Football coaches watched a video during the tackling certification program at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Tex. Cooper Neill for The New York Times
ARLINGTON, Tex. — Raymond Kitchen had other places he would rather have been than in a big, empty football stadium at 7 a.m. on a Saturday. But there he was, three days before Christmas, with 450 other high school football coaches, attending a two-hour lecture on tackling at AT&T Stadium, the home of the Dallas Cowboys.
The lecture was a part of an ambitious effort to have all of the state’s 23,000 junior high and high school football coaches become familiar with, by August, a program that teaches rugby-style tackling.