Driving Progress Toward Better Protective Equipment

Ryan Sullivan, President of Xenith helmet company, attended the D.C. Symposium.

“I have three young boys, and there are millions of young athletes, both here in the United States as well as around the world,” said Sullivan. “The opportunity to help make athletics, especially the game of football, safer for our athletes is a very noble cause.”

“This forum provided the opportunity to interact with folks that we would hope will lead to collaboration and innovation down the line,” Sullivan said. “There’s a lot of people looking at different materials that could be applicable to our product and our technology.”

Sarah Gholston is Vice President of Merchandising at Russell Athletic, which manufactures shoulder pads.

At the Symposium, she noted Dr. Crandall’s research showing 43 percent of reported NFL concussions during the 2015 season are from helmet-to-body impacts—rules changes related to helmet-to-helmet hits have changed the ways players tackle and the resulting distribution of impact sources. Gholston suggested that kind of information can help inform her company’s designs.

“We can go back and look at the materials that we’re using in our exoskeletons and our foams,” she said. “I think they gave us some things to think about in terms of how we select our materials as we move forward.”

“The more we learn, the more we want to continue to push the envelope on materials and design,” she said.

Gholston also spoke about speeding up the time it takes to bring a product to market. “I think the more connectivity you have between the research, the innovation, and the manufacturing, you can really shorten those lead times,” she said. “And then you can also make sure what you’re bringing to market is going to do the job that you were hoping it could do.”

Erin Sanchez is a graduate student and research assistant at UVA’s Center for Applied Biomechanics. She was one of 20 students who was awarded a grant to attend the Symposium.

“My little brother plays football right now,” said Sanchez. “I thought that this would be a great opportunity, not only to learn from some of the best people in the field and experts in the field but also to contribute, to talk to other people during lunch, at meetings, and just to get a wider perspective than what I’ve had, which has been very biomechanics-based at our lab.”

“The most interesting conversation I’ve had today has been with someone in the Material Science side,” she said. “It was really cool listening to him talk about the different innovative foams that they’re developing, not just for football helmets but for different applications, and how it could be used.”

Dr. Richard Kent is a consultant to the NFL who designed the program for the Symposium.

He is Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Emergency Medicine at the University of Virginia as well as Deputy Director of UVA’s Center for Applied Biomechanics.

Dr. Kent spoke about the need to close the gap between innovators creating products and experts doing the leading research on concussion prevention. The Symposium, he said, was designed to bridge that gap.

“We want to try to bring those folks together, help inform the innovators about what tools might be available to them, how they might be able to better assess their products, better design their products,” he said. “Then also we want to bring the researchers to people that are actually bringing products to fruition, because a lot of times a researcher will answer a question, but won’t know how to apply it to the real world.”

“I think there’s that person working in his garage who’s got this great concept or a great idea and that may indeed have potential,” he said. “But that person may not have the resources, may not have the knowledge-base or the experience to make that product.”

“It takes a special person to be able to kind of take something all the way to market,” he said. “And that person is not necessarily going to know the most cutting edge injury biomechanics research and the latest study on concussion mitigation. So there again we’re trying to fuse those two groups of people.”