"Little Bobbleheads"

More than 3 million football players – none topping 5-feet– gather on spare high school football fields throughout Ohio on the weekends.  So far, they’re largely left out of the debate over sports and concussions. Some leagues start as young as 7 with boys in full pads and helmets learning tackling drills.

Those kids are the key focus of Cleveland Clinic researcher Adam Bartsch. "We can look at pictures of little kids and they almost look like Bobbleheads. A 50-pound child was wearing a helmet that weighed 4-pounds...and you could have a 300-pound NFL player that wears a helmet weighing 4-pounds."

Cleveland Clinic partners with NFL Charities 

A new federal study shows a 60 percent increase in kids going to hospitals with concussions over the past decade. That increase points in part to parents’ growing awareness that blows to the head are more than just 'getting your bell rung.' 

The NFL Charities has given the Clinic a $100,000 grant to study youth football concussions over two years. The goal is to develop better prevention and detection techniques – including a specially designed youth helmet. But, Bartsch acknowledges he’s run into limitations when it comes to studying young children early on. "We have issues where the children don’t even necessarily maybe understand what’s going on. And it’s a lot easier if they’re over 18 and they can consent themselves to be in the study. And ironically enough, we did not get permission from our Institutional Review Board to study them while they were tackling each other."

Coaches intervene

Bartch has to rely on coaches like John Prochaska for help. Prochaska runs the Great Lakes Youth Football League that consists of more than 1,000 kids. With Bartsch, he’s been learning to do baseline testing on all of his players --- a set of balance tests done before the start of the season. For a comparison, the tests are administered on the sideline after a big blow.

Prochaska is a firm believer in the testing, but says it’s also important that he makes sure his pee wee players learn the right way to tackle. "They’re like sponges when it comes to learning, at 7 years old these kids probably know 30-plus plays and they probably do 15 of ‘em highly efficient." But some of what they’re learning comes from TV, where hard hits are celebrated. And some of the rest they learn by doing, which sometimes leads to dangerous helmet-to-helmet collissions. 

A softer helmet?

For researcher Adam Bartsch, it’s not the hard hits he’s most concerned about for a developing brain. "Maybe over a given year you have a thousand hits to the head and maybe you have one or two or three of those sort of kill-shots, but you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these other sub-concussive impacts. You can make a small difference, potentially you can make a big impact. That’s where the helmet design comes in."

Part of the study is whether little kids heads need different helmets altogether, ones that might more closely resemble what players in the 1920's used. Bartch says instead of plastic helmets with stiff padding, a soft, leather helmet may better absorb all those thousands of smaller hits. "It’s kind of like on your car. You have your five-mile-an-hour bumper that’s intended to take all those little small hits, you know you hit the pole in the parking lot, the shopping cart hits, it actually bends a little bit, it deflects, there’s a little bit of energy absorption there. If your car was super rigid what might happen there is you might start bending your fender."


Using the best of what's out there for now 

Bartsch says development of a new helmet is years down the line. So for now, pee wee teams rely on the best of what’s out there. Dave Moeglin runs the Stark County parochial pee wee league and explains the inner workings of the helmets his uses. "These are all air-pockets that we can blow up or down, and you can see these are your air holes are up here so you can pump the air in and out and raise the levels up and down so it’s tight on the kids’ head. Moeglin also says his league inspects helmets for cracks, does compression tests and fits helmets to each child. He replaces about six helmets a year at about $100 apiece.

Is starting them at 7 too young? 

But Moeglin  says age  is even more important than helmets. He believes kids playing tackle football should be at least in the fourth grade. "They’re old enough at this point to start learning truly the fundamentals rather than just creating bad habits where you can’t teach them in second grade, they just don’t have the focus and they don’t have the desire to learn it. They’re just worried about what they see on TV and what the Browns are doing and those kinds of things."

Future of the study

Creating good habits and spotting problems early is the focus of the Cleveland Clinic’s study over the next year. Researcher Adam Bartsch says he has 3,000 kids on a waiting list for baseline balance testing and the Clinic is testing out an iPad app that coaches can use on the sidelines. Next year, he says he’ll begin simulating tackling in the lab to begin developing a new youth helmet. Next year, he says he’ll begin simulating tackling in the lab to begin developing a new youth helmet.