Simon Fraser University football coach Dave Johnson didn't like the way his team's 2008 season ended, especially for the damage it had inflicted of some of his players. The Clansmen finished that season with four starters lost to season-ending concussions, including one player who wound up sitting out the 2009 season as well.
So when Johnson heard about a new football helmet using air shock absorbers instead of foam for protection, he decided to give the gear a shot.
"I'm thinking, something is wrong," Johnson said. "I got a hold of the Xenith helmet guy and told him I need our players to be better protected."
Twenty Simon Fraser players tried the Xenith helmets in the 2009 season and all of them avoided concussions, which is why 70 of the team's 98 players are wearing them this season.
"This year we've had seven concussions but zero with the guys who are wearing Xenith helmets," Johnson said. "Now, when a kid is concussed he goes through the normal procedure but when he comes back he must wear a Xenith helmet. That's my deal. After this year it's going to be non-negotiable. You probably think they pay me - they don't. And we don't get free helmets."
Xenith, a company based in Lowell, Mass., developed the technology with research assistance from the University of Ottawa. Xenith is located nearby Boston University, where a research team has exposed the long-term danger of concussions sustained by football players by linking a debilitating brain disease to repetitive head trauma. The university also found the disease in long-time hockey player Reggie Fleming, as first reported by The Globe and Mail last December.
Much of the Boston University's work to date is based on postmortem exams of former NFL players - originally, six players who had died between the ages of 36 and 50 were found to have suffered from the disease, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and more recently the number of proven cases has jumped to more than 20 former NFLers.
But the university has also found early stages of the disease in two young players, an alarming discovery for youth, high school, junior and university coaches such as Johnson.
In January of 2009, researchers reported that the brain of a deceased 18-year-old high school player showed early signs of CTE.
"The findings are very shocking because we never thought anybody that young could already be started down the path to this disease," Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon at BU Medical Centre and a co-director of the brain study institute, told reporters at a press conference. "It should send a powerful message to people at every level of football that they need to care about this issue and treat concussions with respect."
Last month, after a 21-year-old lineman at the University of Pennsylvania committed suicide, doctors discovered CTE in its early stages. The New York Times reported that Thomas's suicide should not be definitively linked to the brain damage associated with football, because of the prevalence of suicide among university students. However, depression is associated with the disease and the player, Owen Thomas, was reported to be popular, with no history of depression.
Concussions are prevalent again this season in pro football. Toronto Argonauts quarterback Cleo Lemon missed a recent game, and Green Bay Packers pivot Aaron Rodgers may miss his team's game against the Miami Dolphins on Sunday.
The growing evidence has the sport looking for solutions to prevent, or at least mitigate, concussions. Certified for play in 2007, about 40,000 Xenith helmets have been sold but only a handful of players in the CFL and NFL wear them, as both leagues have deals with Riddell, a traditional helmet manufacturer. Edmonton Eskimos lineman Patrick Kabongo is wearing one this season, as are some of the Indianapolis Colts, including centre Jeff Saturday.
Johnson calls himself a "believer" in a technology that was inspired one night in 2004 when Vin Ferrara, a former Harvard University quarterback, watched hockey star Eric Lindros sustain at least the seventh concussion of his career, while playing for the New York Rangers.
At the time, Ferrara was completing a joint degree in medicine and business administration at Columbia University in New York and looking for entrepreneurial opportunities in the health-care field.
"It resonated with me how absurd it was that an elite athlete was being knocked out of his sport," Ferrara said. "My reaction was, they need better helmets. They also need better education and teaching."
Thus began Ferrara's quest to learn all he could about head injuries and helmets, how they worked and how they didn't.
"What I learned was that what you really needed was a system that was adaptive to hits, something that provided increased resistance to increased energy levels," Ferrara said. "In football, a typical football player is experiencing countless low-energy hits than can add up over time like jabs add up to a boxer. But they can also be susceptible to high-energy hits. Those hits warrant different responses."
Ferrara's epiphany came one day when he reached for a ribbed squeeze bottle in his medical cabinet and noticed how it was built like an air shell shock absorber.
"I looked at it and said, 'That's the answer,'" Ferrara said. "No matter how hard I hit it, I couldn't hurt my hand."
But how to turn that into a helmet? Ferrara took his idea to the University of Ottawa and Blaine Hoshizaki, the vice-dean of affairs for health sciences. Before joining the university in 2004, Hoshizaki had been vice-president of research and development for Bauer, designing helmets for the hockey manufacturer, and later for CCM.
A sponsored research agreement between Ferrara's Xenith start-up company and the school led to the creation of a lab and a project aimed at creating a safer football helmet.
"I liked his idea but it required a lot of engineering," Hoshizaki said. "We tested it and proposed some changes to it. We had to develop a system that was dynamic, that could manage even one-and-a-half-milliseconds. We built the structure, then engineered the collapse rate, then used air to mange the rate it allows it to collapse at. Air gives you a wider range of function and a more effective system to manage energy."
What emerged was a helmet padded with 18 thermoplastic air shell shock absorbers that accept all ranges of force, thus moderating all sudden movements of the head that can bruise the brain and cause concussions.
"The effect you get is like a bike pump," Ferrara said. "There's a softer feel and more compression at lower energy and a stiffer feel at higher energy. It's almost like you're creating an intelligent super scalp."
The University of Ottawa also made sure it tested the new design by measuring angular acceleration, hits that come from various angles that cause the head to swivel, rather than jus those that come from head-on.
"That's where the future is," Hoshizaki said. "I think this is the tip of the iceberg and I think the future of helmet technology will involve three-dimensional systems that will manage linear and angular acceleration of the head. That's what we're doing and our first product was the Xenith system."
Xenith helmets are also being worn in Canada by teams at the universities of Ottawa and Calgary this season as well as some Canadian high schools.
A report released by Xenith last February showed that among a study group of 534 high school players who wore the helmets for seven teams last fall, 20 suffered concussions for an occurrence rate of 3.75 per cent. According to Xenith, that constitutes a 60-per-cent relative risk reduction from those teams' prior experience.
Ferrara already has a prototype batting helmet in the works and, coming full circle to the night he watched Lindros fall, has designs on a hockey helmet to follow.
"There's so much more to do and we're not saying problem solved," Ferrara said. "But we think the feedback and the data we're getting show we're on the right track."