport still include options for tackle. Smith acknowledged that offensive and defensive linemen could be “slightly cheated” if America’s youth football system focused entirely on flag.
“But at the end of the day, how many of (the linemen) couldn’t be in other sports if they were provided the opportunity?” he said. “And just because a kid is big doesn’t mean they can’t run a route (in flag football) and help their athleticism. I’m just a big believer in flag football as an alternative to the contact because you could teach kids how to tackle later in life.”
Tackle football participation in Ohio – which ranks fourth nationally in producing NFL players but has one of the slowest-growing populations of any state – has been decreasing for a while. High school football participation dropped 27% across the state since 2009, the steepest decline in the U.S., according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, sports like cross country, soccer and track and field have added players in Ohio during that period.
“Mom is saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a lot of other options here besides you going to play football,’” said Dave Cecutti, former commissioner of the Ohio Capital Conference, which consists of 32 public high schools located primarily in suburban Columbus. “Football’s still a violent sport.”
Smith, who played and coached football at Notre Dame, operates an Ohio State football program with a $1.5 billion valuation, as estimated by The Wall Street Journal. In other words, his university relies on a healthy pipeline of talented youth football players.
Yet Smith said he’s not concerned with how the sport’s participation decline might impact Ohio State. Part of that, he said, is because the university is such a high-profile program. Ohio State is likely always going to pick from cream-of-the-crop talent. But Smith said he also worries there are many youth “chasing football dreams” who shouldn’t be because of how embedded the sport is culturally in communities. Instead, he said, some football players truly should be playing tennis, volleyball, lacrosse or other sports.
“Lacrosse should be a sport where there’s significantly more diversity,” Smith said. “But in our youth system, we don’t have lacrosse in the environments where African-American males or females can gravitate to. We just don’t. Frankly, I look at tennis, and because it’s a low-expense sport, I wish we had tennis in some of the neighborhoods that have a large African-American population because it’s a sport that should be played.”
Central Ohio high school students say they want to try lacrosse
This is not to say that football lacks value for youth. For some kids, if they did not play football, they might not play anything.
The Aspen Institute’s youth survey in Central Ohio found that football players were more likely to participate in sports or physical activity (90%) than males who don’t play football (74%) or females (77%). Football players (84%) were more likely to say that coaches encourage teammates to help each other than non-football males (68%) or females (71%). And football players (13%) were far less likely to list social issues – such as the child not feeling welcome in sports – as barriers to play sports than non-football males (22%).
But the survey also showed that children have interest for sports other than just football. The No. 1 team sport that high school-age students said they want to try is lacrosse – a sport that many Black children lack exposure to at young ages.
Former Pickerington High School Central football star Lorenzo Styles Jr., now a freshman Notre Dame wide receiver, said his participation in track and field and basketball helped with his agility. One rare regret from his childhood sports experience: Not playing lacrosse after hearing from friends who loved it.
“With sports like lacrosse or baseball or soccer, kids just need to get exposed to them,” Styles Jr. said. “I feel like that’s going to be hard to change because looking at the top Black athletes, you see them in football, basketball or track. When I was younger, people always talked about Kobe (Bryant) or Michael Jordan or so many football players. I don’t think I could tell you a Black lacrosse player or too many Black soccer players that people really look up to.”
There are examples to draw upon, past and present. Legendary Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown may have been even better at lacrosse than football, and the reigning Major League Soccer champions are the Columbus Crew, which is dominated by players of color. The U.S. men’s soccer player of the year is Weston McKennie, who plays professionally in Italy. These stars just don’t get the media attention that football, especially in Ohio, receives.
Given the passion for tackle football in Ohio, Smith said he is realistic that any effort to restrict tackle until 13 could not happen organically. The sport is too engrained in the daily lives of too many people. It’s too popular among adults, who pass it down from generation to generation.
“You would almost have to make (no tackle until 13) a law because otherwise it won’t happen,” Smith said. “That’s the only way to change it. Parents are making those decisions. And so even if a young person says at the age of 7, ‘I want to play pee wee football,’ the parent has to make that decision.’ And to me, it almost has to be a law.”
Jon Solomon is editorial director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program. Read the full State of Play Central Ohio report at as.pn/sopco.