The combine wraps up the extended tryouts for the new Graham JV team and 56 names were added to the initial spring football roster. For the next several weeks the JV team will continue early morning conditioning workouts and after-school non-contact practices. On May 22 the Grizzlies will start full contact practice when spring camp starts. The spring camp concludes with a spring jamboree June 1 at Langley Secondary.

Doctor Josh Greggain loves his football.

He’s a big fan of the NFL.

He married a Seattle girl, with Seahawk fandom a part of the package

The last three years he’s coached with Chilliwack Minor Football.

Greggain loves a good hit just as much as the next guy and a smile crosses his face when he recalls Marshawn Lynch going beast-mode on the New Orleans Saints in the 2011 NFL playoffs.

The fan side of him loves that stuff.

The doctor side, not so much.

That side knows the price players pay for making those hits — how the impact of a helmet on helmet blow can rival the impact of a car accident.

Guys like Lynch are well compensated, and increasingly well aware, of the risks they take.

Come September, Greggain will be on the sideline as a bunch of Grade 8 and 9 boys play their first football for GW Graham.

They are not well compensated and they all think they’re invincible.

They do have one thing in common with the pros.

They have a small army of medical professionals looking out for them.

Greggain is one.

Doctors Jenn Turner and Michael Gaetz are the others. It will be their job to keep the boys healthy, with a particular emphasis on concussion diagnosis, assessment and treatment.

“Concussions have become a huge priority for sports in general over the last five years, with athletes like Eric Lindros and Sidney Crosby making a huge impact on awareness,” Greggain said.

A big part of the concussion strategy will be a tie in with the University of the Fraser Valley.

Gaetz is a professor of kinesiology and physical education at UFV, and has spent many years studying concussions.

Gaetz made concussions the subject of a doctoral thesis at Simon Fraser University, focusing on junior hockey players.

With the UFV campus relocating to the Garrison Crossing area in the near future, Gaetz will be making his concussion lab available to GWG.

The lab can assess neuropsychological, neurophysiological, physiological and cognitive function, as well as balance.

Greggain, a family and emergency room physician at Hope’s Fraser Canyon Hospital, said the lab offers the type of testing that is usually unique to big money professional teams.

“With the lab, we can get more than just information about how the kid is feeling, which is completely subjective,” Greggain said. “I can give an opinion based on subjective information. But if Michael can test an athletes and say, ‘He scored this in the preseason, and now he scores this and his balance is off,’ that tells me that athlete is not ready to play.”

Concussions can be easy to spot.

A wide receiver takes big hit from safety coming across the middle, and you can safely assume some damage was done.

“In a case like that, the players will be evaluated on the sideline by myself, Jenn or one of the athletic trainers,” Greggain explained. “We’ve got a series of standardized questions and a brief physical examination that will identify a concussion. Once they’re evaluated, they are followed up. Because we’ll have the luxury of UFV’s baseline testing, we’ll know where they were in the preseason. Once they’re back where they should be, only then will they be cleared to play.”

Obvious concussions are obvious, but studies have shown it’s not just the big hits that cause problems.

It’s the cumulative effects of play after play — an offensive lineman will fire into a defensive lineman X amounts of time per game, generating force with each collision.

“This is stuff that, not only do I not know the answer to but I don’t know that anyone in sports does yet,” Greggain noted. “Inviting UFV into the conversation and doing the testing helps a lot. We will have tangible testing that tells us the cumulative effects of all these ‘mild’ injuries. If this program can help us now, while also helping athletes and teams in the future, hopefully we follow these kids for four or five seasons and get a lot more info about concussions.”

Where five years ago a player might have taken a hit and written off the resulting dizziness and headaches as ‘having his bell rung,’ Greggain feels sports are finally moving out of the dark ages.

“Going back 25 years ago, some of the guys I coach with talk about their high school experiences, where they were so concussed on a Monday morning at school that they couldn’t even carry their own textbooks,” he said. “At that time, no one knew and no one thought twice about it. Are we out of the dark ages? I’ll call this the renaissance.”

Greggain will be on the sideline as often as possible this fall, and he’ll enjoy the return of high school football to Chilliwack for the first time since the late 1970s.

But he’ll do so with a purpose.

“I love the game for the intensity of it, for a bunch of reasons,” he said. “The kids choose to play football, so it’s our job to make sure they play in the safest environment possible.”

