- Most people think it's just the game.

It's not the game, it's the lessons.

It's the things that correlate directly to life that sports can provide, and football in particular because it is so team dependent.

You know, all 11 guys on the field depend on each other.

Things just don't go right if the other 10 aren't doing their job.

(whistle blowing) (people clapping) (Dorian cooing) - Down, set, hut.

(baby laughing) Since Dorian was born, I've always had football around him at some point, whether it's us watching, you know, college football together, he's always had a football jersey uniform always put in.

We watched games together even, you know, me just holding on to him in front of the TV watching football.

Look.

(Dorian mumbling) Who's that?

(onlooker chuckling) That's that Tom Brady, huh?

When Tampa Bay won the Super Bowl, you know, there's pictures of me tossing him in the air because we had a really cool father-son moment together.

We watched, you know, Tom Brady win the Super Bowl for Tampa Bay.

His favorite football player's Tom Brady.

As he got older, he wanted to, you know, get the helmet.

He's got the helmet now, and he just wants to run around and play.

(Dorian chuckling) But to be honest, up until this point, I just always romanticized about Dorian playing football.

But now that he's getting to the age that he's actually gonna start playing, that all changes for me now.

Now I really have to start thinking about should he participate in a sport that we really both love and whether the health risks are just too high?

- [Announcer] Now another Bills player is down.

- [Parent] All the statistics about head injuries, the Damar Hamlin injury, I mean, it all really gives me pause.

So to help me make that decision, I talk to coaches, youth football officials, athletic trainers, and doctors to help me make an educated decision.

- Why should you let your kid play football?

It's pretty simple.

Hard work, discipline, accountability, commitment, learning what competition is, how to compete, learning what team is, how to rely on people, how to be relied on.

The list is so long that, you know, it would take all day.

- [Parent] But for all the pluses also comes the minuses.

Injuries.

- Preparing your kid to play football is like preparing to be a gladiator warrior, right?

Like, you never know what the competition's gonna bring.

You can only provide them with the utility of like the pads and the helmet and the understanding and the know-how, the coaching, and all those things that go into it, right?

There's only so much you can do as a parent.

It's spread of age group.

Somewhere between like, you know, 5 and 18.

There's gonna be a big like, range of the type of injuries that you can see.

On the little kid side of things, as they're getting into Pop Warner, all that, you don't tend to see the kind of dislocation or instability event kind of injuries.

You tend to see more like they broke their ankle, broke their arm, that kind of stuff.

So a lot of times, you'll come in, it'd be no different than if they were, you know, riding on a skateboard or playing at a trampoline park.

As you get kind of closer into that like middle school kind of range or junior high as we call it now, you start getting into where they can actually start having those instability events.

Now, when I'm talking about instability, I mean that could be things like tearing your anterior cruciate ligament, like your ACL, dislocating a kneecap, popping your ankle out of place, definitely popping a shoulder in and out place, and so you can start to see a lot of those.

- [Parent] What about everybody's football boogeyman, concussions?

I know there's a lot of risks in football.

What's really important is to understand how they happen and what to look for and what to do if your kid suffers a concussion.

- So really simply, a concussion is a mild traumatic brain injury that results from a hit to the head, neck, or body, and those forces transmit up to the brain and results in or initiate a neurotransmitter and metabolic cascade.

That's a really kind of science-y way of saying, and when I talk to parents, I usually say it's a hit to the head, neck, or body, so you have to have some sort of mechanism, and then it's distinguishing if the patient or the athlete just feels abnormal.

You don't necessarily have to understand all the signs and symptoms associated with a concussion, but if they seem abnormal, if they're saying things that make them seem like they, you know, have a headache, they're feeling dizzy, nauseous, feeling enough fog, or if they just feel abnormal in any way, take them to a healthcare provider and certainly remove them from play.

- Life for a kid has its risks, and concussions are one of them.

In football where we do everything we can to work against that possibility, it is often less likely.

It certainly wasn't my Pop Warner experience than it was in football.

- It's changed for the better.

The game is safer now than it's ever been.

- [Parent] That's Joe Heinz, commissioner of the San Diego section of the CIS or California Interscholastic Sports, the governing body of high school sports here in California.

- We had two days, you know, all fall.

We wore gear every single day at practice.

We hit just about every single day at practice and that contact's been brought way down and it's for the right reasons.

They really don't even... You know, maybe one day a week teams will practice in full gear.

- Like you said, it was the Wild West.

Coaches basically could do as much as they could handle.

I remember, not here, but someplace else where we did two a daya every day and Monday was a three a day because after dinner, we had a special teams practice and just going, going, going, going, because it wasn't regulated.

- That contact's brought been brought way down and it's for the right reasons.

They really don't even... You know, maybe one day a week teams will practice in full gear.

So it's definitely, they've realized that you don't need that contact every day.

You just need to, again, stay sharp, but it's not an essential part of the game anymore.

- Ready and go.

- We limit, in particular in tackle football, the amount of contact they can have per week.

I believe it's something like 20 minutes and one would think in two hour, two and a half hour practices that they'd be hitting.

It doesn't work like that.

Separate in the same groups.

Let's go.

About the most contact they make in our practices are the tackling drills.

And in our particular program, we work on those drills every single practice.

It's just the greatest opportunity for something to go wrong, so it's where we spend a considerable amount of time teaching them, training them, creating that muscle memory so that they do things right.

- We've gotta make sure we're same foot, same shoulder, hit with the head up and drive through it.

Okay?

Just don't run through it.

Here we go.

- Head up, head up.

- [Coach] Nice job.

- You should be able to look through the person.

You're driving 'em backwards.

(pad rustling) - [Coach] Nice job, Jacob.

- I'm a parent and I'm watching this, at any level, especially when they're attacking.

- Sure.

- What am I looking for as a parent if I see something wrong?

Okay, maybe I need... (whistle blowing) - The worst thing you could see is your son or daughter's head down, the top of their head, the crown of their head or helmet pointing in any direction other than up.

- This is the form that coaches are being trained to teach now.

- Like I said, there are slightly different variations of it.

Most of them are all around the idea of heads up.

- [Parent] Right.

- Heads up tackling, heads up football.

We use the Seahawk method, the Hawk tackling method where again, if you're approaching a defender, you want your near foot and near shoulder to make the initial contact.

You'll notice my head is off to the side as I make the tackle.

I'm not trying to dart through you, I'm not trying to shield you from getting away with my head or neck.

I'm trying to use one side of my body to make that initial contact.

I wrap and I'm gonna drive through with my head off to the side.

- Dorian.

(people cheering) - [Parent] Even after everything I learned, the question still stands, will I let Dorian play football?

That's totally up to him.

As long as he still wants to lace 'em up and as long as he's having fun, that's what he's gonna do.

(lively music ending)