Originally posted by midnight Target
My Uncle was a football coach (HS and College). He was adamantly against peewee football. He thought it was much too dangerous for younger kids.
I was forbidden to play until high school. I just wonder if he was right. Do you see many injuries in Peewees nowadays?
Honestly through two seasons in our community there have been four injuries requiring kids going to the hospital. One was a kid who had no business being on the team and had a vertebrae fractured because he was standing around on a kick off return team. The other three were two cleanly broken bones in the radius and ulna (lower arm) and one fractured humerus (upper arm). The humerus fracture was out for 4 weeks before being cleared by the doctor. The neck and lower arms were out for the season. The two lower arm breaks were freak accidents diving for fumbles.
I played peewee football and all the way through college. I never got seriously injured until college when I broke both collar bones in a game and played the rest of the game. The the next season I destroyed my right knee; (complete ACL rebuild with a cadaver (allograft) tendon and Gore-Tex LAD (ligament assisting device). The the next two seasons were my left ankle getting destroyed (more torn ligaments and bone spurs) and that was the end of my hopes for Pro football.
I am of the opposite opinion though on injuries in football at peewee levels. These kids rarely hit hard enough to break an egg and they have padding basically from the top of their heads to their toes. Plus if they stay in their weight class (My son moves up to 85lbs this coming season.) then you stay in the same group all the way through at the same skill level and mostly the same strength level. Which does change once they move into middle school.
The biggest hurdle I have had as a coach (I too have coached from peewee through college) is that as an older kid comes up they need to be retaught after coming up through bad coaching in peewee. That is the much larger issue because it is bad coaching that can setup a child for serious injuries. If you teach them and drill them enough on the proper way to play then it becomes second nature that they never forget.