Adelphi professor Erik Swartz, PhD, has developed a program called “helmetless tackling training” to help players learn to protect their head and avoid injury when making tackles. His research shows that the program can significantly reduce head impacts.
Erik Swartz, PhD
Erik Swartz, PhD, professor and vice dean of Adelphi’s Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences, has been working for 10 years to teach football players tackling techniques that allow them to avoid contact to their head. The program he has developed— “helmetless tackling training” or HuTT® (the “u” has been added to make the acronym sound like a quarterback’s call to have the ball snapped)—involves a series of supervised drills where players remove their helmet and shoulder pads to practice a safer form of tackling.
With the NFL and college playoffs at hand after a season when concussions and even fatal head injuries made news, we talked with Dr. Swartz, who oversees the Ammon College departments of Health and Sport Sciences and Communication Sciences and Disorders, about the program and the encouraging research it has produced.
How did you decide to get involved in efforts to reduce head injuries in football?
My background is in athletic training, and I’ve worked as an athletic trainer where I was responsible for treating injuries on the football field. One of the things that scared me the most was if there was a catastrophic head or neck injury. I was trained to care for players medically, but the problem on the field is that the equipment they wear to prevent injury becomes a barrier to treatment. So I spent the first part of my career as a researcher focused on the best way to remove equipment to access the airway and chest in an emergency situation in order to provide rescue breathing.
Eventually, I became more interested in ways to prevent head and neck injuries, especially as helmet-to-helmet hits became more common in football. I’d been playing rugby for a number of years, and I never saw anybody lead with their head when making a tackle, and I never saw head-to-head contact. That’s mainly because rugby players don’t wear helmets, so it’s natural for them to keep their head out of the way.
So I began thinking about ways to bring this natural instinct to keep your head out of the way into football.
So are helmets themselves a part of the problem?
Well, helmets are required in football, and for good reason. But they introduce what is called risk compensation. People adjust their behavior to the risks they perceive, and the introduction of protective equipment can create a false sense of security.
Football itself is a good example, because before helmets were required, the game had fewer deaths and catastrophic spine injuries. But once helmets started to be required and got better, players started tackling headfirst. Things like spear tackling, when players launch themselves headfirst into ball carriers—that didn’t exist before helmets were required.
Football has created rules to make it illegal for players to use their helmet to tackle, and new designs and materials have made helmets better able to protect the head and absorb impact forces. But those advances in technology continue to perpetuate that false sense of security. So the football helmet actually is a large piece of what enables headfirst contact.
How can helmetless training help reduce headfirst tackling?
It can reinforce players’ natural instinct to protect their head. Our training drills are designed to ingrain the motor control to keep the head out of the way and to absorb the impact of a tackle with the shoulders and top of the chest. The idea is that players will then react appropriately in full-contact situations.
How does HuTT® training work?
The HuTT® program is composed of a series of helmetless drills performed in practices throughout the football season. The initial drills are very basic; players practice keeping their head on the proper side of a stationary tackling dummy, depending on which shoulder they’re using. Players then perform drills practicing the same technique on a teammate holding a tackling shield. The final set of drills are more dynamic, as teammates holding shields move unpredictably, requiring players to react quickly and correctly.
Research is an integral part of your program. Have you found that helmetless training is effective?
HuTT® was developed as an evidence-based program with a goal of discovering whether helmetless training would lead to fewer head impacts in practices and games, tracking those impacts using sensors. When we conducted our first study, players who participated in helmetless drills reduced head impacts by 30 percent by the end of just one season of drills.
We’ve been conducting studies with high school football teams in Hawaii since 2019, and what we’ve found is even more encouraging. Players who participated in our drills at least 60 percent of the time significantly reduced head impacts over the course of a season.
How are you getting the word out about the effectiveness of the program?
We’ve been working hard advocating our approach, promoting the program as much as we can. We’ve published our research in professional publications like the Journal of Athletic Training, hosted conferences and appeared on news programs. I was recently interviewed on the CBS News affiliate in Boston about the program.
The NFL is aware of our efforts. We won one of their Head Health Initiative grants, which supported a study across five high schools. I was on an NFL medical subcommittee for a number of years as well.
Has helmetless training been widely adopted by teams?
You would think it would be, but we do encounter skepticism. Coaches, I have found, don’t necessarily like to be told what to do, especially from someone who’s not a coach. Or they feel they’re already teaching proper tackling themselves.
Our hope, though, is that it can be something that is incorporated into football on a widespread basis, most importantly on the youth and high school levels.