Background: Research has found that injury rates in football are higher in competition than during practice. However, there is little research on the association between injury rates and type of football practices and how these specific rates compare with those in competitions. Purpose: This study utilized data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association Injury Surveillance System (NCAA ISS) to describe men's collegiate football practice injuries (academic years 2004-2005 to 2008-2009) in 4 event types: competitions, scrimmages, regular practices, and walkthroughs. Study Design: Descriptive epidemiological study. Methods: Football data during the 2004-2005 to 2008-2009 academic years were analyzed. Annually, an average of 60 men's football programs provided data (9.7% of all universities sponsoring football). Injury rates per 1000 athlete-exposures (AEs), injury rate ratios (RRs), 95% CIs, and injury proportions were reported. Results: The NCAA ISS captured 18,075 football injuries. Most injuries were reported in regular practices (55.9%), followed by competitions (38.8%), scrimmages (4.4%), and walkthroughs (0.8%). Most AEs were reported in regular practices (77.6%), followed by walkthroughs (11.5%), competitions (8.6%), and scrimmages (2.3%). The highest injury rate was found in competitions (36.94/1000 AEs), followed by scrimmages (15.7/1000 AEs), regular practices (5.9/1000 AEs), and walkthroughs (0.6/1000 AEs). These rates were all significantly different from one another. Distributions of injury location and diagnoses were similar across all 4 event types, with most injuries occurring at the lower extremity (56.0%) and consisting of sprains and strains (50.6%). However, injury mechanisms varied. The proportion of injuries due to player contact was greatest in scrimmages (66.8%), followed by regular practices (48.5%) and walkthroughs (34.9%); in contrast, the proportion of injuries due to noncontact/overuse was greatest in walkthroughs (41.7%), followed by regular practices (35.6%) and scrimmages (21.9%). Conclusion: Injury rates were the highest in competitions but then varied by the type of practice event, with higher practice injury rates reported in scrimmage. In addition, greater proportions of injuries were reported in regular practices, and greater proportions of exposures were reported in regular practices and walkthroughs. Efforts to minimize injury in all types of practice events are essential to mitigating injury incidence related to both contact and noncontact.

College football is big business, earning slightly more than $1 billion in profit in the last few years. As a result of its popularity, fans of the game devour massive amounts of information about college teams and their players. Less known are the non-academic challenges college football players face, in addition to the typical concerns shared with their non-athletic peers. Along with academic and cognitive challenges, the ability to effectively navigate non-academic areas - such as personal, social and cultural - is critical to the development and holistic growth of today’s college football players. These factors can affect a student's ability to thrive or persist toward graduation. In this report, I explore the specific challenges of African American college football players at predominantly White institutions. Within this scope, I will examine the growth of college football in addition to the reach and impact it has on African American families. Within these communities, research shows a pervasive focus on playing professional football. Some players believe that college football is a mere stepping stone on the road to a professional career. The reality is that very few college football players are chosen to play professionally – actually less than .2%. This report explores some of the psychosocial issues that can impact the on and off the field success of African American college football players at predominantly White institutions The goal of this work is to lay a foundation and make an argument for counseling and therapeutic support targeted to, but not exclusively for African American college football players. As systems that seek to understand growth and change for optimum mental and physical well-being, the field of counseling and sports psychology present intervention models that can be useful for today’s African American college football players. / text

The purpose of this study was to determine what practices and policies were being used in the training and conditioning programs for football, the similarities and differences of the training and conditioning programs for football, and to recommend a training and conditioning program for football in colleges based upon the present practices of colleges and universities of Texas.

This research study and evaluation is based on educational philosophy that acknowledges the values of music education in the institutions of higher learning in the United States, also the place of instrumental music as a part of the music education program. There is, however, a feeling of controversy over the values and place of the football show band within the instrumental music program. In the Rocky Mountain area, every college and university has a football show band. To many administrators and music educators, including band directors, it may seem that the importance of the show band has been exaggerated, and the band itself oversold. The show band, however, appears to be a part of the music program and on a permanent basis. Therefore, it seemed desirable that a study be made to evaluate the show band from a musical and an educational standpoint as it function a within the music program.

