Last month, I attended a USA Football Heads Up clinic held in Rigby, a town just north of Idaho Falls. The clinic aimed at educating local coaches about proper football tackling techniques and other strategies to increase the sport’s safety.

But people have criticized the Heads Up program for sugarcoating the inherently dangerous nature of football.

My story addresses the goals of the clinic and the difficult mission to make a dangerous sport safer.

Here’s the link. The first section of the story is below:

RIGBY — Concussions ended Scott Criner’s football career.

Saturday, Criner helped teach coaches how to prevent that same fate.

Criner is the head football coach at Rocky Mountain High School, and he’s Idaho’s lone USA Football Master Trainer. He helped organize Saturday’s USA Football’s Heads Up Football Player Safety Clinic at Rigby High School.

The clinic’s lead speaker was Terry Summerfield, the head football coach at Barlow High School in Gresham, Ore., and a USA Football West Coast Regional Master Trainer. He lectured more than 20 local coaches about football player safety, from hydration to proper tackling techniques to concussion awareness.

Summerfield’s guidance included a crucial point.

“We know we can’t completely take the head out of the game,” Summerfield told the coaches.

Saturday’s clinic was a small part of the Heads Up Football program, which is attempting to tackle a complicated question: How do you make an inherently dangerous sport safer?

“Let’s do everything we can to reduce and try to eliminate the helmet from making contact,” Summerfield said in an interview. “We can’t completely, but let’s take it away from the initial contact. … That’s about teaching. It’s about education.”