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AFM Magazine


Getting Footballs Game Ready

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It doesn’t matter whether you purchase a dozen footballs at a time or 244 like Auburn equipment manager Frank Cox has each of the last five seasons. Once they are delivered, these footballs have to be made game ready.

While you could simply throw the footballs out of the shipper’s box and into your players’ hands, there are a few guidelines you may wish to follow.

While routines vary from program to program and even season to season, nearly all the equipment managers we spoke with had two similar practices. First, most will use a warm, damp cloth to wipe the new footballs down. This breaks down the waxy residue or slick outer coating of the new football. Then they take a soft bristle brush, which is sometimes shipped with the balls, and brush the football from end to end. Brushing them creates friction and heat, which restores the tackiness to the leather surface.

At the University of Florida, head equipment manager Bubba Saniel reverses the process. First, he brushes, then he applies a wet rag, leaving the oil on the leather tacky. Saniel says this rag usually turns the same brown-leather color as the footballs. When kickers want to put the balls in the dryer or other players have a personal preference, Saniel trys to accommodate them, as long as it seems to benefit the football and the player.

“We’re not saying this is the way we’re going to do it, so this is the way it has to be done,” Saniel said. “If (the quarterbacks) have a certain way they want to break the football in and it works great for them and it works great for the game, we let them do it ... we’re not going to do anything that hurts performance on the field.”

Another method used to break in new footballs is to give them to the running backs or use them for pre-practice drills, before they ever come in contact with the quarterbacks.

At Auburn, Cox has the managers put the next week’s game balls out for passing drills and pre-practice warm-up only. The goal is simply to get the balls outside, expose them to the air, and have them on the ground a little bit, not complete a practice with them, Cox says.

In 26 years at Auburn, Cox has seen and used plenty of techniques to break in footballs. But when breaking in new footballs today, his prep work simply involves a damp cloth and a hard wipe down of each ball. Nothing more.

“We’ve done a lot of different things over the years, but I think the footballs that are available now are some of the best that have ever been,” Cox said. “There really isn’t as much of a break in process with each ball as there used to be. At one time we had some guys here, quarterbacks or whatever, we actually took heavy wire brushes to get some of that coating off the leather ... you really had to do that to break down that coating that they came from the factory with.”

At the University of Kansas, equipment manager Jeff Himes uses a “hot room,” where warm moist air from hot water tanks heats up the balls for an hour or so, making them “a little more pliable” before the brushing process starts. After brushing, Himes says new balls usually go to the “running back, wide receiver, or d(efensive) b(ack) bag before we give them to the quarterbacks ... so the quarterbacks usually get a ball that’s been used for awhile before they get it.”

Kansas State also uses dryers to break in footballs. After wiping new balls with a damp cloth, equipment manager Jim Kleinau’s staff drops them for a five to ten minute tumble in the dryer. The emphasis here is not on the heat – the setting should be very low, Kleinau says – but on the tumbling action, which simulates some of the bouncing the footballs will do once they take the field.






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