USA Football seeks to grow the sport
By Mike Scandura,
Special to AmericanYouthFootball.com
Check Webster's Dictionary for the meaning of
galvanize and here's what you'll find: To stimulate by words or deeds.
That's exactly what USA
Football Executive Director Dave Ogrean has in mind when discussing
the future of this organization, which was created in December and
will be endowed by the NFL
Youth Football Fund, and was created by the NFL and
the
NFLPA. But as far as Ogrean's concerned, USA
Football will stimulate the growth of youth football through words AND
deeds - which will benefit groups like American Youth Football.
"If you compare football with other youth sports
organizations, in the USA it's more fragmented,"
says Ogrean, who's served as a marketing and broadcasting executive
with the U.S. Olympic Committee and
the College Football Foundation, and who was USA
hockey's executive director from 1993-99. "Most youth hockey programs
are under the USA Hockey umbrella. If you play
soccer, it's under U.S. Youth Soccer or
AYSO.
"In football, which is very well organized at
the high school, college and professional level, it's below the
mid-teen level where there's so many groups running programs."
That's one way of saying all these groups aren't
always on the same page when it comes to doing what's best for their
respective organizations.
"Most of these groups are doing a fine job, and
it's not to say a program has to be a part of a national apparatus to
be a success," says Ogrean. "But my experience in other sports has
demonstrated the value of having an organization to represent the
interest of football at a national level."
When USA Football was formed,
its stated goals included the promotions, setting league standards,
communication, grant-making, education and training. In generic terms,
that's nice. But what about specifics?
"One very apparent possibility is for
USA Football to help control costs of participation, and to
create a two-million (player) insurance pool that'll guarantee lower
rates," says Ogrean. "Another possibility is to get corporate
sponsorship with substantial amounts passed down to stakeholder
organizations.
"This would give organizations the clout that a
national sponsor can give."
The value of this strikes to the very heart of
something which concerns youth football. Or, how do you spell
affordability and liability?
"If there are pieces of equipment that are
getting too expensive so as to become a deterrent to participation,
maybe we can make a marriage between, say, a helmet manufacturer and a
consumer products company - like Coca Cola - to keep costs down," says
Ogrean. "We become the pass-through for the dollars in order to keep
costs down."
Nowhere are costs higher than when an incident
on the field lands people in court.
"Several years ago we came fairly close to not
having a football equipment manufacturer left," recalls Ogrean. "USA
Football can, if appropriate and necessary to stakeholders like
AYF, do some persuasions with elected officials
that we should not let things get so litigious that they're off the
charts and huge liability payments get made in lawsuits."
But since accidents do happen in sports, Ogrean
feels USA Football can play an integral role when
it comes do dispensing information in times of concern.
"When I interviewed with (NFL
Commissioner) Paul Tagliabue and (NFLPA Executive
Director) Gene Upshaw in December, I used the Travis Roy incident,"
says Ogrean, referring to the former Boston University hockey player
who suffered an accident 11 seconds into the first game of his career
and was rendered a quadraplegic. "The next day, calls came in to
USA Hockey because people knew this was a national
organization and they wanted to know how many catastrophic incidents
like this do you have and what do you do.
"There was a place for them to call, and
football doesn't have that. If a middle school kid in Montana has the
same incident, who do you call for information?"
Ogrean's staff has one item on its agenda that
could do much to ensure players receive better instruction and are in
top-flight condition. In theory if not in fact, this could greatly
reduce the number of injuries.
"I believe the education of coaches is most
critical in the development of young players," he says. "I'm sure this
is prevalent in programs like AYF, where there are
a huge number of coaches who are volunteers and who get roped into it
because they're kids are playing.
"They do it for about three years and then stop.
That means you're not going to get a lot of coaches who're going to
professionalize themselves and go to clinics.
"We need to create easy-to-understand tools on
the Internet and make them available to everybody," says Ogrean. "I'm
sure there's a lot of volunteer dads who know they're going to have 12
defensive linemen at practice and say 'God, give me two or three pages
which tell me what I'm going to do with them.' Youth leagues shouldn't
be running schemes. They should be running fundamentals, so let's put
something together and make it readily accessible to everybody on the
Internet."
To help attain these goals, Ogrean has assembled
a staff of top-professionals:
"It's not USA Football's
intention to impose it's will on anybody," adds Ogrean of the
non-profit corporation. "We look at our task as being the construction
of a tent, and we want all these organizations inside the tent to help
us determine what our road map should be.
"We want these people to come together, moderate
the dialogue and help determine what's the best interest of the game.
We're about alliances and bridge building."
Story courtesy Red Line Editorial,
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