WAIMEA — Elliot Kastner hated Tackle Tuesdays.
The 2009 Hawaii Preparatory Academy graduate recalls his early days of football, when the defensive lineman tackled each other at practice, hoping that contact would translate to a better performance on game day.
“In a game, when am I ever going to be tackled by a 300 pound guy?” Kastner said. “I didn’t know how to take a tackle and those contacts were taking away energy and causing injuries for game day.”
Kastner, along with the rest of the Mobile Virtual Player (MVP) team, are hoping to make that kind of unnecessary practice contact a thing of the past with their revolutionary tackling dummy. The MVP is the first of its kind — motorized, remote controlled, and self-righting. It can make even the most agile of defensive players miss, and rolls through the 40-yard dash in around five seconds.
With the awareness of sub-concussive hits and concussions growing, the MVP hopes to lend a hand in tackling the problem and turning the conversation.
“In every drill, there is somebody taking a hit that is getting nothing out of it,” Kastner said. “We are trying to do our part to address the problem. Whether we have hit the correct solution right now or not, we are doing out best to protect players and make a better future.”
A dummy is born
After his time at Hawaii Prep, Kastner — an academic and multi-sport standout with Ka Makani — moved on to Dartmouth. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering and biomedical engineering from the Ivy League school, and also played defensive tackle for the Big Green.
While there, Kastner’s coach, Buddy Teevens, implemented the revolutionary idea to ban live tackling in practice to reduce injuries.
“It was a unique experience. I never touched our own quarterback or running back in practice. His philosophy was that you can recreate the scenario, but you probably already know how to make that contact,” Kastner said. “You don’t need to bash your head around more than you need to. There are a lot of valuable assets up there you need to protect.”
The results were undeniable. Not only did Dartmouth’s number of injuries drop, but so did the number of missed tackles.
However, Teevens still needed a way to simulate a moving target during practice. Enter — the MVP.
Teevens tasked Kastner and a few other students from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering to work on something that could help fill the void and create a safer, smarter and more realistic practice environment.
“We had to think about making something capable of taking a tackle from a full-sized adult, that could move and pop back up,” Kastner said. “Once all that was taken care of, it was about durability and having something that could sustain multiple hits. It took getting it out there every day, and breaking it every day.”
While a number of factors have contributed to Dartmouth’s recent success, the MVP has proved to be one of the MVPs for the program. In 2015, the team won a share of the Ivy League title — its first since 1996.
This year, the entire Ivy League has followed Big Green’s lead, banning tackling in practice.
“It really didn’t dawn on me until one day after practice. We were sitting down with a napkin and counting up the number of hits the MVP took,” Kastner said. “We would be out there for just part of the practice and it would take 70 hits. Now, say it’s at a full practice, and it’s taking 200 hits a day. Now multiply that over a career. If you can reduce even a fraction of those, we can help players have a healthier future.”
Rapid reaction
Very early on the in the process, a video was shared of a U.S. National Rugby Team player taking down the dummy. Kastner remembers watching the video rack-up views, eventually breaking the million mark.
“I never had a video go that big before,” Kastner said. “It escalated from there.”
The MVP has been a guest star on everything from SportsCenter to CNN and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert himself suited up in pads and a helmet and gave the dummy a tackle. The MVP was also the star of an episode of HBO’s Hard Knocks with the LA Rams.
“As far as media exposure goes, it has been unreal,” Kastner said.
While the dummy proved to be a viral hit, it also passed the test on the field. The MVP rolled into the NFL camps this year to resounding reviews.
“We have yet to have a team that has taken it and not liked it,” Kastner said. “Coaches find a use for it — whether that’s big or small.”
One of the coaches making a big use of the MVP is Steelers skipper Mike Tomlin.
“The applications we are quickly finding are endless. It never gets tired and it runs at an appropriate football speed,” Tomlin is quoted as saying on the MVP’s website. “In today’s NFL, with player safety the focus, I think it’s going to provide opportunities to improve without the hand to hand or man to man combat.”
Kastner said Tomlin didn’t even look through the manual before tackling the MVP himself.
“He was rattling off all these uses he thought he could get out of them,” Kastner said. “We dreamt of it as a tackling dummy, but he was thinking about defensive linemen pursing it for conditioning, or have it run routes like a wide receiver”
That opened the door for the MVP team to start thinking of other ways the dummy could utilized. The ideas ranged from rugby to ice hockey.
“Now, we have a great product, but we are thinking about how can we make simple modifications for other sports,” Kastner said.
Looking forward
This month, the NFL announced it is pledging $100 million to player safety as concerns about concussions continue to grow.
The league said the money will be used for “independent medical research and engineering advancements” to advance the “prevention, diagnosis and treatment of head injuries; enhance medical protocols; and further improve the way the game is taught and played by all who love it.”
The MVP hopes to be part of the improvement, but not just at the professional level. To help make the game of football safer, it starts with the youth, teaching safe and proper tackling techniques from a young age.
According to the statistics posted on the Rogers Athletic Company’s website — which has partnered with MVP — in youth football, 53 percent of all injuries and 46 percent of all concussions occurred during practice. The most common mechanism of injury was player contact. In high school football, 60-75 percent of head trauma occurs in practice, not in games.
“I expect to see a huge interest from the high school level,” Kastner said. “Parents are not sure if they want their kids playing football, and it’s a difficult choice. You don’t want to feel like you are putting your child in danger.”
Kastner said his ideal would be to have the MVP readily available for youth and high school squads around the nation. However, the price tag right now makes that a challenge. When the dummies roll out in January, the cost will be about $8,000 each.
“That’s unapproachable for a lot of high school teams, but we have had parents say they would all pitch in to pay for one,” Kastner said. “What’s the cost of a concussion or a lost player? There is no value there. It’s intangible.”