February 10, 2025
WESTFIELD, MA (WGGB/WSHM) – With the football season now officially over, NFL players have a few months off. For most, that means some rest and relaxation but, for those who were injured on the field, it’s a time to recover and efforts remain ongoing to keep players safe now and well into their retirement.
It’s no stretch to say football is a full contact sport and, while injuries can and do occur in any athletic competition, the gridiron presents its own set of challenges. “I think player safety has become the forefront, rightfully so. I mean it’s a physical sport, you want to protect the kids,” said Westfield State University football coach Lou Conte Jr.
Conte Jr. has spent more than two decades in college football. He’s the first to admit that injuries are top of mind for many, both players and parents. “It’s become a bit of a fear. It’s become a bit of a stigma where at least some younger kids aren’t playing as much or people are holding out until they’re comfortable with the physicality of the game,” Conte Jr. explained.
That’s where Conte Jr. said long hours of conditioning, training, and practice come in, as well as the Guardian cap. It’s become more and more common in both college and professional football but, while it’s not unusual for players to wear them during practice, especially for lineman at both the collegiate and professional levels, as Westfield State University football equipment manager Kathy Seltis explained it’s still not something you’ll see very often during a game. “The biggest complaint is ‘I don’t want to put that on.’ [Reporter: is it simply aesthetics…they think they look silly or does it actually affect game play?] No, they don’t want to wear…a big sponge on their head,” she explained.
That sponge is actually a soft shell that fits over the hard shell of a football helmet and it’s designed to reduce the impact of player collisions to the head. Recently, those collisions have come to the forefront in studies that are looking for the cause of something called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. “So CTE is a neurodegenerative disease. It’s similar to other neurodegenerative disease that we might be familiar with like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s Disease, but it looks differently in the brain,” said Dr. Dan Daneshvar, a brain injury medicine doctor and director of the LATE-TBI Lab at Mass General Brigham.
He said, even though the current understanding of CTE, is still relatively new, we’ve known about it for quite some time, especially as it relates to boxing. “So the first time that CTE was described in the literature was in 1928 by a Dr. Named Harrison Martlin and he called it punch drunk syndrome,” Daneshvar added.
As it turns out, CTE isn’t endemic to boxing or football or any one specific sport or activity, but scientists do say it’s at least in part caused by repeated brain trauma. “Your brain doesn’t care what hits it. If you’re getting hit in the head repetitively, that could put it at risk,” Daneshvar explained.
It’s that risk the Guardian cap is designed to reduce, but by exactly how much is still in question. “As they’ve done the tracking, they’ve found that, over the period of time in the study, that the number of concussions has been diminished by a certain percentage,” Saltis noted.
In fact, preseason injury data released by the NFL for 2024 showed the fewest number of concussions in practices and games (44) since tracking began in 2015 and a nearly 50 percent reduction in concussions among players wearing the Guardian cap in mandated sessions versus the pre-mandate average. However, the NFL also credited more than just the Guardian cap and said it’s one part of a holistic approach to prevent injuries that also includes education of proper techniques and a better understanding of what causes concussions.
It’s a familiar refrain echoed by Conte Jr.: prioritizing practice, prioritizing safety equipment, and most importantly, prioritizing the well-being of his Westfield State Owls both on the field and afterwards. “I want the sport to be around for as long as I’m around and I think player safety is going to be leading the charge to help that,” he said.
Guardian caps are currently used by more than 5,000 high schools, over 500 colleges, and all NFL players were permitted to wear them during games for the 2024 season.