Social media has changed the way that we create, use, and disseminate information and presents an unparalleled opportunity to gather large-scale data on the networks, behaviors, and opinions of individuals. This dissertation focuses on the role of social media and social networks in recruitment, examining the complex interactions between offline recruiting activities, online social media, and recruiting outcomes. Specifically, it explores how the information college football recruits reveal about themselves online is related to their decisions as well as how this information can diffuse and influence the decisions of others. Recruitment occurs in many contexts, and this research draws comparisons between college football and personnel recruiting. This work is one of the first large-scale studies of social media in college football recruiting, and uses a unique dataset that is both broad and deep, capturing information about 2,644 recruits, 682 schools, 764 coaches, and 2,397 current college football players and tracking offline and online behavior over six months. This dissertation comprises three case studies corresponding to the major decisions in the football recruiting cycle—the coach’s decision to make a scholarship offer, the athlete’s decision to commit, and the athlete’s decision to decommit. The first study investigates the relationship between a recruit’s social media use and his recruiting success. Informed by previous work on impression management in personnel recruitment, I construct logistic classifiers to identify self-promotion and ingratiation in 5.5 million tweets and use regression analysis to model the relationship between tweets and scholarship offers over time. The results indicate that tweet content predicts whether an athlete will receive a new offer in the next month. Furthermore, the level of Twitter activity is strongly related to recruiting success, suggesting that simply possessing a social media account may offer a significant advantage in terms of attracting coaches’ attention and earning scholarship offers. These findings underscore the critical role of social media in athletic recruitment and may benefit recruits by informing their branding and communication strategies. The second study examines whether a recruit’s social media activity presages his college preferences. I combine data on recruits’ college options, recruiting activities, Twitter connections, and Twitter content to construct a logistic classifier predicting which school a recruit will select out of those that have offered him a scholarship. My results highlight the value of social media data—especially the hashtags posted by the athlete and his online social network connections—for predicting his commitment decision. These findings may prove useful for college coaches seeking innovative methods to compete for elite talent, as well as assisting them in allocating recruiting resources. The third study focuses on athletic turnover, i.e., decommitments. I construct a logistic classifier to predict the occurrence of decommitments over time based on recruits’ college choices, recruiting activities, online social networks, and the decommitment behavior of their peers. The results further underscore the power of online social networks for predicting offline recruiting outcomes, giving coaches the tools to better identify vulnerable commitments.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed Jan. 22, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-71).

The purpose of this study was to determine the: 1) knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors toward hydration and fluid replacement among collegiate football players at an NCAA Division I University, overall , and the relationship, if any, by position on the team, number of seasons played, and previous nutrition education; 2) relationship between the athletes’ hydration knowledge, attitudes and behaviors; 3) current sources of nutrition information likely to be used by the football players; and 4) players’ perception of the adequacy of, and barriers to, their fluid intake before, during, and after exercise. The players’ mean Hydration Knowledge Score was 14.2 ± 1.4 out of 17 (83.5%). Common misconceptions included: 60% thought water, rather than sports drinks, should be consumed when exercising for more than one hour; 54% did not believe sports drinks are better at restoring muscle glycogen than water; 47% believed salt tablets kept players from getting dehydrated; and 42% indicated thirst is the best indicator of dehydration. No differences were detected by number of seasons, position or previous nutrition education. / Department of Family and Consumer Sciences

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This study investigated the academic progress of special admit football players compared to general admit football players at a private, Division I university in the western United States. Using mixed methods, the researcher quantitatively compared the two groups in terms of credits enrolled, credits attained, GPA and progress toward degree. The researcher also interviewed special admit football players to determine their perceptions of academic support service. Data answer the quantitative and qualitative study questions. Most notably, the researcher found that, while general admit football players had higher GPAs than the special admit athletes, the special admit athletes experienced the same amount of progress toward degree as their regular admit teammates. Furthermore, participant interviews revealed that athletes most value the learning specialists and tutors within the university’s support service framework Discussion includes implications for practice.

No description available.