Tomlin saw an opportunity and invited Warner to speak at a spring football clinic. The league would expand to 16 teams by 1933, the same year that the legendary Glenn “Pop” Warner arrived in Philadelphia to coach the Temple University Owls. In the fall of 1929, Tomlin officially launched the Junior Football Conference that was comprised of four teams. The owners embraced the idea and Tomlin agreed to facilitate the league, and decided that football would be the sport of choice. ![]() Tomlin, a former college athlete himself, suggested that the factory owners get together and fund a recreational league. Tomlin was asked by a friend who owned a factory in Philadelphia what he should do to stop the young teenage boys from shattering his windows at the plant, an issue that multiple factory owners were having. The idea was brought about when a man named Joseph J. Though these pick up affairs were a coordinated effort, it wouldn’t be until 1929 that an official league would be set up for boys and young men to participate in football. Many of these teenage teams eventually evolved into semi pro teams, and as pro football historian Joe Ziemba has noted, The Arizona Cardinals, which is the NFL’s oldest franchise, actually started out as a prairie team of teenagers who played on the team into adulthood during their days in Chicago. In Chicago, Illinois, many amateur teams from different neighborhoods competed against each other on abandon lots that Chicago locals called “prairies.” Hence, these games would fittingly be referred to as “prairie football games.” While the average ages of these teams would vary, most of the teams were comprised of teenage boys that weighed around 125 pounds. However, it wouldn’t be until the late 1890s that youth football would become a somewhat organized effort, right as America was creating its own distinct brand of football that separated itself from its English predecessors. Youth football would be no exception.įootball, as many of you know, was remarkably different back when the game was undergoing its development in the mid 1800s as many games were variants of association football, and boarding schools in the east were some the first instances of young students playing these various form of football in intramural competitions. As of 2014, the National Football League Players Association reported that of the 1800 players active in the NFL, 70% of them played youth football.īut as history has shown us, football and the institutions that have been built around the sport, such as the NFL, the NCAA and a multitude of High School Football Federations, began its humble roots as a regional spectacle enjoyed by a select few before entering the mainstream. ![]() Though a controversial topic today, youth football is undoubtably still one of the most popular pastimes for children not yet in high school, with nearly 1.2 million kids between the ages of 6 and 12 enrolled in Pop Warner, the leading youth football program in the world. For many of these young boys, that first step toward achieving their dreams was on the gridiron fields in the youth football circuit. When watching an NFL game, it’s easy to forget that many of these giant athletes were once young boys that dreamt of playing football on the big stage as they witnessed their favorite players make incredibles plays on television for the whole country to see, leaving such an impression on them that they too wanted to be a professional football player, just like their boyhood idol.
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