A Concussion Ended His Brother’s Football Career, So a Dallas Teen Invented a Mask to Reduce the Risk

On Nov. 6, 2021, Jason Hogg watched both of his sons play football. Carter was on the field in front of him in a Texas high school state final with the Episcopal School of Dallas. Jason cheered him on from the stands while streaming his other son FJ’s game on an iPad. FJ, a junior linebacker at Washington and Lee University, was playing in the Old Dominion Athletic Conference championship.

In the second quarter of FJ’s game, he and a teammate were going for a tackle and collided. On the screen, it looked like a routine tackle. FJ was hit on the top right portion of his helmet, but he got up, finished the game, and took a picture with his team while celebrating their win. When FJ called his dad the next day, he told him something was wrong. Over the next few weeks, he had trouble getting out of bed. The photo of him with his team was the only way he could look back on the game. He couldn’t remember anything from that night. He suffered what turned out to be a career-ending concussion.

“It was really tough to see him go through that,” Carter said.

Nearly three years later, FJ is headed to Duke Law and plans to run an Ironman race in July. But his injury was a turning point for the whole family, inspiring them to start a business aimed at making football—and other contact sports—safer for athletes.

By the spring of 2022, Carter’s senior year at Episcopal, he was poring through studies and reading as much as he could about what causes concussions. He took out a notecard at school one day and sketched out a rough diagram of a protective layer that players could wear under the helmet to protect them during hard hits.

His dad was sitting in a chair in the living room when he got home that day. Carter handed him the note card and asked to talk through how they’d turn it into an actual product. The pair spent the next few weeks fiddling with sketches and wrapping cupcake liners around action figures to figure out design principles.

They workshopped the idea for a couple of months, then hired a design firm to build prototypes. Two years after his brother’s concussion, Carter had a product ready to be tested. Worn like a ski mask, it helps stabilize the neck and reduce acceleration of the head when hit. The technology inside, though, is way more advanced than the gear you pull on each winter.

The balaclava-style garment is made of a patent-pending fabric designed to redistribute the energy of collisions. It also includes perforations around the ears so players can hear calls being made and a pocket on the backside of the neck to insert cooling gel packs. It’s lightweight, too, at just eight ounces.

While this kind of innovation may go way beyond the normal homework help from parents, it’s part of the Hogg family DNA. Carter’s grandfather, Russell Hogg, was the president and CEO of Mastercard in the eighties and oversaw the company’s introduction of the Gold Card, which pioneered the use of holograms to battle counterfeits.

Jason Hogg remembers going to his dad with a business plan that became Revolution Money, a secure payment company that was bought by American Express for $300 million in 2010. “There are people who have incredible ideas and they don’t know how to implement them,” he said. “I was very lucky because my dad was super supportive and that enabled me to get into entrepreneurship and innovation.”

Jason raised his boys the same way. “He was amazing when we were kids, asking questions and building that curiosity within us,” Carter said. “From a problem-solving approach, he has what he calls a white-sheet approach where you don’t try to build on existing solutions—you try to come up with something completely different.”

Carter knew he wanted to go into the business realm, but he wasn’t sure exactly where that path would lead him. He found a purpose at the intersection of his brother’s recovery from and Carter’s own love of football. “People are choosing to not play these sports,” Carter said. “But ask anyone who has played and they’ll say it has a profound impact on your life and how you operate and tackle issues and work together as a team. There are so many amazing life lessons that the sport is able to teach you.”

Once Carter had a product, he had it tested in January 2023 at the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab, which rates head protection gear. The results were so encouraging that he created a company to sell the headwear, which he named G8RSkin (like “gator skin”), in February. The name invokes not only the toughness of an alligator’s skin, but also the fierceness of the reptile, Carter said.

By then, Carter was a freshman playing Division III football for Johns Hopkins University. He reached out to contacts in the sports world and visited Texas high schools to pitch them on using G8RSkin.

Carter and his dad knew from their conversations with NFL equipment managers that convincing the football world to adopt a new product would likely begin at the grassroots level, with high school–age players and younger. “Athletes get very set in their ways,” Jason said. “The more senior they get, the more advanced they get in their career, the more difficult it is to shift behavior—unless an event happens to them. We’re talking with people on the professional level, but focusing on youth.”

In the fall of 2023 and spring of 2024, the fledgling company conducted a pilot program with one hundred athletes, including hockey players, equestrians, and skiers. They completed another test session with football players this spring. They took feedback and fine-tuned the design—G8RSkin is now on its ninth iteration—to create a slimmed-down headwrap that comes in at one-third the original weight. It’s five millimeters thick and weighs eight ounces.

The latest version underwent laboratory testing and data collection at Southern Impact Research Center. Calculations done by G8RTech show a relative concussion risk reduction as much as 79 percent. According to the tests, G8RSkin Shiesty provided the most effective protection on impacts to the top of the helmet.

As shown by the pilot program, Carter isn’t just hoping to help make football safer. G8RSkin masks can be worn under almost any type of helmet. And G8RSkin could very well end up having its greatest impact outside of football, where efforts to improve helmet technology and find other ways to make the game safer have been a priority for the past decade-plus. In comparison, many hockey helmets resemble something out of the Stone Age.

“It’s frightening,” Carter said. “When we went down for testing, the first time we put the [hockey] helmet on the dummy, the lab tech actually turned to us and said, ‘Get ready for this, because it’s not like the football hit.’ ”

The company recently introduced G8RSkin Ice, a longer version of their standard headwear that can be worn under helmets for concussion protection but also extends down to the collarbone with cut-resistant material. The product was in the works before the death of Adam Johnson, who was fatally cut by the blade of another player’s skate while playing in the British pro hockey league. Development efforts sped up after the accident, Carter said. When USA Hockey mandated that all players wear neck protection, Carter reached out to the Hockey Equipment Certification Council and asked to get G8RSkin tested.

“They were like, ‘Woah, we just started on that,’ ” Carter said with a laugh. The group hadn’t even set up minimum requirements for protective neckwear. “We’re a little ahead of the curve,” Jason said, “but we’re ready when they are.”

G8RSkin is manufactured in the Dallas area, which Carter said is helpful for a variety of business purposes. Just as important, though, is the family’s desire to keep the business in the community where they live. The family moved from New York in 2020, and Jason said they “fell in love” immediately with the Metroplex. He believes G8RSkin could be one of many new products to emerge from North Texas and change the sports world.

“From an entrepreneurial perspective, I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Alley and 128 in Boston—and obviously Silicon Valley,” Jason said. “I think, based on my pattern recognition, that Frisco—and Dallas in general—could be the sports tech corridor for innovation. They’ve got the infrastructure. I think we’re on the early end of that, so it’s exciting to help perpetuate that.”