UCT tackle-height study drives rugby’s concussion law shift

Rugby has long faced a difficult balancing act – protecting players from injury without stripping out the physical contest that defines the sport.

Research led by Dr Sharief Hendricks and colleagues at the University of Cape Town's (UCT) Health through Physical Activity, Lifestyle and Sport (HPALS) Research Centre, working with Leeds Beckett University, has been helping to answer that question and is now shaping changes to tackle laws aimed at reducing concussions across the game.

Hendricks, whose research and consulting work spans bodies including the South African Cricketers' Association and the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee, and who sits on the board of the South African Institute for Drug-Free Sport, said rugby union carries a high concussion risk, Myolisi Gophe writes for UCT.

The collaboration with World Rugby began with a simple question: would lowering the tackle height reduce that risk?

A trial led by Dr James Brown, conducted with Stellenbosch University in 2018 and 2019, found a 31% reduction in concussion incidence that did not reach statistical significance – but which Hendricks and colleagues argued was still clinically meaningful.

World Rugby weighed the findings alongside input from players, unions and other stakeholders, balancing what Hendricks described as safety against spectacle.

The organisation went on to introduce lower tackle-height regulations at youth and community level, requiring players to tackle below the sternum – a policy since adopted internationally, including by Italy.

For Hendricks, the project's significance lies less in the rule change itself than in what came after.

A good idea does not guarantee adoption, he said, and the team has since drawn on diffusion-of-innovation theory to understand why some policies take hold while others stall – questions such as whether coaches are equipped to teach the new technique, and what support players and teams need to make it work.

World Rugby has since asked the team to evaluate how the tackle-height rules are being implemented internationally, supplying individual unions with their own data so they can examine the policy's effects in their own settings; that work continues.

Hendricks described the relationship between researchers and sporting bodies as a bridge that must be built over time, with external stakeholders involved from the initial research question through to the analysis of results.

That exchange runs both ways, he said – scientists understand the mechanisms of injury, but coaches and administrators understand what it takes to implement a new rule on the field. The tackle-height project, he said, shows how evidence can inform a sport's decisions without dictating them outright.