WXII (Winston-Salem, NC)
February 19, 2025
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — The game of football and the football helmet itself have both changed a lot since John Zeglinski played wide receiver and running back for the Wake Forest Demon Deacons in the mid-1970s.
“I love the game. It does so many life lessons, teaches you lots of things about life. We want to make kids safer, you know? Participation is going down,” Zeglinski said.
“Ziggy,” as his friends call him, racked up nearly 2,000 yards of total offense at Wake and was inducted into the university’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2019 for both football and baseball. For the last seven years, though, his work has focused on safety and technology within the game.
Today, he is the CEO of SAFR Sports, a company based about 30 miles west of Philadelphia, which sells a football helmet cover that he claims can dramatically reduce concussions in players of all ages.
“When two hard objects hit, the energy is transferred to the brain, okay? The inside of the helmets are great but that’s great for skull fractures. But when the objects hit, the energy transfers. Our product captures, and dissipates force, deflects force. And it’s actually spring-loaded, so it actually moves a little on contact, which also dissipates force,” Zeglinski said.
One of his former teammates at Wake, Dr. Tom Fehring, is now an orthopedic surgeon in Charlotte. He recalls randomly running into Ziggy at an airport a few years ago and initially being skeptical about what his old friend was telling him about his new company and promising lab test results.
“Send me the data,” Dr. Fehring recalls saying to Zeglinski.
“It can’t be 70 percent better than a helmet alone. And I run it by one of my Ph.D. scientists in my institution and they go, ‘This is the real deal.’ And so he goes, ‘OK, it’s great, now we can start making everybody wear it!’ And I go, ‘Well, let’s slow down a little bit. You don’t have on-field clinical data yet.'”