Study: Heads Up program isn't helping limit youth football concussions
USA Football’s campaign to reduce concussions in young football isn’t as effective as the statistics it originally cited.
The New York Times reported Wednesday USA Football, youth football’s national governing body, used preliminary numbers from a study that touted its Heads Up Football program reduced injuries by 76% and concussions by about 30%. But the study published in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine last July showed the program only had a marginal impact on overall injuries and no discernible effect on the number of concussions.
“USA Football stands behind the independent peer-reviewed results of Heads Up Football’s efficacy published in medical journals as well as other third-party case studies regarding the effectiveness of the program,” USA Football said in a statement. “We are reviewing the New York Times article and will release a statement today.”
Representatives of USA Football and the NFL told The New York Times they were not aware their claims about how effective the Heads Up Football initiative was not supported by the final data published by the Datalys Center for Sports Injury Research and Prevention. The Datalys Center received a $70,000 grant to conduct the study.
“USA Football erred in not conducting a more thorough review with Datalys to ensure that our data was up to date,” Scott Hallenbeck, the executive director of USA Football, said in an email to the newspaper. “We regret that error.”
USA Football receives millions in funding from the NFL, and the organization touted the initial statistics in a blog post from February 2015. In a subsequent blog post after the study was released, USA Football focused more on the Heads Up Football training when coupled with Pop Warner’s safety initiatives, which include limits on contact in practices that weren't part of the Heads Up Football program in the time period examined by the study.
USA Football has since set guidelines that call for 30 minutes or less of full-contact drills in practices. The guidelines went into effect in Feb. 2015; the study surveyed youth football players ages 5 through 15 during the 2014 youth football season.
Datalys told The New York Times it did not inform USA Football or the NFL that the published study contradicted the information it had provided originally.