Today's Tidbit... Will Tethered Footballs Make A Comeback?
Fred Gehrke, a former NFL player and coach, is best known for designing the horns for the Los Angeles Rams helmets in 1948, the first logo to appear on a professional football helmet. Later, while working with the Denver Broncos, Gehrke also designed the first sideline net used by kickers to warm up or practice during games. The kicking net highlighted one of the challenges kickers and punters faced when practicing their kicks. That is, every time they kicked the ball downfield, they either needed someone to shag the balls for them or had to run downfield to retrieve the ball from the spot where it stopped rolling.
Along the way, a few kickers and punters were smart enough to kick the ball into the nets or tarps hanging from the crossbars that passers used for target practice. Others used the nets behind soccer goals.
Of course, football is famous for tinkerers who developed solutions to the problems faced in practice and games. One attempt to address the kickers' problem came in the 1920s, when William J. Dolan, Jr. of Pearl River, New York, applied for a patent on the tethered football. Born in 1901, Dolan starred in high school before heading to Norwich University. By 1923, Dolan had filed for a patent, and his tethered football appeared in the 1925-1926 D&M Fall & Winter catalog.
As seen in the image and description from the catalog, the kicker or passer hung the tethered ball from a tree limb or goal post and kicked or threw it to their heart's content, knowing the ball would travel only as far as the length of the rope. While the tethered ball had limitations, it allowed kickers to kick more and walk less. However, like many other football innovations, the tethered ball disappeared from the D&M catalog by 1928, so it likely was not a big seller.
While Dolan likely earned very little money from his tethered football idea, George R. Masters may have earned even less from his tethered ball device. Rather than attaching the ball to a tree limb or crossbar, Masters designed his device to attach to a band on the user's head.
Masters’ patent application promoted the device for providing the following benefits:
It is a primary object of this invention to supply a lone football player with equipment wherewith he can go through several basic playing routines repeatedly without the help of other players, and it is a further object of those invention to speed up these routines in a manner to compress more practice into a given time schedule and also to put a maximum speed requirement on the reflexes and coordination of the player.
By equipping a squad with a number of these devices it is possible to have all the men constructively occupied during the practice period instead of having to wait on a few in active practice.
Maybe I missed something and did not notice the many teams that used Masters’ tethered ball device, but I doubt it. Of course, if anyone out there has seen one of these devices in the wild or has used a similar device, let us know by commenting below.
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I love the tethered head device. I sure that no discomfort of any nature was discovered by it's use. Lol Great article on these novelty training devices.