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The sight was a common one for Andrew Kolpacki. For many a Sunday, he would watch the National Football League (NFL) games on TV and see quarterbacks (QBs) putting their hands on their helmets, desperately trying to hear the play call from the sideline or booth as tens of thousands of fans screamed at the tops of their lungs.
When the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA’s) playing rules oversight committee this past spring approved the use of coach-to-player helmet communications in games for the 2024 season, Kolpacki, Michigan State’s head football equipment manager, knew the Spartans’ QBs and linebackers were going to have a problem.
“There had to be some sort of solution,” he said. As it turns out, there was. And it was right across the street.
Kolpacki reached out to Tamara Reid Bush, a mechanical engineering professor who not only heads the school’s Biomechanical Design Research Laboratory but also is a football season ticket-holder.
Kolpacki “showed me some photos and said that other teams had just put duct tape inside the (earhole), and he asked me, ‘Do you think we can do anything better than duct tape?” Bush said. “And I said, ‘Oh, absolutely.’”
Bush and Rylie DuBois, a sophomore biosystems engineering major and undergraduate research assistant at the lab, set out to produce earhole inserts made from polylactic acid, a bio-based plastic, using a 3D printer. Part of the challenge was accounting for the earhole sizes and shapes that vary depending on helmet style.
Once the season got underway with a Friday night home game against Florida Atlantic on August 30, the helmets of starting quarterback Aidan Chiles and linebacker Jordan Turner were outfitted with the inserts, which helped mitigate crowd noise.
“We kind of just did this as a one-off favor to the Texans and honestly didn’t forecast it becoming our viral moment in college football,” said Jeff Klosterman, a vice president at XO Armor Technologies, which provides on-site, on-demand 3D printing of athletic wearables. “We’ve now got about 60 teams across college football and the NFL wearing our sound-deadening earhole covers every weekend.”
“It can be just deafening,” Kolpacki said. “That’s what those fans are there for is to create havoc and make it difficult for coaches to get a play call off.”
This article was provided by The Associated Press.