Montreal company gets $195K NFLgrant
FieldTurf working on safer surface
TORONTO The NFL on Thursday coawarded US$195,000 to a Montreal manufacturer to help it develop a new, safer artificial turf playing surface.
FieldTurf Inc. is one of three 2018 grant winners in the fourth HeadHealthTECH Challenge, awarded by the NFL and Football Research, Inc. (FRI), in an initiative operated at Duke University.
If you or your children have ever played soccer, football, lacrosse or field hockey on artificial turf fields filled with gazillions of those tiny black rubber bits, odds are many were FieldTurf surfaces.
An industry leader since the last decade, FieldTurf ’s groundbreaking, softer, Canadian-developed, sand-and-rubber infill technology adorns 8,000 indoor and outdoor sports fields across North America, said Darren Gill, VP of marketing, innovation and customer service with FieldTurf Inc.
In a news release, the NFL said the grant will help FieldTurf to develop “technology for an all-new sports surface designed to reduce impact, while providing optimal playability when exposed to standard play.”
Barry Myers, director of innovation at Duke’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute that operates the HeadHealthTECH Challenge, told reporters on a conference call Thursday that about 20 per cent of NFL concussions “are head-to-ground impacts … That’s a real opportunity to help players if we can make the surface better and more friendly for the head.”
Gill said he was not at liberty to specifically describe what type of new, safer surface his company hopes to develop, other than to say FieldTurf might go in a “potentially entirely new direction” from sand and rubber infill for this initiative.
Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive VP for health and safety, told the conference call the league is “very excited to see that there are potential advances” in turf from safety standpoints, not just for the head but lower legs.
“We have been working on this for a period of time, working with the cleat manufacturers,” Miller said. “Advances made in turf, along the lines that FieldTurf is proposing, and hopefully will continue to develop, will be to improve safety for our players on those significant number of injuries that are suffered in the lower extremities.”
Especially ACL tears, often caused when a player’s cleat digs into any brand of artificial turf while the body keeps moving and twisting at the knee.
The other two grants awarded by the NFL and FRI are:
Corsair Innovations, Inc., based ■ in Plymouth, Mass. It received a second grant of $168,504, to continue testing its internal material for helmets, “an impact attenuation system.” Corsair first received a grant in 2015.
Yobel Technologies, LLC, a ■ startup in Starkville, Miss., that will use its $20,000 grant to test its “optimized, lightweight, energyabsorbent prototyped faceguard” designed to fit modern helmets.