SportTechie’s Athletes Voice series features the views and opinions of the athletes who use and are powered by technology. Shawn Springs spoke about his childhood as the son of former NFL running back Ron Springs, entrepreneurship, and his impact protection company, Windpact, at SportTechie’s State Of The Industry conference at Barclays Center in Brooklyn in February.
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Shawn Springs grew up in the NFL, where his father Ron played six years with the Dallas Cowboys and two years with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. During that time, Springs got to know players and staff from his father’s era, even being tasked with bringing cups of Gatorade to coaches during practice.
Springs received All-American honors at Ohio State, and was chosen as the third pick in the 1997 NFL draft by the Seattle Seahawks. He was selected for the Pro Bowl in 1998, and went on to play 13 seasons in the league, including five years with Washington and one with the New England Patriots. In Seattle, employed by Microsoft co-founder and Seahawks owner Paul Allen, Springs got his first look at the world of technology entrepreneurship.
As the NFL’s concussion crisis deepened at the beginning of this decade, the reality of the risks associated with head injury were brought close to home. One of Spring’s father’s friends, retired Chicago Bear safety Dave Duerson, committed suicide in February 2011, donating his brain to researchers investigating the neurodegenerative disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Springs came across the technology behind Windpact near the end of his career in the NFL. The company uses small air pockets called “wind springs” to absorb impact energy. As the pockets compress, air is squeezed out through small holes, and once the force is removed, the pockets rebound to their full shape by sucking air back through those holes. Springs discovered the idea being used in car seats for babies, and realized that it could have a much wider application in a larger range of impact protection systems, including football helmets.
Springs and Windpact were featured in IMPACT: The Evolution of Football Helmets, a video feature produced by the Smithsonian Institution and SportTechie.
The Helmet He Chose
“The helmet that my dad wore in 1987 [and] the helmet technology that I wore in my last year in New England hadn’t changed much.”
“At that time there was no discussion or talk about the significance of having traumatic brain injuries or concussions or anything like that. I guess if the helmet wasn’t broke, why would you need to fix it? It was an old school Riddell VSR4 with the white squares in it, and the guys they played with it and that’s all they knew. They’d get their bell rung, and they’d just go back out.”
“I tried a Xenith on, but the truth of the matter is once a guy gets locked into a helmet that he likes, or something where it’s cleats that he likes, or shoulder pads that he likes, it’s hard to get the guy off that brand.”
“The only thing I thought about, we thought about, was ‘My Nike rep is coming in. I need these type of shoes if I’m playing in New England in the snow, or I’m playing in Washington, or I’m playing in New York, or we’re playing in Oakland.’ Things that we were more excited about was new spandex materials, new cleats, and everything from soft goods. The helmet was an afterthought.”
Athlete Mentality v. Safety
“I remember in eighth grade one time, my dad was leaning on a fence and I was playing safety. But my dad told me I was playing ‘safely.’ I was too far back so he was like ‘Get in there. You need to stick your face in there.’ And it was just a whole mentality and a culture show. My dad was all about just being physical toughness and being a football player and that’s what the game was about. And that’s what we learned early.”
“I don’t think there will ever be a time where a professional football player especially, but a professional athlete will ever turn down a [chance to play]. You have to save the athlete from themselves. Because, especially when you get to the pro level, the truth of the matter is even today, if you tell me if I had to get a concussion or wear something lighter for performance. What I would do, I probably would say ‘Well I’ll risk the fact that I’d get a concussion and I’m gonna make $7 million, or $10 million, because I can cover and I can run.’”
Teaching Smarter Tackling
“Pete Carroll and the guys at the Seahawks have done a fantastic job at spreading the message about how you should tackle properly without having your head involved.”
“I coached 11-year-old kids last year, and we started off teaching that tackling technique. And I had never seen that before and I think that’s going to permeate now throughout youth sports.”
“They’re teaching it to every defensive position. Everyone is being taught to hit that way through Pop Warner youth football. I think it’s just amazing now and I think that’s going to be one of the biggest game changers.”
“I think it’s a great way to tackle. It’s about getting the guy down on the ground. It’s good because you’re not getting the head involved. And, we clearly know, the elephant in the room is football is a beautiful sport when played correctly but if it’s not played correctly it can be very dangerous. So the truth of the matter is we need to be able to take the hits out of the game that involve the head.”
Entrepreneurship in the Evergreen State
“I got drafted here—New York—and I remember being drafted real high. I was the third overall pick, and I’m crying on draft day. I wasn’t crying because I went so high, I was crying because I didn’t even know where Seattle really was. ‘I’m going to the state of Washington? They’re terrible, right?’ And my dad was like ‘You need to stop crying. You’re going to be all right. Go out to Seattle.’ And it was one of the best things to happen to me because at the time Mr. Allen was purchasing the team and he had put up $300 million of his own dollars.”
“I was living in Bellevue, Washington, [or] Kirkview, Washington, at the time, and I was 21 years old, 22 years old. And I’m paying $2,700 in rent and I thought that was a lot. But everybody who lived in my neighborhood was the same age and I was like ‘Man, how are you affording to live here?’ [A friend] was like ‘I got the same boss as you. I work for Microsoft.’”
“Then my other buddy he said like ‘I’m about to start for this other company selling books online.’ I was like ‘Man, that’s a dumb idea!’”
“I remember one day I was asking Mr. Allen. I said ‘Mr. Allen, did you know you were going to be a billionaire?’ Because it’s not like today where these startups are just going crazy becoming billionaires. But he was like ‘Shawn, when me and William, me and Bill, started in a 150-foot office in Bellevue, it wasn’t about being a billionaire. It was about being disruptive on the internet and doing something that we thought was going to change the world and exciting.’ And that stuck with me.”
The Opportunity in Helmet Redesign
“I spent the first three, four years just studying the industry. Because I was really confused why helmet technology hadn’t changed.”
“And the reason I realized helmet technology hadn’t changed is, one, when Riddell or the helmet guys went from a leather helmet to a polycarbonate shell, they were solving for skull fractures. It was a different problem. You fast forward 50 years later we’re solving for traumatic brain injuries and CTE and people didn’t know that was a real issue. The second thing I realized was there was kind of a disconnect between the medical professionals and the guys who were actually building the helmets. You’ve got guys over here trying to understand how the brain is functioning, how things were working. But the guys who were building the helmets knew that they had a price point. They need to understand what their customers want and where, and make it affordable so they can actually make a profit. And the third thing, there was not enough push from the bottom, until TIME magazine put a deflated football on the cover of the magazine.”
“The opportunity was right to think about football. But as I started to look into how we wanted to deploy the technology, I didn’t want to be a football helmet company. I didn’t want to be VICIS, I didn’t want to be Xenith, because I knew competing against the Schutt and Riddells of the world you have to raise 200 million bucks. I didn’t want to do that.”
Windpact’s Expertise
“Most people think of us as a sports helmet company, a sports technology company … But Windpact, we like to say we’re a technology and applied science company that focuses on impact protection.”
“The cool thing about the technology is we can tune it. A football helmet may be a little different from a hockey helmet. We do chest protectors. We also work in an automotive space for headliners where we solve for impact protection.”
“I get to work with some really exciting engineers because we use a lot of [finite element] analysis and a lot of modeling. And I learned a lot of that from my days being back in Seattle. I knew guys from Boeing and I was always asking questions about material characteristics and things that I might have missed in a few of my mechanical and aerospace engineering classes at Ohio State.”
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