The Taylor Haugen Foundation, in association with the All Sports Association, held an outfitting event Tuesday at Crestview High School, providing Evoshield rib protection shirts for every Crestview football player.

• Aug. 30 will mark the 18th anniversary of Taylor Haugen’s death. The former Niceville High School football player died after sustaining a hit in a game against Fort Walton Beach that ruptured his liver.

Following his death, his parents, Brian and Kathy Haugen, started the Taylor Haugen Foundation to promote awareness of abdominal injuries in youth sports and to ensure that no student-athlete suffers the same fate as Taylor. The Foundation has grown to become the nation’s leading non-profit for abdominal injury protection.

The foundation’s Youth Equipment for Sports Safety (YESS) Program provides protective rib shirts made with exclusive Gel-To-Shell technology that custom molds to each player’s body.

“The composition of how the shirt is made, it’s a compression shirt, and it’s very personalized,” Kathy Haugen said. “It’s like a mouthpiece. You get the mouthpiece in there, hold it until it cools off, and your teeth are imprinted in it. It’s the same concept with this. With the shield around their midsection, it conforms to their body and their rib cage. So it’s a very personal piece of equipment.”

Foundation Board Chair Justin Turner kept it simple: allowing more student-athletes to play the sport they love safely.

• “It’s allowing kids to continue playing the sport that they love but doing it safely,” Turner said. “Everybody knows what size they wear as a T-shirt, but it’s very important to make sure that we get accurate measurements for these kids, because if it’s too loose, it’ll move around and not protect them the right way.”

The Foundation has outfitted more than 7,000 student-athletes across 18 states, though local schools remain its priority. That was on display Tuesday, as the Bulldogs watched a video explaining Taylor’s legacy and received a presentation from Kathy Haugen.

The compression shields remain something of an unknown at the prep level compared to college and the NFL. The foundation’s goal is to make them more familiar at the high school and middle school levels.

“It protects them. Plain and simple,” Kathy Haugen said. “This is a protection that football teams typically don’t have, especially a high school and middle school football team. They just don’t know it exists. Colleges and NFL wear this. They wear this because it protects them.”

For Crestview head football coach Thomas Grant, the partnership came down to looking out for his players.

“Shout out to All Sports and the Taylor Haugen Foundation for helping protect our kids,” Grant said. “I really appreciate both organizations for supporting this cause, to help protect Crestview athletes.”