Today's Tidbit... Feeling Detached About Tackling in 1902
Entering the 1902 season, the greatest hope of the preseason prognosticators was for football to experience its safest season yet. The game was witnessing rapid advances in the protective gear worn by players, the game's tackling techniques, and the training devices to teach tackling. We'll touch on the first two and focus on the third.
While some coaches argued against players padding themselves due to the added weight and its impact on their speed, most accepted the need for selective padding, primarily based on previous injuries. Still, solutions were available for nearly every body part if a player needed padding.
Rather than padding their players, many coaches argued that injuries most often resulted from players not being in football shape or properly coached to fall and tackle. Coaches devoted practice time to hardening players' bodies, including teaching players to fall correctly, especially on loose balls. The secret to safe falling was to fall on one's side while pulling your arms close to your body to prevent breaking arm bones. Proper padding on the hips and pants also made falling safer.
The secret to proper tackling was to strike the opponent low so the tackler did not absorb the runner's total weight. Of course, dropping the head, as shown in the illustration, led to other problems, but you live, and you learn.
However, one of the most exciting advances came from the staff at Harvard, where veteran trainer Jack McMasters worked. McMasters worked at Princeton before Harvard. While in New Jersey, he earned credit for inventing the "tackling machine." The tackling machine had a dummy suspended from a structure and pulleys running along ropes, so the dummy moved, simulating a runner's movement. Also, the tackler could run through the tackle, pushing the dummy along the ropes.
While the Princeton version of the tackling machine was an advancement, McMasters became more innovative and inventive upon arriving at Harvard, as shown by his 1902 introduction of the detachable tackling dummy. The innovation was a mechanical device connecting the ropes and the dummy, allowing the dummy to detach from the ropes when struck with sufficient force. The device also had weights so the trainer or coach could adjust the force needed for the tackler to detach the dummy.
Tackling a dummy rather than another player lessened the opportunity for injury while making the dummy detachable gave players a more realistic tackling experience. Schools often placed hay or sawdust in the areas where the tacklers fell to soften the impact of landing on the ground.
The framework with the hanging dummy and the detachable device proved popular and was used nationwide. Ten years later, Harvard still used theirs, Pop Warner did the same, and many others used it over the next several decades.
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Your articles and research are excellent! I wish I had discovered your Substack sooner. I hope my comment isn’t repeating something you’ve previously covered, but your tackling dummy reminded me of an article and illustration in Harper’s Weekly, March 26, 1892. In the article “The College Athlete In-doors,” Caspar W. Whitney wrote:
“The most important feature of the football man’s in-door training is the tackling bag, a recent contrivance intended to perfect men in tackling. It is a bag, sometimes canvas and sometimes leather, about five and a half feet in length, and with about the circumference of a man’s body. It is stuffed with a mixture of excelsior and hair with a little sawdust, and packed solidly, though not too hard.
“It is hung up by a strap or rope running over a pulley, so it may be lowered or raised, and what would represent a man’s legs between hips and knees is marked off, and the bag always kept at a height that would make them correspond to the actual player. Then it is set in motion, and the candidate tackles it. Lieutenant G.A. Merriam, U.S.M., stationed at Annapolis, has made an improvement that is certain to be copied. He has rigged an arrangement, nautically termed a “squilgee,” whereby when a man tackles the bag his weight releases it, and he “downs” the stuffed and inanimate opponent…”
(I'd send the accompanying illustration but don’t know how to attach it to a comment…it looks like a giant pacifier!)