It’s a late summer/early fall classic: Friday night high school football in Minnesota.

“Anything we can do to make the game safer is something we want to invest in,” declares Rick Fryklund, Park High School’s head football coach.  

For this game, it’s the Park High Wolfpack versus the Buffalo Bison.

But what’s with those green coverings on the Wolfpack players’ helmets?

“I don’t really feel it,” explains Brevin Vang, a junior-year linebacker. “I just look at my other teammates and I see they’re safe, and I see I’m safe. It’s good.”

The coverings are called guardian caps— attached to a helmet by Velcro, they’re an added layer of protection.

“It’s just like the padding we have inside the helmet,” says Jason Carr, whose son Zach, is on the Wolfpack varsity team. “The outside of it is padded, so that if a helmet hits onto our kid’s helmet, would reduce the impacts of it.”  

Amid the growing conversation about safety in football— as players suffer concussions and other injuries— the guardian caps are gaining attention from high school all the way to the NFL.

Park High has been using the caps during games for two seasons now.

The Wolfpack averages about ten concussions a year— but the caps have resulted in a thirty-percent decrease.

Fryklund says he’s seen the difference, both at practice and in games.  

“In practices, I control contact, volume, and intensity,” he notes. “In a game where I don’t, that’s where we really need to keep kids safe.”

Fryklund and state officials say the Wolfpack is the only high school team using the guardian caps right now.

He says Cottage Grove student-athletes in the football program are required to wear them, from grades 3-12.

“Our data says they work,” Fryklund says. “My takeaway is that it makes student-athletes safer.”

Concussion injuries are once again in the spotlight after Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa sustained his fourth concussion during an NFL game Thursday night.

Wolfpack wide receiver Eyuel Miftah, who’s seventeen, says it’s happened to him twice.

“I like blacked out for like fourteen seconds,” he recalls. “I remember like memory was one of the things that was a problem, sensitivity to light and sounds.”

That was during his freshman and sophomore years on the gridiron.  

But with this new protection, Miftah, now a senior, says his parents are permitting him to play again.

“Junior year, after I saw the first game of them wearing the guardian caps, my parents gave me a new chance to play the sport again.”

Now— NFL players are beginning to wear the caps as well.

“I’m not going to say it eliminates everything from happening,” Carr notes. “But it’s a great deterrent. It does a really good job of mitigating injuries and stuff on our team.”  

Fryklund says each guardian cap costs between seventy and eighty dollars— the total cost for all participants in the school’s football program is about $20,000.

He says the money comes from the team’s booster club and from area charitable organizations, with no cost to the school district.

“When I was playing before the guardian caps, I was a little worried about what would happen if I got another head injury,” Miftah says. “Now, I don’t think about it at all because you know you have something helping you out. At the end of the day, football is a good game, but health is more important than football.”