Coaches
As a coach, you are concerned with winning in competition, continually improving your athlete's performance, and keeping them safe, healthy, and in the water. You run a tight ship with high expectations.
What you don't want is athletes out with injuries, athletes that are timid and lack confidence due to the trauma from an injury. This affects the team in many ways.
If you are like most coaches, you see head hits above and below the water's surface, but there is nothing available to minimize the impact when it happens. Until now! Introducing the Hammer Head swim cap. After years of perfecting the technology, design, and material, testing it's effectiveness, durability, and speed, there is now a swim cap that delivers head protection while improving your performance.
SWIMMING
As you know, head strikes happen when a swimmer collides with someone or something resulting in a head injury. Whether you're a coach, official, or instructor, you’ve seen accidental head hits time and time again. Goggles fog up, swimmers are blinded by the sun, they forget to count from the 5-meterflags, a new swimmer is learning the backstroke or to circle swim correctly, and before you know it, they’ve hit the wall or collided with another swimmer. And to exacerbate the problem, their arm count continues to change as they get bigger and faster.
For youngsters, that means pain and tears. For a competitive swimmer, it can ruin a race, reduce confidence, lose an opportunity, or still worse, end in a lifechanging injury. The Hammer Head® is designed to reduce impact when these accidents happen. For example, for the best performance in the free style, it is important for competitors at all levels to maintain proper form
with their head down looking at the black line on the bottom of the swimming pool. When doing this and wearing the Hammer Head swimming cap, up goes their confidence to train aggressively knowing they have the world's only protective swim cap on.
Head safety of our swimmers should be top of mind for parents, coaches, and athletes. With the implementation of Concussion Protocol Training (CPT)across all states by major organizations like USA Swimming and the National Federation of State High School Associations, swimming as a sport needed a solution. The solution is the Hammer Head swim cap that combines safety and performance for the first time ever.
IMPROVED SAFETY
Cumulative bumps to the head are serious and can be as damaging as one big strike – they can both lead to lifelong problems. When this happens, aquatic athletes lose confidence, be more apprehensive, and their desire to participate in aquatic sports.
Swim gear innovation has improved over the years, such as tech suits, goggles, training equipment, and nutritional supplements. Unfortunately, there has been little advancement in swim caps and nothing to help protect our athletes from head injuries. Hammer Head Swim Caps is revolutionizing aquatic sports as the first cap designed to reduce top of head impact when strikes occur.
Whether it is a backstroker miss-counting at the 5-meter flag and slamming into the pool wall, a triathlete entering the water in a mass competition start, an Artistic swimmer base launching the flier into an acrobatic move and hoping for an accurate landing, a diver entering the pool incorrectly at 25 MPH or a water polo goalie repeatedly heading the ball, there is a need to protect these heads like all other sports do for their athletes.
THE STATISTICS DON'T LIE
50%
50% SAFER
10.5%
Up to 10.5% FASTER
100%
100% MORE DURABLE
At Hammer Head, we challenge the "status-quo" of flimsy silicone or fabric caps by offering the safest solution.
The Hammer Head® Swim Cap reduces collision impact on top of the head by 50% compared to other swim caps.
ENHANCED PERFORMANCE
We all know swimming is a sport of small measures with athletes accelerating into a cement wall as fast as possible. Whether you' re coaching one or multiple swimmers, we tell them to eat right, sleep well, train hard, shave body hair, wear competition suits and goggles to reduce drag in order to cut time in the pool.
We talk a lot about the patented head protection technology inside the Hammer Head, which sets it apart from any other swim cap in the world. But, we also want you to know that it doubles as a racing cap.
The Hammer Head is optimal as a racing cap proven by the frontal drag tests just published by Dr. Gary Hall, Sr., and The Race Club. His conclusions cited up to a 10.5% reduction in drag wearing the Hammer
Head. It is like Tesla, initially designed to do good for the environment, buthas the bonus of speed. This is all positive news!
Have a peek at Coach Gary Hall, Sr.'s 4 tips to swim faster.
“How do you go back into the frenzy of your workout with 4,5,6 swimmers per lane and not look forward? Wear your Hammer head Cap. We love these caps! They have a little cushion on the top.
God forbid somebody is on your side of the lane…you won’t hurt yourself. These caps help prevent injuries. They’ve been tested and are also faster.”
Four things he suggests:
- “Be the first or give yourself 10 seconds distance”
- “Stay to the right (side of your lane)”
- “Wear this Hammer Head cap!”
