As a high school football player, Elliot Kastner remembers reading the safety regulations listed on the back of his helmet during practice at Hawaii Preparatory Academy. He remembers practicing safe tackling techniques, and hearing from his coaches and trainers how football is a dangerous sport.
As a high school football player, Elliot Kastner remembers reading the safety regulations listed on the back of his helmet during practice at Hawaii Preparatory Academy. He remembers practicing safe tackling techniques, and hearing from his coaches and trainers how football is a dangerous sport.
But he doesn’t remember any talk about concussions. Or the effects of subconcussive hits, which don’t have the same force or impact, but occur more frequently and add up over time.
“In high school, they were talking about safety, but there wasn’t the whole concept that this is a bigger situation than anyone realizes,” Kastner said. “We have people who are potentially harming themselves and their future.”
He’s thinking of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease most commonly found in athletes who take repeated hits to the head, such as football and hockey players. Initially, it was thought to be found only in boxers. Symptoms don’t appear until about a decade after the hits were sustained.
It’s a numbers game, Kastner said. And it starts with the amount of practice time versus the amount of game time.
“You practice five days a week, you play a game on one day,” Kastner said. “Every practice, let’s say you come into contact (with another player) 100 times … multiply that by five, by a 10-week season.”
In 10 years, a player could have had 50,000 contacts.
“You’re not hitting somebody every day of the week, but just thinking about that number, and assuming that even a fraction of those could be subconcussive … how is that going to affect me?” Kastner said. “It’s sad to think that a kid could have played high school football and pay the price of it for the rest of his life.”
When Kastner, now 25, arrived at Dartmouth College in 2009 to suit up as a defensive lineman for coach Buddy Teevens, he found that the Big Green had eliminated full-contact practices entirely. Last year, that policy became standard in the Ivy League.
During his senior year, Kastner and two fellow engineers began developing a robotic dummy that could be used during practice drills. Teevens helped fund the first project.
“Anywhere you would have a player coming in contact with another … can we remove that?” Kastner said. “It’s inherently much safer.”
After graduation, Kastner and his classmates founded Mobile Virtual Player to take the tackling dummy to the next level. Unlike standard-issue tackling dummies, MVP is motorized and moves at human speed; it zips around the field like a prop from a poltergeist movie (the poltergeist is a remote control).
The units are being used by several NFL teams, including the Baltimore Ravens, Carolina Panthers, Dallas Cowboys, Los Angeles Rams, Oakland Raiders, Pittsburgh Steelers and San Francisco 49ers. Dartmouth is using MVPs, as is West Virginia University.
“It’s been a phenomenal experience to train with these elite-caliber coaches and really get their insight into how the product could be better,” Kastner said. It was phenomenal, too, knowing that “they already loved the product and interacting with it.”
MVP works with Rogers Athletic, a football equipment company, to produce the equipment and sold 25 units this fall. A limited release of MVPs takes place in January.
“I hope to say it’s going to make a difference,” Kastner said. “I’d like to think that we’re making progress in figuring out a way to make a sport that so many people love a little safer.”
It will be some time before MVP technology trickles down to high schools — a unit costs about $8,000 — but the Dartmouth team and Teevens also are working on developing a philosophy of education at the youth levels.
Coaches “were using effective drills, but there are drills that are safer to help players maintain their longevity in the sport,” Kastner said. The group looks to rugby for inspiration, where players experience fewer concussions despite playing helmet-less.
“That’s just through slightly different techniques,” Kastner said. “It wouldn’t really modify the game much at all.”
Some companies are developing virtual reality programs to give second- and third-string players a chance to experience a drill without actually being on the field.
“They’re getting those firsthand reps in a much more realistic scenario than just watching film,” Kastner said.
Playing for Teevens, who has been at the forefront of the football safety movement, was an eye-opener for Kastner.
“The words that motivated me the most (were), ‘We have to change the way we teach the game, or we aren’t going to have a game to teach,’” he said.
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.