Game’s Critics Are Not Amused : Peewee Football: Is It Time to Blow Whistle?

The Raiders have just thrashed their way through another strange outing on the football field and now gather at half time in their black and silver uniforms to determine what has gone wrong. One of the most pressing concerns for the coaching staff is why, on a play called “sweep left” in the second quarter, nearly half of the team ran to the right.

“OK,” a coach says to his players, who are still wearing their helmets with the distinctive Raider-with-eye-patch logo. “Which hand is your left hand?”

More than a dozen of the players raise their right hands.

Welcome to peewee football.

“We should make them all wear wristwatches,” said John Granillo of Canoga Park, one of the coaches of the Woodland Hills Raiders, a team of 7- and 8-year-olds getting their first experience in tackle football.

Directional missteps aren’t the only problems. Often, the young players don’t know whether they are playing offense or defense.

‘He’ll Just Guess’

“When I see a kid confused, I’ll go out and ask him, ‘Are you playing offense or defense?’ ” Granillo said. “And most of the time, he’ll just guess. He’ll say, ‘Offense?’ He figures he’s got a 50-50 chance of being right.”

After a pileup on the field during a recent game in Sylmar, one of the Raiders raced to the sideline and tearfully complained, “Coach, that kid ran right into me.”

Of course he did, this is football, the coach said.

“Well,” the young boy fired back, “someone should tell him to cut it out.”

Conversations like that take place regularly in Southern California, where thousands of kids play youth football. Nationwide it is estimated that 250,000 kids play organized, tackle football below the junior high school level.

“There are some pretty funny things that go on out there,” Granillo said.

Some critics are not amused.

One is Thomas Tutko, a psychologist and professor at San Jose State University who has done research on the effects of sports on youth. He is the co-author of a book entitled, “Winning Is Everything and Other American Myths.”

“I am strongly opposed to young kids playing tackle football,” Tutko said. “It is simply contrary to the nature of young kids. It is not the right stage of development for them to be taught to crash into each other. Kids under the age of 14 are not by nature physical. Their main concern is self-preservation. They don’t want to meet head-on, to slam into each other.

‘Too Traumatic for Kids’

“But tackle football absolutely requires that they try to hit each other as hard as they can. And it is too traumatic for young kids.”

The trauma can be seen regularly on the faces of the youngest players. They often look scared and often cry when they get hit.

“It happens all the time,” said Ada Munoz, whose son Raymond, 8, plays for the Woodland Hills Raiders and is coached by her husband Daniel Munoz. “The kids get so scared. They get hit once and they don’t want anything to do with football anymore. They’ll sit on the bench and pretend their leg hurts so they won’t have to go back in.”

Fred Mueller, a spokesman for the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research in North Carolina, said terrible injuries are almost unheard of in youth football. There have been only one or two permanent or life-threatening injuries in the last seven years, he said.

“My personal belief is that kids below the high school level, and especially at the youngest age levels of tackle football, just don’t hit hard enough or run fast enough to cause any real serious injuries,” Mueller said. “From a physical safety standpoint, there’s no reason young kids shouldn’t play football.”

Tutko, the psychologist, said the most painful injuries are not always of the broken-bone variety. They are emotional. And, Tutko, said the problem is that coaches of youth football are not youths.

“Coaches are adults. They think as adults,” Tutko said. “The statistics say there are few serious injuries in youth football, but that’s by adult standards. There are a lot of what we call minor injuries, but they are not at all minor to the kids. A sprained ankle or a sprained wrist can be very traumatic to a 7-year-old.

“That trauma can interfere later with their outlook on other sports, on all sports. Trauma in sports as a child can turn a kid off to sports entirely. He may be turned off forever.”

A more serious problem, Tutko said, is parents who force a young child to play tackle football despite indications that he does not want to.

“That becomes super-traumatic,” he said. “That can really, really hurt a kid.”

Dr. Casey Clark, executive assistant director of the U.S. Olympic Committee and a specialist in sports-injury research for 25 years, confirmed that, medically, youth football is not very dangerous. But he agreed that the real damage can be hard to detect.

“I am favorable on a physical-risk basis,” Clark said. “As they get older, the risk factor goes up. If you get creamed by a 10-year-old, you get pushed backwards onto your rear end. If you get creamed by a 21-year-old, you can get devastated.

“But the key question is not about injury, it’s about the educational value of tackle football for young kids. Not everyone benefits from football at the age of 7 or 8. A parent has to analyze it closely. If a kid really wants to play, he’ll let you know. He’ll keep bringing it up and talking about it and driving you crazy. But if they show little interest or no interest in tackle football, don’t push it. Let it go.”

The coaches frequently see examples of youngsters whose hearts are not into tackle football. Some coaches say most of the younger players fall into that category.

