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The generosity of some anonymous donors will help with the safety of Fremont High School football players starting this fall. Joe Sajevic, the executive director of the Fremont Public Schools Foundation, said the donors wanted the organization to facilitate the purchase of 130 Riddell SpeedFlex Helmets for the Tigers. The total cost is about $52,000. "These are top of the line helmets and it is a pretty neat deal for the kids," Sajevic said.
At the Super Bowl on Sunday, 20 players will hit the field wearing Riddell Precision-Fit helmets. What's special about this gear is that they fit the contours of the athlete's head — down to the half-millimeter. Riddell, which has been making helmets and other protective sports gear since 1929, unveiled the technology behind its Precision Fit helmets in early 2017. This season, 150 NFL players wore the protective gear. The company starts by sending a technician to take multiple 3D light scans of a player's head. One scan is done of the player while they wear a tight neoprene hood. Another is performed with the player wearing a helmet at the exact angle they like to wear it during a game.
Football is a violent game, and Ohio State is doing every thing it can to protect its athletes. To exemplify this, the football program released a video Wednesday afternoon detailing its helmets. They feature Riddell's Precision-Fit technology, which debuted in 2017 and was first used by Colgate University back in March. "Riddell reps come in and do a 3-D scan of every guy's head," head football equipment manager Kevin Ries explains. "Each Precision-Fit helmet is customized to each individual player that is then finalized with a signature in the back of the helmet so you know it's designed for this individual player."
Innovation in sports often follows calamity. Nearly 80 years ago, Riddell invented the plastic football helmet to slow an epidemic of broken skulls. Now, amid the growing realization of how rampant brain injuries are in the sport, the company is reimagining the football helmet, pushing beyond protection into detection. And that’s meant reinventing itself as something more like a tech company—not an easy task for an 88-year-old business built on manufacturing. “This is a very big bet for us,” says Thad Ide, who runs Riddell’s research and development arm. “We think that in a few years, it will be hard to buy a helmet without sensors. We’re all in.”
The Bulldogs football program recently received a $10,000 Smarter Football Equipment grant through Riddell, an American sports equipment company best known for its football helmets. Principal Dwayne Dykes said the school found out they received this grant two days after Kelly informed him of the incoming shoes. “It was a good week,” he said. However, the person breaking the news may have aroused more excitement out of the football players than the gift itself. Louisiana native Peyton Manning, the former NFL quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts and Denver Broncos, delivered the news to the team in a video that was uploaded to YouTube on Oct. 10, starting off with a cheerful “Greetings Bulldogs.”
The San Antonio-area Pop Warner youth football league saw participation numbers fall almost 25 percent in 2016, almost matching the national trend that reached 35 percent. The downward slide ended this year. Local participation increased 3 percent, contrasting another hefty national dip of 15 percent. Representatives from Texas Youth Football & Cheer Association in San Antonio also reported no declines in enrollment. Stacy O’Dell, whose kids have been a part of San Antonio Pop Warner for five years, said it has “always been safety first,” citing the presence of either a paramedic or a nurse at every game. Riddell specialists also fit the athletes with helmets and educate the parents before each season begins.
A new addition of gear will help with concussion prevention and safety. Thanks to Crawford Memorial Hospital, The United Way of Crawford County and Bay Safety, county schools will receive new high-tech football helmets. It's a project that totals out to about $18,000. For Rawlings, the new helmets serve as another set of eyes for the training staff.
As the high school football season wraps up, the Omaha Public School District is taking a hard look at data collected from the high-tech helmets each of its seven teams started wearing this year. All OPS high school football teams began wearing the Riddell Speedflex helmets with InSite technology this fall. The helmets send off alerts each time they detect a hard hit. At the start of the year, coaches and trainers had no idea how often the helmets would send an alert. "I think the initial fear was that these sensors would go off quite a bit and that it would keep our coaches from coaching," said OPS supervisor of athletics Steve Eubanks. Eubanks said the feedback from coaches and trainers has been incredibly positive. "The helmets have been a tremendous tool," Eubanks said. "N0. 1, for just assessing the student."
Football may be America’s favorite sport, but it’s taken a bruising. Former NFL players’ posthumous diagnoses with the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, aka CTE, have spurred lawsuits as well as growing concerns about the safety of athletes who aren’t pros. We visited a Chicago-area helmet maker to see how it’s tackling the issue. You may not be able to notice the difference in the Bears’ new quarterback Mitch Trubisky, and the Bears aren’t saying anything about it. But one day soon, he’s going to hit the field wearing a new helmet – one made just for him. Trubisky is one of 130 NFL players who have ordered the latest in headgear from Riddell, according to the company headquartered in suburban Des Plaines. Riddell has deep roots in the Chicago area, reaching back to when John T. Riddell was coaching an Evanston high school football team in the early ‘20s and invented removable cleats.
Many schools nationwide are upgrading their football teams' helmets with impact sensors in an effort to lower the number of head injuries. According to the company's website, the Riddell InSite Impact Response System is a helmet-based impact monitoring technology designed to alert coaches and trainers when significant single or multiple impacts are sustained during a football game or practice. When a player is impacted, a five-zone sensor pad built inside the helmet determines the intensity.
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