The game of football continues to get faster and more physical at all levels. Ensuring players are as safe as possible while playing is more of a focal point than it's ever been, especially for head safety.

Hingham's Youth Football program has taken notice, and will begin using the new five-star safety rating VICIS Zero1 Youth Helmet, the highest rated youth helmet for protection in a recent Virginia Tech study. Hingham is the first youth football program in all of New England to introduce the helmet to all players from second through eighth grade.

“This helmet is five times safer than what we were previously using,” said Oliver Kuehberger, the new president of Hingham Youth Football. “I've been involved with Hingham Youth Football for seven or eight years. This is single-handedly the coolest thing we've done. This puts on us on a new level in terms of safety.”

Alexi Evriviades, a HYF board member suggested the helmets in a presentation to the HYF in May.

“Lexi’s never-ending energy and enthusiasm, together with the incredible support by the Hingham Youth Football community and Hingham Sports Partnership, made this all possible,” said Kuehberger. “I was skeptical at first, but Lexi convinced me and the board and together we came up with a financing concept that allowed us to make the $70,000 investment into our kids.” Hingham Youth Football will debut the helmets when games begin after Labor Day.

This helmet has new technology on the inside that separates it from any other helmet currently on the market.

A representative from VICIS said the helmet’s outer shell deforms like a car bumper upon impact.

Underneath the shell is what VICIS calls the ‘reflex layer,’ which is a columnar structure that moves omni-directionally depending on where the helmet is impacted. The helmet is designed to respond to impacts from any angle, at any location. Each Hingham player received a helmet that is custom fit to his or her head all without using air, and instead using a pod system to create the perfect fit for each individual player.

Virginia Tech, which is the premiere entity for helmet ratings, does helmet evaluations for the NFL and college level. For the first time this year they did so for youth football as well.

The VICIS Zero1 Youth received five stars and scored a numerical value of 0.69 (the lower the number the higher the rate of protection. The next highest rating a helmet received from Virginia Tech was a 2.11

VICIS was founded in 2013. Since then, they've made helmets for all levels of football from the NFL, to college, to high school, and now to youth for the first time this year. About 70 NFL players wore VICIS helmets in its first year, including New England Patriot Julian Edelman.