Jonathan Conlon didn’t exactly yawn, but he didn’t get overly excited when he heard he and his Tolono Unity football teammates were going to be oversized guinea pigs this fall.
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“I didn’t think too much about it,” he said Tuesday before practice, “because I didn’t expect to get hit that hard.”
The junior offensive tackle certainly didn’t expect to get clobbered so thoroughly on the second-half kickoff in a Sept. 14 game that he would come up as wobbly as the Bears’ passing attack.
Conlon had a concussion and was done for the evening, but game medical personnel had a high-tech second opinion. A laptop computer indicated the blow he had absorbed likely was hard enough to cause a concussion, and that actually gave him peace of mind.
“I guess I was kind of glad we had it,” he said. “If I didn’t know how hard the hit was, I probably would have wanted to go back in the fourth quarter and maybe get hurt more.”
Concussions are a hot topic in football, especially lately because of the well-publicized controversy concerning the health plight of former NFL players. Unity, a school with 468 students in a small town near Champaign, is part of a research study being led by Steven Broglio, a professor of kinesiology and community health at Illinois.
Broglio is using technology in which small-impact monitors in helmets beam information to a Web-based system in an attempt to improve diagnosis and prevention of concussions.
This technology, called Head Impact Telemetry System, was developed by Simbex, a New Hampshire-based firm that began testing it in 2003 with the Virginia Tech football team. Helmet manufacturer Riddell began selling it in 2005 as the Sideline Response System under an agreement with Simbex.
A Simbex spokesman said about a dozen schools, including two high schools, currently use SRS, including Unity. The technology is used in other sports as well as in military helmets.
Broglio approached football coach Scott Hamilton late last fall about participating in the study. The coach was an especially willing listener because a half-dozen of his players had suffered concussions in 2006.
“It was something that really hit home,” Hamilton said. “I thought it could be very positive for the kids and program.
“It’s nice to have an extra tool to possibly evaluate for concussions.”
Hamilton particularly liked that Broglio would conduct a preseason test on each of Unity’s 32 varsity players to establish a baseline for neurocognitive function to make it easier to diagnose a concussion.
The laptop records every blow of any significance, showing the location and force of hits and the identities of the players absorbing them. Broglio’s ultimate goal is to devise a formula that can determine which kinds of impacts cause concussions.
He said he is studying high schools players because research on them is limited and they represent the largest number of football athletes.
“We’re trying to determine what the threshold for a concussion is for high school kids,” Broglio said Wednesday by phone. “How hard you have to hit them — and where — to cause a concussion.”
For now he has assigned a scientific guesstimate as to the combination of impact numbers that might cause such an injury.
If the computer records a hit above that threshold, a pager alerts the team’s trainer. That does not mean the player has a concussion, so he stays in the game unless he shows symptoms, though the trainer monitors him closely.
The pager goes off two or three times in a typical game. Hamilton said the team has had three concussions this season through six games.
If a player has, or is suspected of having, a concussion, Broglio tests him the next day and matches the results against the baseline study. If the results differ, the player remains away from contact until his symptoms disappear and he passes a retest. Conlon missed Unity’s Sept. 21 game and was cleared three days later.
On Tuesday, manager J.R. Burr monitored the system during contact drills. The laptop displayed various impact numbers, and arrows pointed at a red dummy-like head to show the location, direction and force of blows.
At one point a player left practice with flulike symptoms apparently unrelated to contact. Hamilton checked with Burr to be sure that was the case.
At another point a player asked if he had produced any noteworthy impacts.
“They like to see how bad they hit someone,” said Burr, who periodically would grab a player’s helmet and replace the small battery that joined the six impact monitors in a circular pattern near the top of the helmet’s interior.
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Broglio said it costs about $1,000 to equip a Tolono helmet with the SRS system and about another $30,000 for the sideline unit. He provided Unity’s equipment, except for about two dozen Riddell helmets that cost the school about $3,000.
Clearly, and unfortunately, cost will put SRS beyond the means of many high school football programs, although even those schools could benefit by instituting a baseline test. And all teams may benefit from research such as Broglio’s as well as from Simbex’s own research, perhaps in the development of safer helmets, including ones specifically for high school players.
“I think the bigger picture is if down the road this study can make the helmet safer and make this game a safer game,” Hamilton said of Broglio’s work, which the professor hopes will continue next season. “If we can make helmets safer and eliminate injuries, it will be a better game.”
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*Read Barry Temkin’s blog “Upon Further Review” at chicagosports.com/temkin