Every year, stories dominate the sports headlines about how concussions have ended a player’s season, made someone quit the game, or even caused a player’s death. This year, the CHS football program has attempted to cut down on concussions through the implementation of rugby-style tackling. Cade Koenig, CHS football and rugby player and junior, has been one of the leaders in helping the football team get adjusted to the new methodology.

“[In] the old tackling method, the head was the main part. You wanted to use your head to hit somebody,” Koenig said, “[With the rugby tackle,] you want to use your momentum to take somebody down, like you wrap them up and put your head behind them and use your shoulders and arms to take them down.”

According to Steve Schofield, athletic trainer for the CHS football team, football is not a contact sport. Instead, it is a collision sport with an inherently violent nature, making it difficult to reduce concussions.

A Boston University research team found that the average high school football player takes 1,000 hits to the head every year. The average force of these hits is 20 g’s.

However, Schofield said concussions have a lot to do with angles, not just how hard someone gets hit. For this reason, the new rugby-style tackling aims to improve the angles where players make contact with each other.

“[Before now] the coaches would really try to teach us to put our facemask onto the ball and get our head in front of the person running the ball,” Koenig said. “It’s safer now because it takes the head out of the equation.”

Koenig has played rugby and football for nine and eight years, respectively. He has suffered three concussions in his lifetime. Two of these injuries occurred while playing football. He said that he has never suffered a concussion while using the rugby tackling method, and that it holds true across the board for rugby and football players.

“I’d say there are a lot of concussions for football players. There are a few [for rugby players], but not as many as football,” Koenig said.

While the aftermath of having several concussions is well documented for NFL players, a Boston University research team found that a dead 18-year-old high school football player’s brain actually had evidence of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE).

CTE is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in many former professional football players. Symptoms of this condition include memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and progressive dementia. This is the earliest evidence of CTE ever recorded, and just another in a growing list of reasons as to why participation in football is declining.

The rugby tackling initiative should help reduce hits to the head, according to John Hebert, CHS head football coach, but it’s the new mindset of the coaches and players that should help even more.

“The coaches aren’t only preaching rugby tackling, they are telling us not to use our head in general for any situation,” Koenig said.

It is that new mindset that may be most important, according to Schofield, because there is a difference between a broken leg and a damaged brain. A broken leg will heal he said, but you can never be too careful when dealing with the most complex organ in the body.

“They only have one brain for the rest of their lives,” Schofield said.