03 November 2025

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Making history: How the School of Dentistry worked with U-M athletes to develop the modern sports mouthguard

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It’s been more than 65 years since the late Dr. William Godwin, a University of Michigan School of Dentistry faculty member, embraced the challenge of how to protect athletes’ teeth from injury. Collaborating with other dentists and U-M athletic trainers, Godwin began a decades-long quest to invent, improve and promote the use of mouthguards. It is an accomplishment that has benefitted countless athletes at the university and around the world.

When Godwin began working in the late 1950s on how to prevent dental injuries for athletes, mouthguards were rare, primitive and mostly used by boxers. Those playing the most rugged of high school and college sports – football and hockey – frequently needed dental work for broken teeth and other orofacial injuries. Godwin and Jim Hunt, the U-M athletic trainer at the time, set about trying to change that. Instead of treating injuries after the fact, they reasoned, injuries should be prevented to begin with, an endorsement of the adage that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

During years of trial and error, working in his kitchen at home in the early days, Godwin combined his inventiveness, problem-solving skills and dentistry training to fabricate mouthguards. The materials and his production methods evolved over time, significantly reducing the cost and time required for production, as well as improving the effectiveness of the product. Studies have confirmed that today’s athletic mouthguards, used by athletes around the world, limit damage to teeth from the jolts and jarring of contact sports.

Promoting the need for sports mouthguards, as well as sharing best practices for making them, were Godwin’s passion during the 38 years he taught at the School of Dentistry, from 1951 to 1989. Even after he retired, he regularly returned to the dental school to help students learn the mouthguard fabrication process and to help with an annual free mouthguard clinic the dental school sponsored for young athletes participating in local recreational and high school sports. Godwin’s important legacy has continued at the dental school after his death in 2017 at age 95.

Earlier this summer, early on a Wednesday morning in late July, three faculty members and two retired professors from the School of Dentistry gathered at the indoor practice fieldhouse for the Wolverine football team. They were there for the longstanding annual rite of passage that Michigan football players and dental school faculty have shared since the 1960s.

The dentists were completing the important first steps in the process of making custom-fit mouthguards to protect the players’ teeth and mouths from injury during practices and games for the 2025 football season.

About 20 of the newest players on the team – mostly freshmen and players who have transferred into the football program – took turns sitting in a row of six folding chairs on the sideline of the practice field. They wore identical Michigan-blue t-shirts with a maize-colored “Team Over Me” design emphasizing teamwork.

The dentists, showing some teamwork of their own, worked quickly in an efficient, well-practiced routine. They filled small metal, U-shaped trays with a dark pink, mushy material used by dentists to make dental impressions. It is a form of silicone called vinyl polysiloxane, or VPS. Each tray was inserted into a player’s mouth, with a dentist holding it in place for about 2 minutes until the material hardened in the shape of the player’s upper teeth and palate.

The impressions were removed from the player’s mouth, each was tagged with the name of the player, and they were taken to another dentist in a nearby room. The next step was filling the pink impressions with a different mushy substance, a brown material called “stone” that eventually hardens into a rigid, precise model of the player’s teeth and mouth.

Once the stone models were made, the dental school faculty were finished with their part of the mouthguard process. From there, the athletic training staff takes over and implements the rest of the process, which was developed at the School of Dentistry decades ago. The stone models are put into a table-top machine that uses heat and vacuum pressure to soften and pull down a flat sheet of ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA) tightly over the model. The heat-softened EVA is reshaped to fit tightly over the model of the athlete’s teeth to form a custom mouthguard. The EVA is then cooled, pried off the model, excess is trimmed away and the edges are buffed to remove sharp edges, leaving each player with his first custom-fit mouthguard of the football season. The training staff keeps the stone model of each player’s mouth and makes as many additional mouthguards as necessary during the course of the season as players lose or damage their originals.

Time-honored tradition

School of Dentistry faculty member Dr. Dennis Fasbinder has coordinated the annual football mouthguard session since 1994, but it dates back much further, to the 1960s. Fasbinder calculated that this year’s team of five dentists have been helping the football team make mouthguards for a cumulative total of about 150 years. This year Fasbinder was joined by current faculty members Drs. Don Heys and Dan Edwards, and retired faculty members Drs. Richard Fisher and Josef Kolling. Various other faculty members have regularly assisted over the years.

Fisher is the dean of the current group. He began fitting mouthguards for football players in 1970, a year after joining the dental school faculty. At age 84, the Ann Arbor native says he continues to participate each year because he has spent his entire life as a fan of the Wolverine football program. His ties date to his days as a 5-year-old when he would help his father park cars in a field next to Michigan Stadium before then attending many of the games. His family had season tickets starting in 1959 and he maintained them until a couple of years ago. After completing his undergraduates studies and dental school at U-M, it seemed natural to use his dentistry skills to help his beloved Wolverines.

“I probably haven’t missed more than just a few years of doing mouthguards since 1970,” Fisher said. “Michigan football is ingrained in my soul. Being part of the football program has been a way to give back after almost 80 years of watching teams come and go. A mouthguard is a vital element in the safety of all student-athletes. It is self-satisfying that I could be a part of that. It has been truly enjoyable.”

The dental school’s mouthguard program has expanded beyond the U-M football and hockey teams, which were the original focus in the 1960s. Today Fasbinder or another faculty member makes mouthguards for other teams, including lacrosse, field hockey, basketball and wrestling. Fasbinder is implementing modern technology with some of the non-football sports, using an intraoral digital scanner to map each athlete’s mouth, then sending the images to a dental lab that makes the mouthguards. The process requires more equipment than the traditional impression method used for the football team, so the impression process will likely continue for football, with its much larger team roster and highly regimented schedule with limited flexibility.

In addition to the mouthguard services, the dental school, through Fasbinder, also treats any U-M athletes with general dental needs, such as removing wisdom teeth or filling cavities.

Fasbinder said his 30 years of assisting U-M sports teams has been enjoyable because he is able to see the hard work logged by the athletes and teams, as well as the progress made by individual players during their time on campus and later in the professional ranks or at the Olympics for sports such as swimming. “The commitment that these athletes have to be successful is just amazing, so it is rewarding to be a part of helping them,” he said. “At last count, I have four Sports Illustrated covers that, when the athletes smiled, it was some of my dental work that was visible. It’s kind of a cool thing.”

Fasbinder views the athletic department’s collaboration with the dental school as yet another benefit U-M can highlight as it recruits athletes. “It’s part of that extra piece that you benefit from when you come to Michigan – be it the network of alumni who support the team, the opportunities on campus, the educational programs available, or the world-class dental school across campus.”

Teaming with the Athletic Department

From the athletic department’s point of view, the resources offered by the School of Dentistry have long been considered a valuable asset that is built into its annual routine for the football team and, more recently, other sports. Phil Johnson, the head football trainer, notes the demanding schedule that football players must follow, which makes the annual on-site mouthguard session so important. “It offers a lot of value for the guys, just for the efficiency of their time, which is extremely limited,” he said.

Once the dental school faculty have made the initial impressions and models of the players’ teeth, Johnson and his assistants finish the process, making multiple mouthguards for each of the 100-plus players on the roster. The extra mouthguards are stored in a large case that is on the sideline of each home and away football game.

The staff keeps the “stone” models of not only the current team members, but Johnson also has saved a large box in his storage area that is marked “Phil’s Museum.” It contains the dental models of notable previous players, with the most famous being former Wolverine and New England Patriot star quarterback Tom Brady.

