Quote:
Originally Posted by bigjohn
No idea what you mean by that, Robert. Sounds like bs excuse to me though
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For a full appreciation you'd have to look it up at dumcoach.com , which specializes in youth football. But here's my explanation:
The Hosea method (and he's not the only one promoting it, but I'll use his name became the video has gotten around a lot) has the tackler approach the tacklee face on, and protects the head only by getting enough neck dorsiflexion and lack of forward flexion of the hips that the contact is made with the chest and the heads don't make contact. I have no doubt that works if you do it perfectly and it's done between close-to-evenly matched players.
However, a great many of us don't coach under such conditions. We often have kids who are a considerable mismatch in size or at least height with whomever they're tackling, and we have less practice time than schools do. When you're about to crash head-on into someone, if your head is up, you're leading with your chin, and your impulse is not to bend back further, but to tuck your head in, putting your neck into flexion and often a sideways twist as well, increasing the danger of head & neck injury. It would take a
lot of practice to coach away that natural impulse. Plus, if you're trying to tackle someone taller than yourself who is also, as kids tend to do, running erect, even if you bend back, his chest is going to hit your head anyway.
Therefore I, and most other, youth coaches teach tackling in a way that doesn't put the head in the middle of the action to begin with. Instead of tackling straight on, we use a shoulder, putting it into the opponent's chest, hip, or leg. The head goes
past the opponent.