ST PAUL, Minnesota — The Super Bowl is this Sunday and while everyone is talking about the Patriots versus the Rams, another competition is happening the day before in Atlanta that involves a Minnesota company.
The St. Paul-based company TackleBar is a finalist in the Fourth Annual NFL 1st and Future competition—designed to spur innovation in player health, safety and performance.
Brigid and Jeremy Ling have four kids who love football. Several years ago their oldest child, 13-year-old Caleb Ling, reached a point where he was tired of playing flag football but his parents had concerns about their kids tackling at a young age.
But Caleb told them, "I don't want to play baby football anymore."
That's when the Lings started to develop TackleBar Football, a safer option for players that serves as a transition between flag football and tackle football. Players still wear helmets and shoulder pads but they also have a TackleBar harness around their waist; it has two foam bars at the back.
"Once they pull the bar off, they raise it up and that signals to the referee that the ball carrier is down and the play is dead," Brigid Ling explained.
The harness is designed to teach players how to properly tackle without the normal wear and tear.
"What we want to do is teach kids proper fundamentals... that they keep their head up, that they engage the ball carrier, that they wrap up properly. So there still is contact in TackleBar Football, there just isn't the big hit or the take down to the ground," Ling said.
Ling said they conducted a study comparing TackleBar to flag football and tackle football and discovered that TackleBar was the safest. According to Ling, they collected data from more than 920 TackleBar football players and discovered that out of 16,000 athletic exposures they had only five injuries and zero of them involved concussions.
"That was very affirming to us to see that kids were enjoying the sport, they were learning the game and they were not getting injured," Ling said. "We hear it all the time... programs that had 140 kids five years ago are down to 30. Whole programs having to close or having to consolidate multiple grades on a team."
TackleBar is now being played by thousands of kids in 21 states.
Now, they're headed to Atlanta ahead of the Super Bowl. TackleBar was chosen as one of five finalists for 1st and Future—the NFL's annual Super Bowl competition. They're competing in the Innovations to Advance Athlete Health and Safety Competition.
"We were thrilled to get the news that we were one of the five. It's definitely been a goal of ours to participate in this competition and so we're really excited and we really do see that the winners of this competition in the past really have put a lot of innovation into making the game safer for athletes," Ling said.
The competition on Saturday will reward the winner with $50,000 and two tickets to the Super Bowl. The second-place winner will receive $20,000 and two tickets to the Super Bowl, as well.