Prior to last season, when a University of Alabama football player was injured in a game, he would be rushed to the sidelines and instantly a flurry of cameras would surround him. Seemingly, the more a player would grimace at the amount of pain that they were in, the closer the cameras would come.
So, thanks to a suggestion from the director of sports medicine at Alabama, Jeff Allen, players now have a special tool to give them a bit of privacy when they are injured. Allen and some members of the College of Engineering designed the SidelinER, and now they are partnering up with Kinematic Sports LLC, a company in an incubator within Tuscaloosa, to further their creation.
The SidelinER is essentially just a tent that houses an assessment table for athletic trainers to evaluate a player’s injury. It is fairly easy to set up, thanks to some engineering students that worked on the project. The tent is still loud, but the layer of material provides all the privacy that a player and athletic trainer need. Check out the video below to see just how it is set up:
So far, it has been met with positive reviews from players.
“I like it personally, because when someone gets hurt, no matter if it’s serious or not, you can go in there and have them evaluate you without everyone looking or having a bunch of attention on you,” said Alabama receiver Richard Mullaney.
This has been such a success that the original developers and Kinematic Sports are set to bring the invention to the marketplace.
Allen filed a provisional patent last week in order to bring this idea to other programs, and give some of the students that originally worked on this design a good business opportunity. With nothing else like the SidelinER on the market, it looks like this could become very popular at the college and professional level, and not only in the sport of football.