American Athletic, Incorporated and Spalding in Jefferson is adding a new product and company to its lineup.
Russell Athletic has developed a new type of football shoulder pads and has chosen the Jefferson-based company to manufacture the new product. Vice-President of Design, Merchandising and Product Development with Russell Athletic Sarah Gholston says the started the process of redesigning their shoulder pads about two years ago and just this last spring tried it out with different Division I college football programs like Auburn University who competed in the National Championship Game in January.
Gholston says these pads are lighter weight and allow for the disbursement of a hit from a football player to be absorbed by the entire pad, not just in one central location. Since AAI/Spalding and Russell Athletic are owned by the same company of Fruit of the Loom Corporation, Gholston states that the Jefferson company was the perfect fit to be the manufacturer.
“Anywhere in the Fruit family of brands that we could make this product and AAI was a perfect fit. They do a fantastic job up here for Spalding and also for their AAI-core business. And we just felt like a lot of the attributes that they brought to the table matched the product that we were trying to bring to the market.”
After on-the-field testing and laboratory testing at the Sports Science Lab in New York, Gholston adds that they distributed a few pads to some of their partnering Division I college football teams last summer and director of equipment operations for Auburn University Dana Marquez says the players’ reactions were extremely positive.
“Over fall camp, we’ve got just an overwhelming success of not feeling impact, the pads (are) lighter (and) it breathes. We’re at Auburn so, it’s about 100-degrees with a 100-degree humidity, but the players just knowing the weight of the pad was still the same weight as we began to the end of practice.”
By the time Auburn played in the title game, they had 11 players wearing the new pads.
AAI/Spalding Vice-President of Operations Mark Lane talks about his reaction when he found out that AAI/Spalding were chosen to make the new product and take on a new client.
“This isn’t a product that fits into our mold really well except for the fact that we are accustomed to building products that athletes abuse. We had to learn different ways to sew, we had to get some new machines and those are all here now. Although we were surprised, we were pretty honored to have a name like Russell (Athletic) added to our portfolio and I’m very happy to be a part of this project.”
They have begun making several of the new pads which Gholston comments will be sold to several college football programs this fall season with plans to sell them to the National Football League and to high school teams.
The new product allowed AAI/Spalding to create four new jobs with the possibility of expanding their current physical business in the future.