Southeast football team continues to use the Guardian Cap for Safety

The Southeast football team is using the Guardian cap during practices for a second season. The quilted-looking cap reduces impact up to 33 percent, according to the Guardian’s website.

“The padding is to help prevent concussions during practice and is used as a safety measure,” Southeast football’s co-head athletic trainer Ben Fox said.

The Guardian cap is a padded helmet cover that augments any existing helmet to make it flexible, soft and able to more effectively manage energy and mitigate repetitive blows, according to Guardian’s website. The cap is ideal for interior positions that accumulate daily sub-concussive blows such as offensive lineman, defensive lineman, linebackers, tight ends and other players that are subject to being hit in the head, the website states.

“We understood that there is a hotbed topic about concussions and wanted to address the issue to keep our players safe, in which we have them on players that play inside the box,” Fox said.

More than 100 colleges are customers of Guardian, the website states.

“The equipment, which is connected to the facemask with four elastic straps, cushions blows to knees, hands and the abdomen during inside run and position drills,” Fox said. “It also reduces sound and vibrational frequencies, insulates heat in direct sunlight, while preserving the helmets and decals for gameday.”

The caps are sold with a disclaimer “no helmet, practice apparatus, or helmet pad can prevent or eliminate the risk of concussions or other serious head injuries while playing sports.”

The goal of the cap is to reduce acceleration forces upon impact.

The physics from the tests show that an outer material of the proper density, stiffness and energy absorbing properties reduces the initial severity of the impact, according to research done by Guardian.

When the players make contact with each other the hard shell then has lower forces transmitted to it, and in turn conveys lower forces to the interior padding, and ultimately lower forces to the head.