APEX, N.C. _ It's a simple drill.
Four cones are placed 5 yards apart in two parallel lines. Three players stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the center of the resulting rectangle, an offensive player in the middle facing one way, two defensive players on either side facing the other.
On the coach's whistle, they each sprint to one of the four cones in front of them, then turn around. As they face each other, it becomes football at its most elemental. One ball-carrier. Two players trying to tackle him in a confined space. A zero-sum game. Someone wins. Someone loses.
On a bright September day at Apex Friendship High School, in the shadow of a plume of steam from the cooling tower at the Shearon Harris nuclear plant, linebacker Nate Hightower had it right. With a floppy haircut and tattoo of a guitar on his shoulder, Hightower looks like he should be singing folk tunes in a coffee shop. But here he is, hips squared, as he stands up the ball-carrier with a clean but crushing hit that sent his teammate to the turf on his posterior.
At just about any other football practice in the world, there would be hoots and hollers for a tooth-rattling hit like that. At Apex Friendship, there was only an awkward silence.
Adam Sanders, a 33-year-old former Furman fullback and the first and only football coach at the school that opened in 2015 just southwest of Raleigh, pulled Hightower aside and put his arm around him.
"We all make mistakes," Sanders said later. "It's what we do after it. He knows. I know. He just got revved up, and that kind of thing happens."
A mistake? Aren't hits like that what football is all about?
Not in practice at Apex Friendship, where the Patriots are going against conventional wisdom this fall and saving all the contact for Friday nights.
As research continues to link concussions to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain disease that can cause dementia later in life, participation in high school football across North Carolina has declined 25% since 2010. But what Sanders is doing at Apex Friendship may be the future of football and a way to save the sport for future generations.
He spent three days at Dartmouth in May as a guest of coach Buddy Teevens and his staff observing the Big Green practice without hitting each other, without even tackling each other. That's how Dartmouth has done it for a decade. That's how the whole Ivy League does it now.
Sanders came back to Apex with pages of notes and a determination to see if it could work in high school _ without the resources of a major research university, like robotic tackling dummies and virtual reality, or the collective knowledge of the engineering and medical schools.
His team had never finished better than 6-5 in its three varsity seasons, despite growing into the biggest high school in Wake County in only five years. Friendship isn't in a hotbed of football talent, surrounded by equally new suburban subdivisions that sprout constantly from the old farmland, a cash crop of cul de sacs.
The Patriots entered this season with two Division I recruiting prospects, both of whom are tall, rangy defensive ends. When Sanders was hired at Friendship, he quickly abandoned the spread offense he ran as an assistant coach at Chapel Hill High School for an old-school, Wing-T running attack that relies on effort as much as ability.
If cutting contact out of practice meant his team stayed healthier _ his key players in particular _ it might not just be the right thing to do. It might actually make his team better on Friday nights.
Other local programs have drastically reduced contact in practice with the same goals in mind. That's the trend these days. Sanders was willing to go all the way.
"I just don't know how many got on a plane and went to Dartmouth to try to figure out a better way to do it," Sanders said.
That's all Sanders was thinking about in May. He wasn't thinking about the bigger stakes, about the future of football at a time when people (and parents) are more aware of the connection between concussions and long-term brain damage, even repetitive sub-concussive hits.
Those stakes are high. A recent Boston University study of donated brains found the risk of developing CTE increased by 30% for each year of football. Essentially, the odds of developing CTE double with each additional 2.6 seasons of football played. A Texas-San Antonio examination of more than 700 brains of athletes and non-athletes alike found football had the highest frequency of CTE of any sport, with higher risks for athletes who continue to play beyond high school.
Fewer players are willing to take those risks. According to data compiled by the National Federation of State High School Associations, football participation in North Carolina has declined from an all-time high of 35,691 in 2010 to 26,962 last season. Over the same time period, the population of the state grew by 28 percent.
The implications of those trends prompted former North Carolina coach and CTE denier Larry Fedora to famously bluster last year that football is under "attack."
