Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 89.djvu/657

 Popular Science Monthly

��Vol. 89 No. J

��239 Fourth Ave., New York

November, 1916

��$1.50 Annually

��Training the Football Tackier

A tackling dummy which moves as if it were a live player running around the end

��FOOTBALL as now played is a well- balanced, interesting game, with emphasis laid more than e\-er on the physical development of the players. During recent years the game has undergone refining at the hands of experienced sportsmen, with the result that open placing is encouraged in preference to the rough and tumble close formation of other seasons. The demand today is for more speed and better general- ship.

Football is so strenuous a game that it may not be played without preliminary training. A thorough mastery of the sport calls for the proper coordination of brains and brawn.

A number of mechanical con- trivances have been invented to harden the football recruit during his practicing season. Tackling ckim- mies are perhaps the most numerous. They require tactics which arc far removed from the actual operation of bringing a player to the ground when he is running at full speed. Throwing a lifeless figure pros- trate is entirely different from tackling a moving figure.

Oliphant of the "Army," the human battering ram, carried from one to four tacklcrs down the field with him when he was running with the ball. No amount of preliminary practice enabled players to halt his ter- rific rushes. It is just possible, however, that if a tackling

���device such as that illustrated on the opposite page had been used in teach- ing the players the rudiments of scientific STEEL CABLt tackling, Oliphant might

I have met his Nemesis.

John H. A s h t o n, a Brown Uni- versity man, has over- come many of the most serious defects in exist- ing tackling devices. His dummy moves exactly as if it were a live player on a quick run around the end. When the player tackles the dum- my, it does not im- mediately fall to the ground, but furnishes a positive resistance to a downward drag, so that the player must use the same force that he would employ to down an opponent. The dumni}- hangs by a steel cable from an arm mounted upon a hollow mast. Attached to the mast, at a point where a bracket meets it, is a handle, used to rotate the frame at any desired speed to impart the proper momentum to the dum- my. As the player rushes toward the dummy, the coach pulls the handle, causing the dummy to swerve away from the attack. There is a counter- weight in the hollow mast.

���The hollow mast and its various parts

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