Are you ready for some football?

The National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame are making sure that high school coaches are.

That organization announced last week that it has sent out guidelines to help more than 150,000 prep coaches tell parents about their efforts to make their programs safer than ever.

Guidelines include telling parents about teams’ preparation to battle the heat, deal with concussion concerns, equipment issues, etc.

“The guidelines being sent out are things we’ve been doing,” Butler varsity head coach Rob Densmore said. “But it’s good to see somebody’s promoting it nationwide.”

The PIAA is in its third year of a weeklong mandatory heat acclimation program for Pennsylvania high school players to start their preseason camps.

Knoch coach Mike King said, “I think that’s been good. It’s a good way to ease the kids into more conditioning and adjusting to the heat. It’s a process at a relaxed pace.”

Butler and Knoch coaches have meetings with parents in May to tell them about safety precautions their respective programs take.

“We’ll talk to them about the heat acclimation, how we fit a kid with a helmet ... all of that stuff,” King said.

Densmore said about 45 parents took part in Butler’s meeting last spring. That covered Golden Tornado football players in grades 7 to 12.

“It’s mostly the parents of the younger players or first-year players who come,” he said. “Parents of kids who have been in the program already know how it all works.”

The Butler Area Midget Football League program offers a nonmandatory three-day heat acclimation program for all of its players. About 80 percent of them participated this year.

BAMFL begins its games this Saturday.

BAMFL President Chris Morrow lets parents know that someone certified in first aid and CPR is at the field during every youth football practice and game.

“All of our youth coaches take the Heads Up concussion course (for concussion knowledge and prevention) just like our high school coaches do,” Morrow said. “We’re all certified in that area.

“We mirror everything the high school program does. We ordered 10 new helmets this year, 25 last year, that are state-of-the-art. They are the same helmets from the same company the high school deals with.”

A study done by the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina found that six prep football deaths occurred nationwide in 2014 from heat stroke or cardiac arrest. There were five such deaths last year.

There was an all-time high 26 high school football deaths in 1968 and a total of 92 from 2005 through 2014.

“Heat-related illness and fatalities is 100 percent preventable today,” longtime Karns City athletic trainer John Burnett said. “There’s enough knowledge and information out there, it shouldn’t happen. The well being of our student athletes is the top priority.”

Burnett uses a hand-held device called a wet bulb globe temperature at football practices that determines the heat index on a given day. The device factors in humidity, wind and surface temperature.

The on-surface temperature on an artificial turf field may be “15 to 25 degrees warmer than on grass,” Burnett said.

“There are days we’ll make decisions on whether to practice on grass or turf, based on those readings,” he noted.

Karns City coach Ed Conto said he works with Burnett in making decisions on whether to practice in full pads, helmets, T-shirts and shorts, etc.

“We work very closely with our trainers in that regard,” he said. “If the humidity is too bad on a given day, we’ll act accordingly.”

Prep football coaches must take and pass online courses about heat acclimation, concussions and CPR before being permitted to coach.

“We give our coaches a three-month window, from the previous spring, to take those courses,” Conto said. “They need a printed certificate indicating they’ve passed them.

“That involves every coach, including the volunteer coaches. We have to know how to react to symptoms in all three of those areas.

“We might be dealing with 10 to 20 concussions at a time, nonfootball related. Kids get hurt on a four-wheeler, a dirt bike, falling off a skateboard. Regardless, we have to know how to handle them,” Conto added.

Safety precautions in football are more prevalent than ever.

King said, “A lot of it is common sense. Even during a three-hour heat acclimation session, you don’t go hard for three hours. There are mental breaks, hydration ... Kids get fired up, adrenaline pumping for physical contact. It all factors in.

“Safety is No. 1. That’s how it ought to be.”