It Takes A Team
Alex Semadeni
Prior to every road game, the Boise State football equipment staff packs up a semi-truck full of equipment to take to the game. The truck leaves days before the team takes off for the contest so that when the equipment staff arrives with the team, they can be ready to unload as soon as they land.
As the equipment staff was preparing the checklist for the first road trip of the season against Georgia Southern, assistant director of athletic equipment operations Blake Schulte remembered one final task that needed to be done. He pulled out his drawer, grabbed a sheet full of green stickers, and headed toward the helmets.
For the first time, the NCAA permitted the use of coach-to-player headset technology in-game. Similar to the NFL, the rule is designed to improve communication between a coach on the sideline or in the booth and the player on the field. For nearly a full year, Schulte has been responsible for the implementation of that rule change at Boise State.
Before the truck pulled out, Schulte put the green dots - used to identify the players that are designated by rule to use the technology - on the back of the helmets.
“I always noticed the quarterbacks in the NFL with the green sticker,” he said. “It was so satisfying to put the green stickers on that helmet. It felt like the big leagues. It’s been a lot of fun to have something new to college football like this.”
The NCAA approved the rules in April, officially allowing coaches to speak directly to players via a headset installed inside the helmet. The rule change comes with a few caveats. There can only be one player on the field at any given time with the speaker, identified with the above-mentioned green dot on the back of the helmet. If two players with green dots are on the field at the same time, a five-yard penalty will be enforced.
The coach-to-player communication is allowed to be used during any play with a live play clock – essentially every play except a kickoff. The communication between the coach and the player will be turned off by a game operator with 15 seconds remaining on the play clock or when the ball is snapped, whatever comes first.
The April rule changes didn’t come as a surprise to Boise State. The potential for the rules was first discussed at the American Football Coaches Association Convention in Jan. 2023. Schulte attended the convention, and though the timeline for implementation wasn’t set, there was enough conversation about the topic to convince him that changes would come in the near future.
Those discussions began heating up around the college football world as the 2023 season played out, and rumors started to swirl that the bowl season would serve as a trial run for the new equipment. Sure enough, following the Broncos’ triumphant 44-20 victory over UNLV in the Mountain West Championship, the LA Bowl staff communicated with the program about the potential to use the equipment. The staff decided to utilize one of the proposed new rules - the ability to use iPads during the contest - but decided that the two-week turnaround was not enough time to properly implement a proper coach-to-player communication system.
Following bowl season, the 2024 AFCA Convention was dominated by conversations of the coming technologies. Discussions got further in the weeds on the potential hurdles, such as the cost of the technology, the differences between specific vendors and how exactly the headsets would actually work.
Knowing that rule changes were coming soon, Schulte started scheduling meetings to figure out how to prepare for the shift. It was clear from the beginning that the changes would require a group effort back in Boise. Already responsible for the coach-to-coach headsets, the athletic department’s IT team would handle the communication technology, while Schulte and equipment staff would take the lead on figuring out how to get the actual technology safely into the players’ helmets.
Before the NCAA legislation even passed, the two departments met to come up with a gameplan. The first step became figuring out what vendors to use. After some deliberation, the Mountain West decided to go with CoachComm, a company that was different from what Boise State uses for its coach-to-coach communication. That required the IT team to figure out a way to connect CoachComm to the system they currently use without disrupting their own operation.
“Initially the burden was on us,” said Boise State Athletics’ director of information technology, Andy Atkinson. “It was more just figuring out how this was all going to work. It was non-matching firmware, so I had to program all of the stuff to make sure it worked with our system. Once we got that piece ironed out, it was pretty straightforward on our end. There’s still management that we have to take part in, but once we got it all set up and working, the process kind of switched over to Blake’s crew to make sure they could get it in the helmet. That management is a lot for those guys.”
Indeed it was. A wrench was thrown in the plan early, as the necessary gameday equipment wasn’t going to be ready by the time spring ball rolled around.
While waiting for the gameday materials, CoachComm shipped out what the Bronco equipment staff calls “talkies” to use during practices. The talkies are essentially walkie-talkies that use a mobile, portable system that the equipment staff can easily set up for practices. Though capable of two-way communication, the talkies are only programmed to go one way to simulate the new NCAA rules.
“Spring ball became a very important clarification on if we could use this,” Schulte said. “Everyone wanted as much practice going into the season as they could get.”
The main difference that the talkies had was that the speakers were placed on the back of the helmet. Though effective at practices, the setup wouldn’t work in game environments due to the crowd noise. Therefore, for gamedays the technology must go inside the helmet, tucked away in the back near the ear hole.
“The players love the gameday setup because the speaker is closer to the ear,” Schulte said. “It’s a very high-quality speaker so it’s much clearer. The talkies that they use in practice can get muffled by having to go through multiple layers of padding and the helmet itself.”
Next came the hard part. How to put the equipment into the helmet. Schulte did his due diligence by reaching out to his friends in the NFL for their advice.
A helmet is built with three layers of protection – the hard shell (outer layer), the padding (middle layer) and the comfort lining (inner layer). Between the hard shell and the padding, Schulte had to install three pieces of equipment – a receiver, a battery and a speaker.
