School sports have become more popular since Spokane Public Schools began its emphasis on "Engaging in Real Life" last year.
Turnout has increased in a variety of sports, from volleyball to track and field.
I asked Stephanie Splater, the district's executive director of athletics and after school programs, about which sports are becoming less popular. I thought she’d mention football, which many parents are telling their kids they can’t play because of the risk of traumatic head injuries.
Not so. In fact, she says, football turnout numbers are increasing.
"We invested in safety. So we do a helmet reconditioning program. We make sure our helmets are not good enough, they're the best," she said.
"At the high school level, we've committed to that for a long time. We have extensive concussion and sudden cardiac training. We have head coaches, head football coaches, who are trainers for concussion protocols."
Splater says SPS has taken a page from the playbook of the Seattle Seahawks, "where new age tackling became a thing, we've adopted that as part of our school cultures as well."
These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Doug Nadvornick: Can you explain what new age tackling is?
Stephanie Splater: Less head-to-head, more safe tackling that doesn't involve the violent, what everyone thinks football is about, to reduce concussions, to reduce all of the things that people fear in football. Clearly it's a high-risk activity and there's going to be that risk, but having coaches and having kids who know what they're doing is really important.
And that's why we took a big leap last year and brought on middle school football. We've never had middle school tackle football. It was almost unheard of to bring on a football program at this point in time, and we decided our kids need it, our varsity and high school age kids need it. They need to be prepared. They need to be working out more and healthier, and they need to be learning the skills at the developmental level.
So we piloted it last year with four of our schools from Rogers and North Central feeders [schools], and we're bringing on all of our schools this year. So we're increasing in football. We know there's going to be injuries. We know there's going to be situations, but if we invest in great equipment, great training for our coaches, and giving kids the opportunities to grow in their development, we think we can be successful in a program that kids want to be a part of right now.
Football has grown to the point where over 500 kids play it in high school. Last year in our pilot middle school, we had 120. So it's growing. We can't wait to see the numbers for this year. And I love to mention right now our Rogers football team is our most successful team, and last year was the first year we allocated an additional coach to their staff because they had so many kids. They had 160.
DN: The head football coach at Rogers is Ryan Cole.
Ryan Cole: The game has come a long way, even from the time I was a kid. When I was a kid, you know, in the early 2000s, we were taught, you know, put your head on the football, put your head across the body, put your face mask in their sternum. And that's a dangerous way of playing the game. And I experienced that as a kid.
But we've evolved so much in taking the head out of the game. A lot of inspiration is from rugby. That's how football is kind of going these days and keeping the head out of the game, using your shoulder to strike. And then there's a strike zone. Right? So where do we hit guys to keep the opponent safe as well? So teams aren't just wheeling and dealing on each other and hurting each other.
So it's come a long way, but I understand where parents are coming from. But we do a good job of minimizing risk. A lot of it is the practice planning and making sure that you're not overdoing drills that involve high-speed contact collision at bigger distances. To be smart about it, you condense the area that kids play in. You cut the amount of reps that they do. You rotate them appropriately, and you give them breaks in between.
RC: We've been working really hard at establishing good TC, team culture. And it starts with working with the players individually and then as a team collectively. During the summer and during the fall season, we're meeting with our kids in the classroom. We give them team notebooks that they write in, and we cover all kinds of topics. We cover leadership, character, humility, integrity, teamwork, all of it. I mean, we cover it all, and we get them involved in it.
A lot of our kids here at Rogers might not come from a household or an environment that supports a lot of the things that young men need to thrive and be successful. And so, as a coaching staff, we work really hard to provide that for kids, not that they're a replacement of their parents, but we can just be an extension of that learning. It's been translating really well. You can see it in the kids when you're out there watching.
Here in Spokane, the Little League scene where kids are playing from fourth grade up before they get to high school isn't as prominent as it is on the west side. I grew up in Tacoma, and everybody played football growing up as little kids. I mean, one of my best friends in the world is a basketball junkie. He doesn't even like football. And yet he did it as a kid because that's what everybody did. And here, when I got over here, it's like, man, where are all these Little Leagues? They exist, but it's not as profound here. There's not much of a community backing behind kids playing at a young age. And so oftentimes it's us trying to entice kids that haven't played the game before. And football is a hard sport to play. So it's like if you're not used to that work ethic, it's a shock when you get into it.
DN: So, it's cool again to be playing football at Rogers High School, which has had kind of an up-and-down tradition over the years.
RC: More downs than ups. But we're up. We've been up for a couple years now.
DN: My assumption going into the discussion about football was that tackle football would be becoming less popular and that perhaps flag football, where players are downed by pulling a flag on their belt, might be increasing in popularity. So I asked Stephanie Splater about that.
SS: Flag football has a lot of energy within the girls' flag football setting. We have tried to figure out where would we do it because here in Spokane with a really different weather climate than Seattle, they can put it in the winter, they can put it in the early spring. We don't have those options. So when we have interest in girls wanting to play flag football, we'll meet that interest and we'll expand. Right now it's a mild interest. We do some singular events at schools. Our middle school has done flag football for a few years, eight years or so. But in general, in our area, it hasn't been as popular.
What we have seen, though, is our community partnerships. Quite a few, the SYSA [Spokane Youth Sports Association], the parks, offer flag football, and so we look to partner with them to connect kids to those opportunities. And so for now, flag football isn't something that we do at the high school level, but it's on our radar.
