Football coaches must manage GHSA practice rules

More than one former player has spoken the phrase “When I played football ...” as the preface to a story about how today’s high school athletes have it easier than in the past.

But as GHSA teams donned pads for the first time on Wednesday — including all seven local schools — they were working under new practice rules aimed at keeping players safer than in the past. Among other things, the new regulations eliminate three-a-day practices, ban two-a-day practices on back-to-back days and restrict the amount of time spent on the practice field in any single day.

Last year, two high school football players in Georgia — Forest Jones of Locust Grove and D.J. Searcy of Fitzgerald — suffered heat-related deaths on the same day, leading to mourning in each community. In the case of Searcy, it also may result in a lawsuit. According to a story from The Associated Press on Tuesday, his parents’ attorney has sent a letter on their behalf notifying the Ben Hill Board of Education of the intent to sue.

According to a recent study in the International Journal of Biometerology, the number of heat-related deaths for high school athletes have increased three-fold in the last 15 years, and Georgia’s six deaths during that timespan led the nation. While the GHSA’s new rules have drawn praise from groups across the country and put the association at the forefront in addressing prevention of heat-related injuries, not everyone is happy with every part of the policy.

For years, going off to camp has been part of the Dalton football tradition, with five days of hard-nosed football and drills designed to push the Catamounts to their limits and prepare the team for Friday nights. Dalton is maintaining its camp tradition — the Cats are at Tennessee’s Tusculum College this week — but the intensity will be a little different, coach Matt Land said.

“The purpose of the GHSA rule is to protect kids and no one is against that, but it is also managing to the lowest common denominator,” he said, speaking about schools who do not have year-round conditioning programs. “We have been going after it since January, and our kids are in great shape. It is a hard pill to swallow if you are a high-speed, high-condition team like we are.”

Dalton and Whitfield County schools begin the school year next week, so the number of days on the field in truly intensive practices are already limited. Because of the time restrictions put in place by the GHSA, that number is cut even further, leading coaches to question whether or not their players will be at a disadvantage against a school system like Murray County, which doesn’t start the academic year until September.

“Camp is supposed to be three-a-days,” said first-year Southeast Whitfield coach Sean Gray. “It is going to be an adjustment. You can only practice twice in a day, and then you have big restrictions on that. This week is going to be so cramped.”

Coahulla Creek coach Jared Hamlin agreed.

“I’m an old-school guy, so yeah there is a little adjustment there,” Hamlin said. “I’ve been through two-a-days and three-a-days as a player and as a coach, and it is beneficial. It helps physically, but sometimes I think it helps you more mentally than anything else. It helps you push through and keep giving your best when you think you have reached your limit.”

The likely result of the reduced time on the field is that there will be less coaching and more time devoted strictly to physical preparation. Another concern for Dalton is that the Cats will open the season a week before the rest of the area’s teams, playing on Aug. 24 in the first Ringgold home football game since tornadoes ripped through the area on April 27, 2011.

“We have taken all of the talking out of practice,” Land said. “We will be full drills, full speed, full work the entire time we are on the field. We won’t have a lot of talking and teaching and walking through. That will be in the classrooms. That is what has changed. We paced our practices out in the past and went through a lot of teaching, and now it will be drill to drill to drill.”

In past camps, Land said the Cats would spend as long as eight hours on the field, with four two-hour sessions spaced throughout the day. Now, with the new GHSA guidelines, teams can spend no more than five hours on the field in a single day, and if a team hits that number, it can only practice three hours the following day. Where Dalton once would have 16 hours on the field in two days, now the maximum hours of practice time is cut in half.

“While the rules spelled out a lot of what you can do, it still leaves some holes,” Land said. “The first thing we will do is focus a lot more of our time in mental preparation. We are going to take advantage of walk throughs and do a lot of classroom work. They even consider working out as a practice. We understand there are some things that we can’t do, and it will affect the way we prepare a lot.”

Land said he believes the policies will be tinkered with after this school year, finding a better balance between safety and preparedness.

“What I would rather see is that you can’t have more than X practices before your first game,” he said. “Instead of limiting the number of practices, give me a number of hours with breaks. I see managing more from a total practice time, but somewhere the GHSA and local systems are going to have to communicate. You shouldn’t be punished for going to school earlier than other systems.”

Even though Murray County doesn’t start its school year for nearly another month, Indians coach John Hammond said the new rules wouldn’t affect his schedule much.

“For us, it really is such a long time before we get back into school, so we are just going to be slow and steady and go three hours every day and let the kids enjoy the rest of their summer,” he said. “We are working hard, but we aren’t having to try to cram as many practices as we can in before school starts like some schools have to do.”

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Football coaches must manage GHSA practice rules

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