Youngsters throughout central New Jersey strapped on their shoulder pads and dug in their cleats earlier this month to gear up for the start of football season.
But the size and shape of the youthfootball landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, with new competition among rival programs and a player pool that has diminished due to increased attention to the risks of the contact sport.
Despite the issues, Central Jersey Pop Warner President Jim Simmons said the focus of his league is simple: for the players to enjoy the sport and learn life lessons in the process. “Really, the focus overall for the kids is to have fun,” he said. “Their chances of getting into the pros is real slim, so working them to death isn’t the answer.
“There are other aspects we work on too, and it is with the kids themselves,” he added. “[We want them] to come out of Pop Warner remembering positive experiences and just coming out as good people overall.”
A new season is underway for youth football and cheerleading in central New Jersey. Simmons said one of the ways the Central Jersey league is trying to convey its message is through an Aug. 29 meeting for parents and coaches, with special speakers including Pop Warner Executive Director Jon Butler and former Rutgers University football player Eric LeGrand. He said the league delivers a message to coaches on the life lessons they will be teaching players.
“Our message to them in this meeting is [about] their involvement with the upbringing of these kids and how important it is for them to not concentrate just on football and cheer, but to concentrate on building selfesteem and develop them into good young men and women,” Simmons said.
For Central Jersey players, Aug. 1 was circled on the calendar — the official date to begin a regulated practice regimen. “Everybody knows it is Aug. 1 that they start; they have to do 10 hours of conditioning without pads and then 10 hours of pads,” Simmons said. “They have two weeks of conditioning that they go through and they start in with scrimmages, and then next Saturday [Aug. 24] is our first game.”
According to Simmons, players are allowed a maximum of 10 hours of practice per week before school starts, and six hours per week during the school year. The practice time varies based on age.
Pop Warner was founded in 1929, and according to the national Pop Warner website, an estimated 400,000 football players and cheerleaders between the ages of 5 and 16 participate in Pop Warner. According to Simmons, approximately 6,000 players participate in the Central Jersey league, with teams from North Brunswick, New Brunswick, Edison, Monroe, Allentown and Millstone.
Pop Warner was the only game in town until 1996, when American Youth Football (AYF) was founded to compete.
While Simmons said Central Jersey Pop Warner hasn’t lost any teams to AYF, the Jersey Shore version of Pop Warner wasn’t as fortunate.
The St. Bart’s Buffalos, based in East Brunswick, have been part of the AYF for the last two seasons, along with 39 other teams from Barnegat to Kenilworth that splintered from Pop Warner to join the new league.
The wide-scale break with Pop Warner left the New Jersey Shore Pop Warner Conference with just eight teams. The remaining Pop Warner teams are based in Asbury Park, Manasquan, Hazlet, Howell, Freehold, Point Pleasant, Tinton Falls and Rumson.
Marcus Blackmon, president of the Pop Warner conference, said Pop Warner has survived, despite having fewer teams.
“We operate under the same guidelines — we haven’t had to change the operations at all,” he said. “The only thing we’ve had to change is the size of the actual organization itself.”
According to Jim Wendell, president of the St. Bart’s Buffalos AYF team, who is a former St. Bart’s player and coach, the decision for St. Bart’s was based on maintaining a certain comfort level.
“We kind of made that decision as an organization, based on the fact that we would continue to play the same teams that we had always played,” he said. “Primarily nothing would change for us.
“We looked at staying in Pop Warner, but they couldn’t guarantee us where we would play, who we would play, anything like that,” he added.
Another issue coaches and players deal with is the increased focus on preventing and treating concussions.
“A lot of it comes from tackling improperly,” Wendell said. “We have tackle-safe clinics for kids and things like that. If you teach them to tackle properly, the risk of concussion diminishes greatly, because they are not leading with their heads.”
While there are now two leagues, the concussion issue is universal. Wendell said poor habits in the professional ranks have made this more of a problem.
“It bothers the hell out of me when I watch pro games or high-end college games how these athletes are out there primarily just launching their bodies into another guy,” he said. “When I started playing, you tackled with your shoulders and your arms. You never led with your head — you’d be penalized, and I honestly blame a lot of it on the NFL.”
Blackmon, who has been with Pop Warner for 17 years, said all coaches take a concussion clinic each year and are certified in CPR.
The AYF has purchased concussion-safe helmets for the approximately 300 players, and coaches take a concussion awareness course, Wendell said. Players 10 and older are eligible for a baseline concussion test before each season.
Both competing leagues start players in flag football at age 5 and move the children through the ranks based on weight class and age until eighth grade.
One difference with the AYF league is its eighth-grade unlimited-weight division. Pop Warner sets weight limitations.
However, some potential youth-football players are being steered away from football to focus on other sports.
“I think it has declined, only because there are so many other opportunities for kids,” Wendell said. “Kids tend to specialize a lot more these days. They did not do that 20, 30 years ago. Kids would play three different sports; now they tend to specialize a lot more.”
Simmons, who has been involved in the Central Jersey Pop Warner league since 1996, said participation has dwindled since he began.
“In all of youth football it is decreased,” he said. “There are different variables with that. There are a lot of things for kids to do. There is fall baseball, lacrosse is big now, plus sitting down in front of the TV is a lot easier [than] going out there on the football field.”
According to Blackmon, another factor keeping potential players away from football is collegiate basketball.
“When you’re a basketball player, you don’t get them for football anymore,” he added. “The risk of injury is higher in football, so they are being geared toward the noncontact sports.”
While there are fewer teams, anyone can start a Pop Warner program in a given town, Blackmon said. He said he believes that Pop Warner, being a national organization, has more oversight than AYF.
“Pop Warner has been in existence for so long, and we’ve been dedicated for so long, and we like the rules of Pop Warner,” he said. “You always have that oversight, and you need that.”
Mindy Doyle, leader of the Howell Rebels cheerleading program, said AYF offers more in the form of camps, clinics and all-star games, as opposed to Pop Warner.
Howell is one of few towns in the area with both AYF and Pop Warner programs, and Doyle has been involved in both.
“Cheerleading has grown,” she said. “We’ve always had a lot of girls, but our numbers continue to grow.”
The Rebels begin practicing in the summer.
“For the fall season, we practice four nights a week in the summer, and once school starts we practice three days a week,” she said. “We have two competitions up here — we have a local, which is October, then we have our region, which is with everybody in our region, in November. Nationals is down in Florida in December.”
According to Doyle, there are six teams in the program between ages 5 and 14 and a team for cheerleaders with special needs. Competition starts at age 6.
The Howell Rebels program continues to grow because of the commitment of both the football players and cheerleaders.
“We are a very lucky organization because we don’t have the challenges or the commitment problems,” she said.