Practice Like Pros

Practice Like Pros, founded February, 2013, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit national movement dedicated to increasing participation and reducing needless injury in high football.   

We are endorsed by Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett, Jon Gruden, Ronnie Lott, Archie Manning, Anthony Munoz, Jim Plunkett, Dick Vermeil (images below) and other progressive minds from football and medical science.  See the full list at www.practicelikepros.com. 

Injuries in football games are inevitable; injuries in practice are preventable. 

During a typical NFL regular season, less than 10% of all concussions are suffered in practice.  On some high school teams, that number is more than 50%.  Thus, our advocacy to “practice like pros.” 

Our traveling clinic shows high school coaches – not tells them, shows them on video – how NFL and college teams practice with less contact. 

We’ve presented this clinic to more than 10,000 coaches and administrators from 47 states and testified before Congress.  Our satisfaction is watching coaches’ faces melt from skepticism to consideration to acceptance.  

In the past few years, several state coaches' associations have endorsed our recommendations and asked their governing bodies of high school athletics to adopt.  So our education program has now become a campaign to change regulatory policy across the country.

On February 13, 2019, New Jersey high schools adopted our Practice Like Pros standards -- the tightest contact restrictions in the history of the game at any level of the game, less contact than mandated by the NFL, less than the Ivy League, less than any football jurisdiction ever. 

On April 29, 2020, North Carolina matched those contact limits.  North Carolina high school football had lost a staggering 25.6% participation from 2013 to 2018.  When the new initiative was announced, a head coach in Fayetteville, NC, said, "If we want kids to come back to our sport, we have to let parents know we care and show kids they're more than a piece on a chessboard." 

High school football is a grand American institution that annually is played by more than one million student-athletes.  To keep it vibrant and assure parents that needless risk is being eliminated, we ask your support of Practice Like Pros.

Thanks for considering, Terry O'Neil, CEO