The NFL has announced the winner(s) of its two R&D grants that are part of its inaugural Healthtech Challenge. The challenge was designed to crowdsource ideas on how to improve the consistency and safety of field surfaces.
The organisers of the American Football competition have awarded Tarkett USD 59,000 for its Playmaster product, a backing-based hybrid turf system.
Fieldturf, another brand owned by Tarkett, received USD 41,000 to further iterate a new liquid surface modifier that is intended to accelerate the process by which a field settles and becomes firmer and safer.
Fieldturf happens to already be the leading supplier of synthetic turf surfaces in the NFL.
“It’s important for us to keep in touch with the industry and understand what new, innovative products, practices and approaches are out there that are going to help us better understand how to continue advancing and improving our surfaces for our athletes,” the NFL’s field director Nick Pappas said, while explaining the awards.
“The real goal is to try and improve consistency, not just location to location — that’s a huge one for us — but ultimately also improve consistency within a surface week to week, as the climate or the usage case or the business model may change throughout the year,” he added.
Pappas was talking about other uses of the stadiums, such as tenants from other sports competitions, concerts and other sporting and entertainment.
“We saw a pretty wide variety of things get presented to us, and that’s what we really wanted,” Pappas said of the 17 submissions to the challenge, explaining that the Joint Surfaces Committee “wanted to look at this and say, ‘What are the opportunities out there that we’re not thinking of?’”
The Joint Surfaces Committee was jointly created by the NFL and the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) to study injury reduction to lower extremities, following a perception that certain field types were more injurious than others.
In two of the past three seasons, the committee determined that non-contact lower extremity injuries were nearly identical on natural and artificial surfaces.