The receiver goes on the right side of the helmet, between the hard shell and the padding. Schulte then runs a cord between the padding across the middle of the helmet to connect to the battery on the helmet’s left side, attached via Velcro. The speaker then runs directly behind the player’s ear, but below the padding. The wires fit anywhere they can between the padding.
“The top right of the player’s helmet is for the receiver, the top left of the helmet for the battery and then the speaker is behind the ears,” Schulte said. “That was the advice I got from my friends in the NFL.”
Once the logistics of installing the speakers were figured out, the next step became determining the comfortability for the players. And there’s only one way to test that.
“I put the equipment in the helmet and gave it to the players,” Schulte said. “The first test was if they could feel anything. If they couldn’t feel anything then it was perfect. We’re extremely upfront with our players. Obviously, I tell them the process and tell them if they ever feel uncomfortable to come talk to me. This isn’t something where if it doesn’t feel good they’re out of luck. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make it work for them. We’ll figure it out. We have fantastic student-athletes here and they do a great job of telling us and trusting us.”
Another person that Schulte leaned on during this process was offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter, who utilized an advanced version of the technology during his 14-year stint in the NFL. Koetter is one of the members of the coaching staff that will utilize the technology this season, and he gave constructive feedback to Schulte during the testing process.
“Talking with him has been a very good help throughout this process,” Schulte said. “We’ve tried to modify a few different things to honestly make it more like the NFL here and there. Dirk is a top-10 human being of all-time and was very helpful.”
As fall camp proceeded and only minor kinks to work out, attention shifted towards the first game of the season. In years past, Schulte’s gameday duties were to lead the equipment staff in the process of unloading the equipment truck and begin preparing the locker room. Due to his new responsibility, he altered his gameday routine.
“I’ve told all the students this year that once the trunk I know that I need is off that truck, they won’t see me for a couple of hours,” Schulte said. “I’m going to go hide in a corner and install everything in the helmets and make sure they’re good. We have a great staff. They can set up the locker room without me.”
It takes roughly 20-30 minutes for Schulte to install the necessary equipment into a single helmet, and he’s required to do so for 11 helmets. All four quarterbacks will have the equipment installed, as well as a backup helmet for each one. The remaining three are spread out among the defense, with safety Alexander Teubner, linebacker Marco Notarainni and safety Zion Washington needing the installation.
The final step of the gameday process is inserting the batteries, which Schulte installs about two hours before kickoff. Each battery has a lifespan of 12 hours, much longer than would be needed for a game.
Once the helmets are clear, it’s on to testing. The equipment staff works with IT, who is in the coach’s booth prior to the game and will attempt to talk to an equipment staffer on the field who is holding a pair of helmets. If they can hear clearly, the equipment staffer on the field will raise the helmets high above their heads.
Even with the headsets running smoothly during camp, the team is prepared should they go down. The Broncos are still using traditional signal-calling methods as a backup, and still hold meetings so that everyone can master the playbook.
By rule, if one team’s headsets experience technical difficulties, both teams will be prohibited from using them. But the IT team, which always travels on road trips, will be on standby to quickly assist to prevent that from happening.
“If there is anything out of place audio-wise, we’re not good with that,” Atkinson said. “We’re going to be right there.”
That speed was on display on Saturday against Georgia Southern. On the Broncos’ opening drive, the equipment staff got feedback that the helmet wasn’t loud enough. Between drives, the IT department cranked up the sound to ensure that it wouldn’t be an issue for the remainder of the game. And there wasn’t.
“It went so much better than I expected,” Schulte said. “The one issue we did have was the volume for the players in the beginning of the game. We got that rectified quickly. That all came from Andy and Justin’s end. They got it fixed quicker than I expected.”
The coaching staff concurred.
“Overall it went pretty smooth,” Koetter said at his weekly press conference on Monday.
Following the contest against the Eagles, Schulte went back to the drawing board to see if he could find a way to help mitigate the crowd noise. He reached out once again to his friends in the NFL, who suggested putting a cover over the ear hole from the inside of the helmet to try and prevent some of that crowd noise from seeping in.
“The goal is like the NFL where there is something covering their ear hole,” Schulte said. “We do that to keep the sound noise inside the helmet and the other noise out. I’m interested to see how that does.”
Schulte also plans to keep looking around the nation to see how teams adjust to the technology week-to-week. He routinely peruses other teams’ social media accounts to get equipment ideas and has been intently following the national conversation around the technology.
With the rule changes getting mentioned a multitude of times on the national broadcast, Schulte feels a sense of pride in the hard work that he and his team put in.
“All the fans are hearing about this,” he said. “The commentators are talking about it in all the games I’ve seen so far. There’s graphics on the screen with the new rules listed. It’s cool that the fans see the dots. I’m very lucky to be in the guts of it and have the support around myself since taking on this project. We have the best group in the nation.”
“It’s a great team effort,” Atkinson said. “It’s a lot of stuff to manage. I think we’ve worked through a lot together during this process. The equipment dudes are awesome.”
“We have a job for a reason,” Schulte said. “The reason I love athletics is because there is always this added pressure, whether it’s wanting to win, fundraise a certain amount, sell a certain amount of tickets – whatever it may be. For us, we truly believe as an equipment staff that what we do on a day-to-day basis helps with the wins and losses that we incur.”