Pop Warner Football Headlines Our 2012 Panini NFL Sticker Album For Week 13 Of The NFL Season

This is week 13 of the NFL season and it is also the 13th week of working towards the completion of our 2012 Panini NFL Sticker Collection.  This week we have our first completed page.

Normally we pick players to watch for the week, but this week we are featuring an important program, Pop Warner Football.

Pop Warner Football is a non-profit organization that provides youth football for participants in 43 U.S. states and several countries around the world. Pop Warner is the largest and oldest national youth football organization in the United States. It is also the only youth sports organization with an academic requirement. Pop Warner's commitment to academics is what separates the program from other youth sports around the world.

It was started in 1929 by Joe Tomlin to keep idle kids in Philadelphia occupied and out of trouble.  In 1933, Joe Tomlin met Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, a legend among active football coaches and then the coach for the Temple Owls, at a winter banquet and asked him to lecture at a spring clinic Tomlin was planning for his organization’s teams.

On the evening of the banquet, it was pouring rain mixed with sleet. Of the dozen area college football coaches scheduled to speak at the clinic, only Pop Warner showed up. The 800 excited young football players kept Warner talking and answering questions for two hours. By the end of the evening, by popular acclaim, the youth program was renamed the Pop Warner Conference.

Today, there are over 5,000 football teams, playing in eight different age/weight classifications with the annual Pop Warner National Championships, held each year at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.  This year the event takes place from December 1st through the 8th.

Here are the stickers we are adding to our album, all Pop Warner related.

Pop Warner logo, Pop Warner Panini Classic logo

Former Pop Warner players Matt Ryan and Ray Rice

3 highlight stickers with images from 2011 Pop Warner Super Bowl

Adding these stickers to our album give us our first completed page.

 The Completed Pop Warner page

In addition to these stickers, there are a limited amount of stickers that have letters on the back, like this one with the letter "F."

Collect enough of them to spell "FOOTBALL" like this...

send them to Panini following the rules and you could win some great prizes like t-shirts, bags, trading cards and stickers.  All the details and contest rules can be found on the Pop Warner page, which is page 70 in the Panini NFL Sticker Album.

To find out about Pop Warner Football and the other great programs run by the Pop Warner organization for both boys and girls, check them out at www.popwarner.com

Be on the look out for more additions to our sticker album next week.