“We see it all the time,” said Granillo of the Woodland Hills Raiders. “Kids are afraid to get hit. They all hold back. They slow down just before there’s contact. There are a few kids who are gung-ho, kids who bowl everyone over, but they are definitely the exception. Those are the kids who grow up to be linebackers.”

Another drawback to youth football--a dark side that has emerged in all sports in recent years--are the emotions that the game creates among the adults. To watch and listen to some coaches and parents while children romp around somewhat aimlessly on the field can be a frightening experience.

Parents Get in Fight

Not long ago, a brawl broke out among parents on the field following a game in Granada Hills between teams of 15-year-olds.

Game officials said nearly 75 people engaged in the Oct. 8 fight. One player, Cornelius Gray, was taken to a hospital with injuries sustained when he was hit in the back. The fight began, according to Gray, when a parent whose son played for the Sun Valley Falcons confronted a player from the Northridge Knights on the field as the game ended.

A spokeswoman for the Knights said the team will consider hiring security guards for future games.

“I hate to put out the money for it, but we may have to,” she told a reporter. “These are children. This is for fun.”

At a game last month among 7- and 8-year-olds, a defender allowed the ball carrier to get past him for a long gain. In an instant a coach’s face was bright red, and he confronted the child. “Kevin, next time you make that tackle,” he bellowed.

The players are assigned to teams based on their age and weight. The youngest players, aged 7 and 8, cannot weigh more than 90 pounds. They are weighed before each game. If they weigh more than 90 pounds, they must play in the next division, against older youths.

Two years ago, an attorney who was the coach of a team of 10- and 11-year-olds in Chatsworth was suspended from the league after he gave diuretics to five children on his team. The over-the-counter diuretic, which promotes the excretion of salts and water from the kidneys, is commonly used as a weight-loss drug by adults. He said he gave the players the pills to help them make the division’s 115-pound weight limit.

Physical and verbal beatings can push some children to extremes. In a game this year in San Fernando a reporter watched as a player ran to the sideline, removing himself from the battle. “Coach, my tummy hurts. I can’t play,” he said. The coach told the player to get back onto the field. “There’s nothing wrong with your stomach,” he said.

When the coach turned his head, the 7-year-old stuck a finger down his throat and made himself vomit. When the coached turned back, the boy pointed to the ground and told him, “Yes there is, coach. See?”

Why is youth football so popular?

“The good side of football, like all sports, is that kids learn to play with teams,” Tutko said. “They learn a cooperative effort, being one of several people working toward one ultimate goal. And the social aspect of just being with their friends and measuring themselves against other kids, well, that’s life. They might as well start learning about it when they’re young.”

But he thinks that football may be the worst sport to be used as a teaching forum.

“My point is that they can learn all about the cooperative effort in other sports, in non-contact sports like baseball,” he said. “Later, they can apply what they’ve learned in non-contact sports towards football, if that’s what they want to do. There’s plenty of time for football as teen-agers.”

For many parents, however, there is no time like the present.

“Sure, he gets scared sometimes out there,” said Ben Luther of San Fernando, whose 8-year-old son Edward is in his first season of tackle football.

“But mostly he talks about how much fun it is. Life’s full of scary moments. But overall, it’s fun. Football is the same thing to most of these kids. There’s good parts and bad parts, like anything else.”

Requires Teamwork

Luther said he has seen his son become involved in something that requires teamwork.

“I was actually pretty surprised that he would do that,” Luther said. “It took a few days of practice and even a few real games, but he finally understood that in football you can’t do anything on your own. It’s great to watch him cooperating with the other kids, all of them working together to move the football or stop the other team.”

Sometimes it does not seem to matter whether the kids know what task they are trying to accomplish.

“As confusing as it can get out there,” Luther said, “they still have fun. As long as they’re having fun, as long as they don’t feel like someone has forced them to do this, then I think football can be a great game. Even for kids.”

Most Take It Seriously

The vast majority of 18 coaches a reporter observed pacing the sidelines at youth football games in Los Angeles during the last several weeks appeared to take it terribly seriously.

An exception was Daniel Munoz, one of the coaches of the Woodland Hills Raiders for the last two years. He was always ready with a hug or soft words for his distraught young players.

“You have to keep it in perspective,” Munoz said. “I see most of the coaches yelling and screaming and jumping up and down, and I sometimes can’t believe it. A lot of coaches have lost all perspective. That’s not my approach at all. You’ve got to make it fun for them, and young boys don’t think anything is fun if someone is yelling at them. Some coaches, even with the 7-year-olds, worry about winning and losing.”

Munoz said the lessons learned in youth football are valuable lessons.

“Football, more than baseball or soccer or basketball, requires discipline,” he said. “Parents tell us all the time that they see a difference in their kids after a few months of football. Football requires a lot of practice and a lot of discipline, but the kids keep coming back every week, every practice. And young kids simply do not keep coming back to something unless they really like it.”