- “Pray a lot!”
In addition, the Hammer Head is made with premium silicone, is seamless and tear resistant, and will outlast other caps. In fact, not one Hammer Head has ever ripped or torn. And to ensure the perfect fit, Hammer Head is the only swim cap in the world that comes in three sizes (small, medium, and large).
Hammer Head gives swimmers of all skill levels a high quality cap designed to be comfortable and fast and built with strength and durabilityfor the best value.
Risk Zones
The risk zones include:
DIVING
Knowing the average diver travels through the air from the high board at speeds of 25 mph, injuries can occur not only in the setting of a dive gone wrong but also more commonly secondary to an accumulation of exposures to repetitive forces.
You may be familiar with the report put together by Livestrong with a list of diving statistics reporting over 10K water-related head injuries in one year. You wouldn’t call diving a contact sport, but when it comes to head injuries, divers at all skill levels are at risk.
According to Current Sports Medicine Reports, concussions occur from both direct head impact with the board and from water entry impact. One must have a high degree of suspicion for a possible head injury whenever a dive does not go as planned or any time abnormal vestibular nerve symptoms are reported.
Another interesting report survey concludes over half Division 1 divers reported dive-related concussions, and on average it took the athletes 23.09days to return to practice.
Platform divers average 50 to 100 dives per day. The high number ofexposures places the diver at risk for multiple individual injury opportunities.
And to conclude, 32% of injured male divers and 16.2% of injured female divers got hurt when they made contact with the water, according to a June2020 study in The Sport Journal.
The risk zones include:
ARTISTIC SWIMMING
USA Artistic Swimming endorsed Hammer Head® Swim Caps in 2019 as a first step in their movement to keep their athletes safer in the water. As a coach you know that Artistic Swimming is a team sport that requires strong acrobatic athletes, demanding practices, and tight formations that put every swimmer at risk of a pool accident or head injury.
Sarah Urke's Olympic dreams were shattered after suffering a career-ending injury that changed her life. and Hear her story what she has to say about Hammer Head.
In 2016 Bill Moreau, the Managing Director for Sports Medicine for the United States Olympic Committee, estimated that about 50 percent of the synchronized swimmers he has supervised have sustained a concussion.
Additionally, we were excited to see that USA Artistic Swimming is partnered with CRASH Course by TECHAids, a culmination of more than two years of research and development and thousands of hours featuring hundreds of individual's powerful and personal concussion stories. They are focused on the causes, symptoms and personal suggestions after their head injury and backed by renowned and respected organizations as BIAA, NCYS, Palo AltoVA, SPICE and in collaboration with the support of USOPC’s National Governing Bodies.
I would like to introduce you to Hammer Head®! We invented it to raise the bar and take swim caps to a whole new level. With its patented cushion inside the cap and seamless design, it 50% safer and 100% more durable than flimsy
latex or silicone caps.
USAAS hosted a webinar featuring Heather Olson, Olympic Gold medalist and artistic swimming coach and Theresa Finn, co-founder and CEO of Hammer Head Swim Caps to discuss how their caps can benefit artistic swimmers. You can watch the full video HERE.
In case you were wondering, you can put your team logo (up to 6-colors) on your Hammer Head caps and take advantage of bulk order discounts.
The risk zones include:
WATER POLO
Team Hammer Head recognizes Water Polo is a contact sport – no doubt about it! As a team sport, your seven players are continuously in motion, contributing everything they've got to beat their opponent. They focus on moving quickly with force and efficiency in order to avoid being pushed or hit, and defending themselves. You need to have full authority over your shoulders simultaneously, back, hips, and knees. For your athletes, the traditional water polo cap will protect their ears, but what about collisions to the head? As a result, serious head injuries do occur.
Hammer Head® Swim Caps are here to change that. Our proprietary safety technology is built in and designed to make you and your teammates safer in the water, improve confidence, and help you compete at the highest level. Many water polo players wear a swim cap under their training or competition cap to protect their hair from the chlorine, so why not replace it with Hammer Head and give yourself a patented protective layer designed to minimize the pain and injury when accidents happen?
Team Hammer Head has been approached by water polo players, coaches, and parents about modifying the current water polo bonnet to make it safer. This was done by inserting our patented HIT Honeycomb Impact Technology into various sections of the bonnet to protect the whole head. With proper USA Water Polo support, this could be a Hammer Head product expansion, and we already have a prototype. If you would like to learn more or share your input, click to contact us.
The risk zones include: