I’LL NEVER FORGET THE DAY I WALKED THROUGH the Prospect Park Parade Grounds and came across a practice being held by the local junior-league football club. There were dozens of eight-year-olds in their oversized pads and helmets, and I couldn’t help but feel the pull to the sport I had played from age eight to 16. The quick drills and the barking cadences of the coaches came flooding back along with a wave of nostalgia.
For a time, there was nothing I loved more than a muddy game under the lights after a soaking rain. Maybe I should have encouraged my son to take up football, I thought.
Then the elementary school-age players ran full speed and hit each other impossibly hard for people that small. The thwack reverberated through the park. And the trick knee I banged up in high school buckled a little bit.
Like most people who became football fans before the recent emphasis on safety, I love watching a good, hard hit. But the inherent violence leads to injuries—for that matter, any athletic performance at the edge of human potential risks snapping tendons, tearing muscles, or even incurring brain trauma. That’s too much to ask of young athletes. And too many injuries spoils competition no matter what sport you care about.
In this month’s cover story, Kayt Sukel reports on the work of engineers who are designing equipment to reduce the number of sports injuries, especially among women athletes, who have a higher risk of tearing knee ligaments.
With all the challenges the world faces, maybe you think focusing on sports is a waste of good engineering talent. But as Lloyd Smith of Washington State University told Sukel, “Engineering, at its heart, is about performance,” adding, “It is possible to design things in ways so we can better prevent common injuries.”
Also in this issue, our own Cathy Cecere interviewed engineering students who compete in intercollegiate athletics (such as Emiko Pope, pictured above). I don’t have to tell you, mechanical engineering features some of the most demanding coursework universities have to offer, and the commitment necessary to compete at as a varsity athlete requires constant training and practice. Combining those two seems on the surface to be impossible.
But as these young people told Cecere, athletics and engineering tend to support one another. The discipline and focus needed to succeed in one provides advantages in the other.
(Cecere interviewed more engineering student-athletes than we could fit in this one story, so look for a follow-up with more conversations on ASME.org later on in March.)
We also have reports on a robot that uses a mushroom for a brain, engineers who designed an inchworm robot for better maneuverability, and work from Oak Ridge National Lab on a building construction element intended to be 3D printed out of a mixture of sawdust and plastic. Our member spotlight shines on Hongyue Sun, who studies manufacturing at the University of Georgia, and our Newsmaker video profile introduces us to manufacturing evangelist Sam Gatley at the New Jersey Innovation Institute.
And Robin Flanigan talks to an expert about how to write a resume in the age of AI screening tools.
So dig in. And if you somehow missed the January 2025 or February 2025 issues, never fear. They are just a click away, with no risk of injury.
—Jeffrey Winters, editor in chief
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