Football And Hockey Equipment Throughout The Years

 Knocks 6

Literature Review

Football and Hockey Equipment Throughout The Years Throughout the years, equipment such as football pads, cleats, and helmets have gone through drastic changes, as did hockey equipment, including hockey sticks. Companies such as Riddell, Bauer, Reebok, Nike, Under Amour, Cooper Canada, CCM, Easton, etc. have changed the way they made their equipment because of not only the wear and tear material that’s affecting the equipment on the field or the ice, but the material used to create the equipment has been shoddy. The Cooper XL7 helmet was one of the most popular hockey helmets around the 1980s, but in the latter years, the helmet began deteriorating due to the material that the helmet was made, including the

Most people in today’s society have heard of the term "leatherheads" but not know where it came from. The term leatherheads come from the helmets used in the early 1920s till the early 1950s (Daughters, 2013). Football helmets were never mentioned in the late 1800s as football was played in natural grass fields, and adapted from the popular English sport known as rugby (Daughters, 2013). The first college football game was between Princeton and Rutgers Universities, and they used no equipment to protect themselves with. That’s until 1890 when the Army and Navy squared off the first time in history, and the use of a helmet was born. The helmet revolution started expanding in the 1920s when Walter Camp decided to take it upon himself to fix the game of football by changing the field, how many players are mandatory on both offense and defense, and created the four-down and 10 system, where the offense has four tries to get past the first down marker, which is ten yards from the line of scrimmage. While Camp was changing the game of football, several players died from injuries, mostly the defense and thus, protective pads were invented to keep the defense from more severe injuries. Helmets themselves were an option for the players who think they would need them for safety reasons (Daughters, 2013). The National Football League (NFL) started on August 20, 1920 in Canton,

The helmets were deemed mandatory in 1939 and they were the first plastic helmets, with a face bar added on later on (Clarke, 2013). Around that time, the NFL decided it was time to make helmets mandatory in the league to protect their players. From the early 1940’s till the 1960’s, the helmet in both collegiate football and the NFL kept on evolving, so that the helmet can absorb impact upon collision between players. The helmet’s shape kept on expanding and more items were added upon the 1970s. Companies such as Riddell added foam cells inside the helmets to give the players more protection from incoming hits. The template of the 1970s model became the cornerstone of American football helmets, with the exception of custom-made face guards (current Oakland Raider’s defensive end Justin Tuck’s “Bane” concept). Today, the helmets are similar to the one back in 1970s, but with a polyurethane cap, which protects players from suffering head injuries such as concussions (Clark,