Contact Greggain at jgreggain@gmail.com.

View the original story from the Chilliwack Progress.

“Good coaches love clinics, because they love learning more about the game” noted Head Coach Laurie Smith, “the interesting thing about these clinics is the number of very accomplished coaches with 20 or 30 years experience who attend every session.” Smith feels football is a dynamic game and what is being taught in terms of fundamentals and systems is constantly changing. “We want to stay ahead of the curve in terms of player safety and proper blocking and tackling fundamentals. Even what was being taught just 5 years ago is now obsolete based on what we now know about concussions.”

The Graham coaches also meet regularly and have arranged to bring in guest coaches from US High Schools to help with their progression as a staff. “We have an enormous amount of collective experience in this group of 19 coaches, but we also know you never stop learning” concluded Smith.

For more information about the coaching staff, coaching clinics or the Graham football program go to www.grahamfootball.ca.

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Many have never played before

By Tyler Olsen, The Times January 31, 2012

The head coach of G.W. Graham’s new football program says he was blown away by the student response to a call for players last week.

Laurie Smith said 82 students signed up to be part of the new varsity program at the school. That means that about half of all boys (a half dozen girls also expressed interest) who will be in Grades 9 and 10 this fall said they wanted to play football.

Smith says he was stunned by the turnout.

“I went into it thinking we might get 15 or 20 kids that wanted to play,” he said. With a couple dozen kids on a waitlist to transfer to the school factored in, Smith figured he might have 30 or 40 kids from which to build a team. “To have something closer to 120, that really surprised me.”

Smith was also taken with the number of students who wanted to play organized football for the first time in their lives.

“What struck me today looking at the list of 82 kids, is that only 10 of them are Chilliwack Giants players,” said Smith

That, he said, means that the program is going to augment, rather than detract from, the Giants minor football program.

“It’s going to grow football, it’s going to increase the total number of kids playing football who are 14 or 15 in Chilliwack,” said Smith.

He attributes the popularity of the program to its integration into the school day and the fact that parents can drop their kids off at school in the morning, pick them up in the late afternoon, and in between the child will have both gone to school and football practice.

From the dozens of students who have expressed interest in playing football, Smith projects that some will fall by the wayside, whether because for personal or parental reasons. The program will host combines and practices in the coming months to introduce players to the sport. Eventually, Smith and the coaches may need to make cuts, but he noted that while most rosters have around 40 players, there is no limit on the number of players a team can carry.

tolsen@chilliwacktimes.com
© Copyright (c) Chilliwack Times

Read this article on the Chilliwack Times

Former Canadian Football League all-star and Grey Cup champion Duncan O’Mahony is joining the G.W. Graham coaching staff as a guest coach, helping the kickers in the new program.

O’Mahony, a former B.C. Lion and Calgary Stampeder, agreed to help the Grizzlies with their spring and fall camps, focusing on the highly specialized area of young kickers.

“We are so fortunate to have a former all-star kicker right in our own back yard in Chilliwack,” noted special teams coordinator Jeff Whitehead. “Duncan will be an incredible asset to our program, and be able to get things out of these young kickers that we may not see otherwise.”

The Grizzlies junior varsity team kicks off their season in Portland (Oregon) on Sep. 1, with exhibition games in Surrey and Nanaimo the following two weeks. Spring camp opens May 21 with an exhibition game in Langley June 1.

Read the article on the Chilliwack Progress.

Smith outlined the process of player evaluations and “combines” over the next few months to determine which players will ultimately form the roster of the first ever Graham football team. “Our roster size is unlimited so it may be that we carry a bigger roster than initially planned, but I also think the schedule of intense strength and conditioning programming over the next few months will help us determine the players that will ultimately participate in the program.”

The positive for football in Chilliwack is that the program at Graham is significantly growing the sport in this area. For more information about the player evaluation schedule contact Coach Laurie at laurie@grahamfootball.ca.

“We are delighted to have Todd on our coaching staff,” noted Head Coach Laurie Smith, “he brings a positive energy and is a very detail oriented coach.” Spring practices start for the Graham Junior Varsity team in May so Todd is spending his time now preparing practice plans and attending coaching clinics to sharpen his coaching skills and incorporate the latest drills and skills for his defensive back group.