He decided to extend the design over Williams’ chest to protect his ribs. Senior athletics trainer Kirk Nielson walked him over to Wiggins Hall the following Monday, had Williams take off his shirt, grabbed a Sharpie and drew an outline of exactly where he wanted the brace to sit on Williams’ shoulder. Without the AUBE Lab, it would have been different story.Ī week after making the amazing, game-winning touchdown grab in Auburn’s season-opener against Oregon, Williams injured his left shoulder against Tulane. He was Auburn’s leading receiver by a mile. Williams finished the 2019 regular season with 891 yards on 55 catches, eight of those for touchdowns.

But as soon as Stewart and Goodlett saw the brace perform in practice, they reached back out and asked Zabala to again wave his magic, $45,000 3-D wand, this time over Williams. Goodlett said the hand hadn’t completely healed. For the first couple of games, he still wore a cast. Schwartz’s first brace took two days to print. … except maybe for the next player to come to the lab. He couldn’t have asked for a better PAIR project case study than Anthony Schwartz … Now, he not only had an opportunity to contribute to Auburn football, he had exactly the sort of test subject he was looking for. Up until that point, his team had only scanned a horse hoof.

The next day, the AUBE lab students met Schwartz at the door. Thanks to a new Creaform scanner purchased for the PAIR project, Zabala could take a spool of polylactic acid and 3-D print Schwartz a thin, durable brace that would fit so perfectly like a glove that he could put it under his glove without anyone else on the field even knowing it was there. The title of their winning proposal? “Additive Manufacturing of Durable, Next Generation Implants and Orthotics.”įorget plaster molds and carbon fiber, Zabala told Stewart. In the summer of 2018, right around the time Stewart first envisioned future collaborations with the engineer next door, Zabala and an interdisciplinary group of Auburn engineers and scientists were designated a Tier III team in Auburn University’s Presidential Awards for Interdisciplinary Research (PAIR) program and assigned nearly $1.275 million in research funding over three years. The timing - and the results - couldn’t have been better. “He thought it would be carbon fiber, but he just asked if we could make Schwartz a more customized brace for his hand, and if we could make it quickly.” “He didn’t really know how we could do it,” Zabala said. It wasn’t as if the trainers had never made a custom brace for a player. Sophomore wide receiver Anthony “Flash” Schwartz, the fastest man in college football, had broken his hand. The possibility stayed in the back of his mind for a year.

Could he involve Zabala in helping Auburn players get back on the field faster? It sounded like some of the stuff his neighbor worked on - orthotics and the musculoskeletal study of athletes and injury prevention. Stewart, Auburn football’s head athletics trainer, first got the idea in 2018, when he heard about a custom elbow brace Purdue engineers had crafted for a Boilermaker basketball standout. “Yeah, I definitely think he was excited to contribute to what we wanted to do.” So when duty called while he was heating up a leftover barbecue sandwich for lunch the Monday before Auburn’s season opener against Oregon, he answered. Instead, he stuck all the sensors on Aubie, the university’s mascot. Two years ago, when filming a video promoting his work in motion capture, he could have demonstrated the technology using a student. Zabala graduated from Auburn in mechanical engineering in 2007 and, after earning a master’s and doctorate from Stanford University, returned to his alma mater in 2016 to teach. “It was like Auburn biomechanics scored 14 points that day.” “I thought, ‘that’s as close as I’ll ever get to scoring a touchdown,’” he said. But when star receiver Seth Williams caught a touchdown pass early in the third quarter, shaking off a goal line hit to his injured left shoulder as if he hadn’t even felt it - that’s when it felt official: Zabala’s cutting-edge work in the Auburn University Biomechanical Engineering (AUBE) lab on the third floor of Wiggins Hall was now, literally, a game-changer. Michael Goodlett, the team physician, there on the Auburn sideline in College Station. His phone vibrated with congratulations, not just from his students in the biomechanics group text, but from Dr. The game had just started.Īuburn’s Anthony Schwartz took the reverse all the way - 57-yards. 21, 2019, and he was in his living room recliner. Michael Zabala, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, will never forget scoring his first touchdown.

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