Virginia Tech study questions safety levels of leading hockey helmets

By @MichaelCaples –

Virginia Tech has been running tests on hockey helmets from all of the leading hockey equipment providers all season, and they released their report yesterday.

The grades were not good.

Engineers tested 32 helmets in a study that has been three years in the making, and on a one-to-five star scale for grading, only one helmet received three stars – the Warrior Krown 360. Meanwhile, only six helmets received two stars – CCM Resistance 300, Bauer 5100, Warrior Krown LTE, Reebok 11K, Bauer 2100 and CCM Resistance 100.

Sixteen helmets received one star, while nine received a ‘not recommended’ label.

“Our focus is to improve the safety of the sport, and we have spent a great deal of time developing the methods and relaying these to the manufacturers so that they can optimize their designs,” said Stefan Duma, co-director of the Va Tech study, via VT.edu. “Our hope is to see new helmets come into the market with improved performance.”

The tests, which originally began with football helmets, assign each helmet a STAR (Summation of Tests for the Analysis of Risk) grade – helmets with higher stars “provide a reduction in concussion risk compared to helmets with less stars.”

“Hockey has the highest rate of concussion of all sports. Football has more, but more people play football,” co-director Bethany Rowson said in the same article. “By rate, hockey is the highest, especially for female hockey players. They have a range of bodily injuries, but we are focused on brain injuries and reducing the risk of concussion.”

From a press release on the same study, which has been shared in Springer’s journal Annals of Biomedical Engineering:

Rowson’s team extended and updated Football STAR by, among other actions, taking into account that hockey players on average suffer 227 head impacts per season. Different intensities and areas of impact were also tested during their laboratory simulations of different types of helmets. A Hockey STAR value was assigned to the helmets based on each one’s ability to protect a player from concussion.

The press release also shared how the STAR system generated a great deal of improvements for football helmets. In 2011, the first year of football helmet testing, only one helmet received a five-star rating; in 2014, 12 received the top billing.

See the full grades for all of the hockey helmets tested here.