Reporters who attended Thursday’s Nets practice in Brooklyn were greeted by a strange sight.
Spread across three shelves on the far end of the court sat 18 black football helmets with white facemasks. “Brooklyn” was written across the side of each helmet in the team’s fancy, old-school font.
No, the helmets were not reserved for an upcoming crossover event with Giants and Jets players. The helmets are being used by the Nets as a unique tool for culture-building purposes.
“I’m going to keep it a secret, but if somebody else wants to tell you, they can,” Cam Thomas said.
Luckily, head coach Jordi Fernandez was willing to explain what football equipment had to do with Nets basketball.
Fernandez credited his assistants for the idea. Each player on the roster has their own helmet, and there is also a team helmet. Like in football, players get helmet stickers for adhering to offensive and defensive staples, but also for personal milestones and achievements. It is a cool way for coaches to recognize players for what they do for the team.
“After games, people have chains, but we have those helmets, and this is great to have,” Dennis Schröder said.
The history of helmet stickers is a bit complicated. According to sportdecals.com, it all started with Ohio State football trainer Ernie Biggs in the fall of 1968. He was looking for ways to motivate his players and chose to give them a sticker for lesser-celebrated in-game achievements, like throwing a key block in the fourth quarter of a tie game. Other high-major programs like Michigan, Florida State and Georgia adopted the concept over the years. It remains an important football trend today.
However, some claim that the practice of awarding helmet stickers actually began with Jim Young, a former assistant coach at Miami in 1965. In his book “Rutgers Football: A Gridiron Tradition in Scarlet,” Michael Pellowski wrote that former defensive backs coach Dewey King was one of the first to award helmet stickers in 1961.
Now the trend has somehow found its way into basketball via Fernandez and his staff.
“You can get stickers for being really good in the weight room,” Fernandez explained. “You can get stickers for doing your shooting metric drills and so forth. It’s not just for the guys who play a lot of minutes, so we try to do it in a way where everybody can get them. Some helmets will look like they have more stickers than others, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is you can work; you can get them in different ways.”
And which Nets player has accumulated the most stickers so far, you ask?
“I don’t know. I’m up there, though,” Schröder said. “I gotta put some on right now, but I got a lot of stickers. I want to have a lot more.”
The helmet stickers are just the latest example of Fernandez’s willingness to think outside the box when it comes to establishing a unique culture in Brooklyn. During training camp, the Nets had regular free throw contests that used a golf-like scoring system.
“It’s different,” Schröder said. “I mean, I’ve been in the league for 12 years. Never had a training camp like we had before. That was by far the hardest. I’m used to it because I’m from Europe. How we do training camps over there is two-a-days with tape and so, I’m used to it, but the structure, just coming in and setting the tone early, even in the summertime and bringing things in like that, where everybody buys into it and embraces it means a lot. For us, for the group, for everybody having fun with it as well.”
