New Jersey high school football teams could soon have the strictest player-on-player practice contact rules in the history of the sport.
The New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association, the governing board of the state's high school athletics, unanimously approved a proposal Wednesday that would reduce in-season full practice-field contact from 90 minutes per week to a maximum of 15 minutes per week.
Pre-season full contact, which is currently unlimited, would be reduced to 6 hours, and the existing ban on full contact in spring and summer would remain unchanged, according to a NJSIAA press release.
If the NJSIAA executive committee approves the guidelines again after a second read in April, the new rules will be enforced starting this summer.
The guidelines were introduced by the New Jersey Football Coaches Association and Practice Like Pros, an organization whose mission is to reduce injury in adolescent football.
The proposal follows a sharp decline in the number of New Jersey high school students enrolled in their schools' football programs over recent years. The New York Times reports that the state saw a 6.8 percent decrease in players from 2016 to 2017, and this decline is widely attributed to safety concerns. Only Colorado, Montana and Oklahoma lost players at a higher rate over that period.
Officials say the goal of the new rules is to increase safety in the sport and not to boost the number of players, but Kevin Carty Jr., a past president of the New Jersey Football Coaches Association's executive board, told the Times the move could boost participation.
"We're not doing this as a recruiting ploy," said Carty, who coaches football at Hillsborough High School in central New Jersey and who has already been following the new guidelines for a few seasons. "It's just we want to keep our kids safe and we want people to know this is happening. By making it a mandate statewide, it can ease the fears of a lot of parents that they won't have to investigate that their coach is doing it the right way."
Some coaches have expressed support for the new rules and believe players can still learn proper tackling techniques since they can practice tackling without actually taking players to the ground. Full-contact hitting involves a player taking another player to the ground, according to the NJSIAA, but players can still practice "thud" contact where they collide but don't go to the ground.
Still, some coaches like Mike McKeown, a coach in South Jersey, have voiced their disagreement.
"When will the lawsuits start for not teaching kids proper way to tackle," McKeown tweeted Wednesday.
"We expect kids to do something for three hours on Friday night but practice that for 15 minutes a week," he said in another post. "I am all for the rule changes to make the game that I love safer but if anyone [thinks] tackling a one man sled and "Thud" is the same thing, stop," he wrote.
Though New Jersey's guidelines would be the strictest, numerous other states have imposed new rules for their high school football programs over recent years. Seven states enforce a 60 minute limit on full-contact in practice each week, the New York Times reported.
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