May June 2024 - 53

performance over time. That's the same thing with a surface.
"
If you buy a car and you never change the tires, you never
change the oil, and you never maintain the car, it will lose
"
CAD: While there's plenty of research around head
injuries-and rightfully so-is there any research into
lower leg injuries?
Barber: Recently attention has evolved from only
focusing on head impact to looking at what turf surfaces
are doing as it relates to lower leg injuries. There are a lot
of people that are playing sports on turf surfaces that they
were not designed for. So for instance, being in, heavily
studded cleats, but on a turf field that wasn't designed
necessarily to deal with those kinds of cleats. And in a
lot of cases that can create injuries that hopefully can
be avoided.
I think people are looking at surfaces, not just from a
competitive standpoint, but from a player's safety and a
training perspective as well. A lot of times what you see
on Saturday and Sunday are not the fields that people are
practicing on. Those are the game day fields. There's been
a lot more investment in protocols that are making those
training fields where people are practicing five, six days a
week and spending most of their time on making sure that
we're elevating the standards that they're
being required to live up to.
CAD: What advice do you have regarding
field and turf maintenance?
Barber: Maintenance is required to keep
that surface at its optimal performance.
Not only from performance and speed
standpoints but also from a safety
perspective.
A lot of people are investing more
and more in maintaining their surfaces.
Historically, it's sort of like a car. If you
buy a car and you never change the
tires, you never change the oil and you
never maintain that car, it will start to
lose performance over time. That's the
same thing with a surface. It needs to be
maintained. Take infill in a turf field, for
example. When you play on that field,
you're constantly migrating the infill-
those little black pellets typically, and
there are a lot of different types of infill
today from cork to wood pellets to all sorts
of alternatives to traditional rubberized
infill. That infill will migrate over time.
COACHAD.COM 53
And wherever your most active points are on a field,
whether that be in the crease or between the hash
marks on a football field, you're typically migrating that
infill as people drag their feet and do all those things.
And you see the rubber fly up. It's actually moving to
different parts of the field. And wherever that rubber
moves, it creates significant deltas in performance,
not just from a head impact or GMAX perspective,
but from an actual speed perspective and playability
perspective. So there are tactics that people need
to put in place to make sure that they're consistently
maintaining that field to make sure that that infill is
distributed over time.
I think maintenance is the one thing that people need
to be focused on that traditionally they were not. That'll
help elevate the performance both from an ergonomic
and safety perspective in a significant way.
To view the full conversation with Barber and
Ecore, as well as all our other conversations, visit our
TechTime landing page, coachad.com/techtime.
http://www.coachad.com/techtime http://www.COACHAD.COM
May June 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of May June 2024
