NFL to allow Guardian Caps during games. Will it trickle down to high school football?

In recent years as football coaches of all ages search for ways to enhance the protection of the players, a new technology has emerged.

Following two years of players putting on Guardian Caps, an extra shell of padding that goes around helmets, during the training camp season, the NFL declared in April it would allow players to wear the helmet add-on during games. It demonstrates such information to support the fact that the caps do bring down the number of occurrence of concussion, Ohio High Schools are likely to take notice.

However, despite the OHSSA allowing the usage of them in the games, players have not frequently deem it fit to use it. But the dab on the leather has been adopted in several schools worn in practices.

Toledo Christian’s head football coach, Andrew Skeels said that linemen and linebackers in his team have been using the Guardian Caps while practicing for five years and last year the Funds provided by parents helped in purchasing caps for the rest of the varsity team.

“As all the studies came out regarding head injuries and concussions, I was talking to a man from Guardian and he was simply explaining to me that these are used to help to avoid such things,” Skeels stated. “To our credit, into the first year we had them, we did not have any of those happen during practice time. ”

To date, many of the schools that use the Guardian Caps depend on donors or parents to fund them since their acquisition is costly once a whole team has been outfitted. The price for a single cap ranges from $60 -$70.

Chuck Jaco a Athletic Director of Perrysburg High School said that due to the dorns and damages helmet need to be replaced, and thousands of bucks have to be spend for inspecting the helmet most of the football crazy people do not know the cost incurred for the equipment used in the sport. When donors in Perrysburg provided Guardian Caps for the team to use during practice, Jaco surmised that if OHSAA wants the caps later in the future, it is the second issue to worry about the finances, more than players’ safety.

“If that became a mandate, you would find a way to build that in and make that work within your budget”, he said. “It’s interesting to learn that between the athletic department, the school district and the football fund-raising account you’d be able to make that work You just have to be a little creative about it I don’t believe that would be too big of a hurdle. ”

However, any questions that one can have about an OHSAA mandate, seems extremely premature. Of course, the safety of the player is a concern; however, the organization still needs much more information before they demand new accessories. When asked about the reasons for disbelief, Beau Rugg, the director of officiating and sports management for the OHSAA listed some of the following.

First, helmet manufacturers may cancel warranties, if players put on the Guardian Caps, so it is even more costly to replace helmets as soon as they deteriorate. Second, new procedures that have been put in place concerning contact in practice and tackling have already reduced the instances of concussion by a great deal. Finally, still there is not enough scientific information about possible side effects of Guardian Caps.

For instance, Rugg, the OHSAA’s football administrator, explained that moving the point of focus up may lead to a wear and tear on the neck part and thus in most likelihood cause a spinal injury. He also said that helmets are meant to slide over each other and as for the padding, it reduces this slipperiness to some degree.

Disposing his thought process over a rule change, he stated that the only thing that he thinks about is safety.

“Price doesn’t really enter into it,” Rugg said. I asked him about the whole issue of their value; he said: “There is not much information regarding them; they weigh down the helmet; how do they help people? The existing tests regarding them are impact; do they reduce impact? Perhaps they do, but a concussion is not impact but rather the shaking of the head, although until a lot of data comes out, one cannot make a decision regarding them. ”

Based on the practices and the samples which have been subjected to impact tests in the laboratory, the caps are observed to have the ability to lessen impacts by up to a third, the rates of head injuries are lower, and besides, the blows on the helmets on the remainder of the body parts is minimized, but all this is based on laboratory experiments, and has not been demonstrated at full speed.

Dr. Ryan Szepiela, a sports medicine doctor from ProMedica who tends to several sports teams of the area, had certain level of apprehensiveness towards the new implementation of the technology. What struck him clearly was that the cushion and padding are protection against the impact, and he was able to understand the rationale used in using the mechanism the action. He said that, in order to minimize the possibility of any adverse side reactions though, it would require a few years of game data.

In addition to the first-order impact, he also raised a concern about a potential problem of misuse because extra padding leads to the players’ heads being lowered even more, a practice that the game has sought to banning.

“If it’s cutting even the 10 percent, or the 20 percent that the initial studies demonstrate, decrease in concussions without adverse effects, then it’s evidently something that you would like to do,” said Dr. Szepiela. “And who would not want to be safer and who would not want to decrease the possibility of being hurt now and in the future?”

Bob Spaite, the head of the Ohio High School Football Coaches Association, was quite uncertain about the necessity of more rules to be introduced and Guardian Cap regulation. From the advances in the design of helmets to changes in players’ tackling procedures, Spaite did not consider football to be more dangerous than other sports.

He further said that if parents took their children’s protection so seriously they would not allow their children to get into a car driven by a teenager as it is much more perilous than any game the child could engage in.

“The game is safer than it has ever been,” recapped Spaite. “Well, just me personally I think it is way too much But again, when people start discussing the safety of the players, you are never going to win an argument. ”

The notion that has always been kept close to their heart is that there is a dangerous risk always involved in anything you do and I mean anything and I think if we want to enjoy life we have to take it The positive aspects of football and the positive aspects of athletic competition so far overshadow any possibility of a catastrophic injury that is why it is my hope that this fact will always be kept in mind.

Therefore, the Guardian Caps topic is still in its infancy and the science and the states’ financial difficulties have yet to be addressed if the state is to alter its current policies. And frankly, if the NFL stays with the caps and presses on with implementing them into the game, it is only a matter of time before they filter down to Ohio high school play in the future.