Wilson factory is the 'heart' of football

ADA — From the kickoff of the high school season through the end of the Super Bowl, millions of people watch football, cheering for their favorite teams and players. Often called "America's Game," football is the nation's dominant sport and is entrenched in our national culture. Despite all the eyes on football, relatively few who follow NFL, college, high school and youth games spend much — if any — time thinking about the football itself. Here in Ada, the odd-shaped ball is of paramount importance. The Hardin County village is home to the Wilson Sporting Goods factory, which produces more than half a million footballs each year. About 150 employees craft footballs every day at Wilson's new $15 million production facility that opened in June 2024. The brightly lighted, air-conditioned 80,000 square feet replaced an aging building only half that size. All footballs used in NFL regular-season games and the Super and Pro Bowls come from Ada. Since 1941, every point scored in pro games and the Super Bowl has been with the game ball known as "The Duke" or with a Wilson kicking ball. Hundreds of colleges use Wilson footballs, including Ohio Northern University in Ada, where Andy Fries, a Norwalk High School 2005 graduate, just completed his first year as head coach. With the first coaching change at Ohio Northern in years, Fries was invited to help create a new football design for the Polar Bears before the 2024 season. The updated logo features a foil bear paw with a super-imposed "ONU," and the balls are custom-laced with the Bears' orange and black team colors. "It was fun to do," Fries said of the design process. "I've been over there several times — just walking into that factory is amazing." The ONU practice facilities are also a test site for Wilson, as are some other Ohio colleges, said Mike Springer, the factory's manufacturing engineer. The product is always "being tweaked," he said, so putting those changes in the hands of players is helpful. "Yeah, it's great," Fries said of the testing opportunity. "They sent over about 15 balls and said, 'hey, try these, let us know what you think.'" Making footballs is a hands-on job — no conveyor belts, no automation. The closest process to 'automation' is a machine that inflates finished NFL footballs to 120 psi and then deflates them to 13 psi, to meet the league's specification. Wilson employees produce five sizes of footballs for youth, flag, high school, collegiate and NFL programs. Flag football, especially among girls, is the fastest-growing segment of the sport in the U.S. New footballs begin with the delivery of thousands of half-cow sized pieces of rawhide from Horween Leather Co., where football leather has been produced for more than 70 years. Ten footballs can be made from one full-size cowhide. The factory uses 250 hides a day. Wilson's daily target is 2,500 finished footballs to reach 550,000 annually — a number that includes specialty, one-of-a-kind footballs that customers can design online starting at $165. The pebbled leather surface includes a random sprinkling of a tiny letter 'W' in the Wilson's logo font. At just 3/16ths-inch wide, the 'W' takes a sharp eye to spot. Before cutting football shapes, workers lay the hides on brightly lighted slant tables to find blemishes and mark defects with a Sharpie. In cutting, all four sections for one football must be color-matched as closely as possible. To become a football, the four pieces undergo another 19 steps. They include: shaving the four pieces to a standard thickness, stamping logos and lettering, attaching the lining, placing reinforcement stitching around the lacing area, adding the sticky-grip white stripes, stitching the pieces together, turning the ball right-side out, inserting the bladder, lacing the gap, and inflation. "We want every ball that goes out of here to be perfect," Springer said. "Teams and players are counting on us to make consistent balls used across their seasons and that's what we do." Part of that perfection is Wilson's tight weight standard: the variance is limited to just 4/10ths of an ounce for all sizes of footballs. Each football has a number and is inspected numerous times along the way. Monitors hanging above the production areas display the number of balls that have passed through that part of the process so workers can see the day's overall pace. Turning the football right-side out is difficult. The stiff leather and odd shape require upper-body strength, strong hands and speed to send the ball on time to the bladder-insertion and lacing stages. Many Wilson employees have worked at the factory for decades — including one lacer who's in her 47th year — but younger staffers do the turn task. For the NFL, "The Duke" balls have a sensor embedded in the bladder, which helps add to pro teams' prodigious set of statistics. "The ball has a sensor and the players wear sensors," Springer said, noting that most fans don't know about this feature. "Sensors show who threw the ball, how many times it was thrown, how far it went, how many revolutions — and a lot of other metrics," he added. Although NCAA footballs don't have sensors, the factory can help quarterbacks who want to add data to their resumés in their quest to reach the next level. Pointing to the 20-yard strip of artificial turf just inside the factory's glass front doors, Springer explained that a quarterback, fitted with a sensor, uses the turf while throwing a sensor-equipped ball numerous times. He's then given a printout that shows a variety of data points. "It helps them identify what they need to work on, and it's fun to watch them," he said. Wilson delivers 780 footballs to the NFL's 32 teams for the regular season, plus about another 2,000 for the post-season. For NFL games, six red, smooth-leather kicking balls are shipped to the head official's hotel room in each city. The official inspects the footballs before the two teams' kickers come in and choose their trio of balls. "Kickers are 'funny' players in that they're very particular about their footballs," Springer said. "They like to 'condition' them in some way — baseball mud, shaving cream, some put them in a sauna," he added, shrugging his shoulders. Wilson provides "Player of the Game" footballs for Sunday Night Football. Those balls have a white leather panel imprinted with team logos, date and venue of the game and the name of the award. They're handed out at game's end, usually out of the public eye and TV cameras. And when viewers tune in to Super Bowl LVIX at the Superdome in New Orleans on Feb. 9, 2025, Wilson's special and truly fancy commemorative football — along with game balls and kicking balls — will be among the stars of the show.