Jeff Skeen stopped the car carrying his 17-year-old daughter from the 2001 Celtic Cup soccer tournament in San Bernardino, California, after she told him she felt sick.  Once outside, Lauren, who had been knocked unconscious by head-to-head contact during the final five minutes of the tournament’s championship game, collapsed again — this time waking to a violent fit of convulsions right there on the shoulder of Highway 16. “I was flipping out,” says the elder Skeen.  “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever been through in my life.”

Scary as it was for dad, the roadside ordeal did little to shake Lauren’s vision of one day playing collegiate soccer.  After all, she had already suffered one loss-of-consciousness concussion the year before with little apparent residual effect.

Jeff, meanwhile, began to brush up on soccer-related head injuries, polling Lauren’s teammates about concussions and reviewing existing sports medicine research on the topic.  A former motocross racer whose own repeated concussions eventually led to brain surgery, Skeen had worked for motorcycle and racecar helmet manufacturers before launching a company that produced equestrian and bicycle helmets.  Still, he was surprised how little he understood about soccer’s inherent injury risks.  “I never thought there would be a need for head protection in soccer,” he says.

He discovered that such a product existed, but couldn’t convince Lauren to wear it.  Then one of her Torrey Pines High School (Sacramento) teammates was felled by a head-to-head collision in a game early last year, and Jeff decided to get back into the headgear business.

Even Lauren eventually got hip to wearing soccer headgear — that is until referees made her remove hers before a California Interscholastic Federation semifinal last year.  As it turned out, an elbow to the temple suffered in that game ended Lauren’s soccer career.  “That’s when I went from interested in pursuing a solution to furious,” her father says.

Skeen channeled his anger into a new venture, called Full90 Sports.  As Lauren endured persistent headaches in the year and a half following her third concussion, Jeff continued tweaking his company’s soccer headgear (based on a patent purchased from an existing manufacturer), seeking input from high-profile players and coaches, and “fighting bureaucracy” among soccer’s rule-makers, he says.  He faced similar challenges to those encountered while marketing bicycle helmets in the mid-1980s.  The soccer community feared that allowing headgear in competition would be admitting that soccer is dangerous, potentially denting youth participation numbers nationwide.

One primary difference, Skeen says, is the added wrinkle afforded by soccer’s ongoing dangers-of-heading controversy, which he claims only diverts attention from the more serious issue:  incidental contact with objects other than the ball.  His product is designed to reduce the G-forces applied to the skull, brain and connective tissue during such contact from concussive levels (70 Gs) to subconcussive levels (30 Gs, for example), as determined by groups such as the American Academy of Neurology.  Independent labs, including Dynamic Research Inc. in Torrance, have validated such outcomes using head forms wired with sensors.  “We’re not saying that we’re going to prevent every head injury in soccer,” Skeen says. “But within the rules of the game and without changing the nature of the game, we’re trying to build a product that players want to wear and that can significantly reduce injuries.”

Thanks, in part, to Skeen’s lobbying, the rules have changed.  In March, the United States Soccer Federation announced that players would be allowed to wear any protective equipment — including headgear — that doesn’t pose a safety threat to other players.  FIFA, the sport’s international governing body, followed with a similar declaration in August.  The National Federation of State High School Associations, meanwhile, provided a written headgear go-ahead in July.

During the FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament completed last month, 11 players wore Full90 headgear — an adjustable headband made of thin, dense open-cell foam. “Since I’ve been wearing it, I don’t notice the pain or the ringing when I knock heads or get punched by the keeper in the back of the head,” says defender Joy Fawcett, a four-time World Cup participant on the U.S. national team.  Fawcett, as well as U.S. teammate Shannon MacMillan, are paid a nominal endorsement fee each time they wear Full90 equipment in competition, but Fawcett envisions a day when headgear use will be widespread (her nine-year-old daughter wears a Full90 product, though she was asked to remove it before a game this September, indicating that barriers still exist.)  “I think it will be a lot like shin guards,” Fawcett says. “I didn’t have to wear shin guards as a youth, and I hated to wear them at first.  Now I wouldn’t play in an international game without them.”

Skeen reported in mid-September that sales of his headgear (both models are priced under $30) were increasing exponentially by the week, reaching 12,457 units in the week prior to this writing. “Mark my words,” he says.  “Headgear will represent a product category in soccer on a par with shin guards within the next five years.  Not only is that good news for players, it will be good news for soccer.”

Paul Steinbach