Mind of McCabe: Flag football may be the future, but that doesn’t mean the death of tackle football

Sometimes I feel like an old man trapped in a young man’s body. I’m very resistant when people try to change the things I like, but at some point in time you need to adjust your line of thinking.

Flag football seems like the new hot button word in our neck of the woods, and while I’m still young, I come from the last generation of players who started playing before concussions dominated the sport. To me, choosing to play flag football over tackle when I first signed up would’ve been blasphemy. Sure it was fun to play at school, but I wanted to get the full experience and hit some live bodies.

In a short amount of time however, that line of thinking has taken a 180. Flag football numbers have been soaring across the continent for the last five years, while tackle numbers have been stagnant at best. If you’re a purest, flag football eliminates the key ingredient that makes the game so enjoyable, but the older I get the crazier I think it is to have 6-12 year old kids lining up to smash heads. I’m not the first to suggest it, but count me among the many who believe that flag football leagues are the future for kids to get accustomed to the game, and most importantly focus on the fundamentals.

That football purest outlook I’ve come to realize is severely short sighted, and comes from that fear of change I talked about before. I hear a lot of people say the NFL and CFL will eventually just be professional flag leagues, but I truly can’t see that happening. It’s not that kids don’t want to play tackle – plenty of them do – but rather it’s their wiser parents with a fully developed brain that realize the risks involved. People love contact it’s human nature, and I still believe when a kid hits the age of 13 he’ll want to try out tackle, but the key will be the knowledge he has at his disposal once he gets there.

Flag football is often seen as anti-concussion and anti-tackling, but I think that tackling still needs to be one of the main coaching emphasis in flag leagues. Instead of looking at the two as separate sports at the youth level, they need to be treated as equals and used in unison to create a brighter future.

I can see a future where you have the Hamilton Jr. Tiger-Cats and Burlington Stampeders square off in a flag football match. Same coaching level as their tackle counterparts, same logos, same uniforms, same organization – but from 12 and under it’s only flag. Every day at practice you’d be dragging out the bags and crash mats to work on proper tackling technique, and every day you’d be hammering home the importance of taking the head out of the equation. Obviously this will be boring for a lot of kids who are ready to hit somebody for real, but at some point we must protect the youth from themselves. The reassurance that once they’re old enough they can put all this knowledge to use should be a good enough incentive to stick with the game, and there is so much more to learn when you’re first starting out that this may result in more versatile players in the long run.

Sometimes there is survival of the fittest mentality at the youth level where everyone is growing at different rates, but if we could delay that process a little bit to allow the playing field to level out, I feel like it would make the game more appealing to players who love the sport, but just haven’t had a chance to grow like some of the other kids. On the flip side, it’ll also force a player who is more physically mature to rely on his skills rather than his size to make plays, which will only make him a better player when tackling enters the game.

While some will argue flag football and tackle football are two different sports, you still need to throw the ball, catch the ball, make cuts, read coverages, take proper angles etc. And if you eliminate tackling at the youngest age divisions, this is going to allow players to focus more on the skills listed above rather than wondering if they are going to get blindsided across the middle of the field. Make no mistake, injuries will happen and unfortunately concussions will also happen, but the likelihood of the latter will be greatly reduced, which I think everyone agrees would be a huge step forward.

As guy who never went anywhere in football and had to quit prematurely because of head injuries, I can tell you it’s not the tackling drills that I remember. Of course those were fun provided you were on the proper end of the collision, but it’s the life lessons you learn while playing on a team that really stick with you once you’ve left the game behind. These values are the same whether it’s flag or tackle football, and I think those values are the most important asset of the game.

Eliminating tackling among youths does sound drastic on the surface, but if you take a look at the most popular sport in our country – hockey – it’s done just fine with a regimented system that slowly introduces kids to contact. Why can’t football do the same?