I have a couple more things to say on the Travis Roy accident that are germane to this list. The first is that while neck injuries are statistically very rare, when they happen they are quite often catastrophic. Jeff Jacobs of the Hartford Courant pointed out that during the same week that Travis Roy was injured, a player in Scandinavia (can't remember which country) sustained such a severe laceration to the neck that he bled to death in front of the entire crowd before anyone could do anything to save him. How does *that* make you feel? Then, just a couple days ago, Chris Pronger of the St. Louis Blues gave Pat Peak a two-hander which sailed up higher than he intended. The stick hit Peak in the Adams apple and ruptured his thyroid cartilage. Peak was lucky. He'll be back in a month. Now, when we examine what we know about the Travis Roy tragedy, I personally am struck by the fact that we know almost nothing. We haven't talked to the doctors, looked at the X-rays, or examined the replays in slow motion from many different view angles. All of these things we would need to do to be able to say that the injury was caused by: a sudden sharp bending moment to the neck, a sudden sharp twisting moment, compressive stress, or blunt trauma. And even if I personally had access to all that information, I still could not say whether or not that *particular* injury could have been prevented, because my area of expertise is not solid mechanics or biomechanics. But I am a mechanical engineer (fluids and thermal sciences); and, I think engineers -- certainly more than most people -- see things in terms of the possibilities rather than in terms of the impossibilities. And as an engineer, I'm sitting here right now trying to think of how to produce at least a small positive out of this very tragic situation with Travis Roy. The following is a proposal I made to Scott Lauber of The Daily News at BU a few days ago. The thought I am pursuing has to do with the curriculum of most Mechanical Engineering departments at universities around the nation these days. Almost all have design courses for juniors and/or seniors which are often cast in the form of a competition and which are part of the core curriculum for the ME major. Sort of like a sophisticated version of the "dropping the egg from the second story window" contests we all used to do in middle school. Anyway, recognizing that there currently is an absolute lack of hockey equipment to protect the neck area that is: 1) effective and: 2) comfortable enough to wear under game conditions, I think it would be entirely appropriate if those ME departments at schools which play college hockey used the design of neck protection for hockey players as the topic for their design courses this year. In addition, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME, with branches on most campuses which offer ME degrees) could be requested to referee a national competition which pitted the winning project from each campus against each other. The manufacturers of protective equipment (CCM, Cooper, Bauer, Louisville, etc.) could be solicited for the donation of prize money with the understanding that all the involved manufacturers would have equal access to the technology created by the contest. The prize money could be split equally by the winning contestants, the advising professors, and the scholarship fund of the winning school. What do you think? Would that spur some creativity? I think it just might, and it would do a lot of good in the process. Remember the point of this proposal would not be to prevent all future accidents of the type that Travis sustained (although that would certainly be wonderful if it could be done). The goal would be more modest since we probably don't have enough information to do that. The goal would be to invent *anything* that would offer meaningful protection to the neck, which is currently unprotected. We all wish Travis the best and most complete recovery possible. And while recognizing that what I am proposing here might not help in cases involving the *exact* sort of injury that Travis received, at least we could eventually prevent some equally tragic situations in the future. -- Dick Tuthill HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.