Brady may be the most celebrated former U-M athlete to have an impression taken of his teeth by dental school faculty, but thousands of others have participated in and benefitted from the annual mouthguard routine, said Paul Schmidt, U-M’s head athletic trainer. Schmidt, who joined the athletic department as a graduate student in 1983 and full-time in 1986, remembers the rather primitive mouthguard procedures that were still in place back then. It included using a large, circular showerhead and a vacuum cleaner to form-fit the vinyl material over the stone models to create the mouthguards.

Though the methods have been refined over the decades, “Mouthguard Day” remains an essential part of protecting football players and other athletes, Schmidt said. He notes that the initial collaboration between the School of Dentistry dentists and athletic department trainers in the late 1950s and early 1960s was groundbreaking. “They were pioneers in sports dentistry and how to help athletes protect their teeth,” Schmidt said.

Inventing the mouthguard

William Godwin’s collaboration with U-M athletic trainer Jim Hunt in the 1950s also included Dr. Don Peterson, an Ann Arbor dentist who had been a star running back for the Wolverine football team from 1948-51. After graduating from the U-M dental school in 1956, Peterson’s connections to the football program helped him become the de facto dentist for the team for many years. He worked with Godwin and Hunt to test ways to protect the teeth of Wolverine players.

Godwin’s early work with mouthguards used an acrylic resin process devised by a California dentist. In 1955, Godwin provided a step-by-step instruction manual of that process for the benefit of Michigan dentists in an article he wrote for the Journal of the Michigan Dental Association. Godwin noted: “The increased interest in contact sports in secondary schools and colleges has resulted in an alarming increase of fractured anterior (i.e. front) teeth. This has created a demand for some sort of mouth protection. … An adequate mouthguard should allow the wearer to breathe and talk easily. It should also be tasteless, esthetic and retentive or it will not be worn by the patient.” After providing precise instructions and photos for how to make a resin mouthguard, Godwin concluded the article by adding, “… it should be mentioned that as a result of the demand for mouthguards, many new materials are becoming available to the profession.”

Those new materials included sheets of polyvinylchloride, which allowed for less bulky mouthguards that could be more precisely shaped for a better fit. Working at home over his kitchen stove, Godwin heated the vinyl sheets in boiling water in a frying pan, then applied the softened and malleable sheet over a “stone” model of a player’s mouth. It was somewhat successful, but Godwin wanted the fit to be much more exact, so he began experimenting with how to force the vinyl to cling more closely to the mouth model. The answer was his household vacuum cleaner. He jury-rigged the vacuum to a wooden box at first, then later a coffee can with holes punched in the bottom, so that the suction would draw down the heated vinyl sheet more closely onto the mouth model. He eventually discovered an even better device in the plumbing section of a hardware store – an old-style showerhead that was large and wide with lots of holes.

The showerhead method was still being used to make mouthguards at the football facility in the late 1980s when Head Trainer Paul Schmidt first joined the football program. Godwin kept refining the process and eventually teamed with a dental supply manufacturer to design a counter-top appliance that combined a heating element, a vacuum function and a special heat shield that Godwin devised to disperse the unit’s heat more efficiently. No more boiling of the mouthguard material. One of the early models of the machine, with Godwin’s hand-written name on the base, resides in a storage cabinet at the dental school. Modern variations of the machine are used today by students at U-M and other dental schools and in dentist offices around the world.

From little-used to ubiquitous

In a dental school alumni magazine article in 2003, Godwin noted the first mouthguards he created took seven days and cost $150 each, which was a prohibitively expensive sum in the 1950s and 60s. Now mouthguards can be made for a few dollars in 2 or 3 hours, most of which is to allow the “stone” material to harden into the mouth model. Godwin also lobbied in favor of the custom-fit method used by dentists vs. the store-bought “boil and bite” mouthguards that can be purchased in sporting goods stores. While even the store-bought models are better than no protection, Godwin advocated for the more precisely-fitting custom mouthguards that are less bulky and more comfortable to wear.

Chris Godwin, one of William Godwin’s four sons, remembers as a young boy watching his father work in the kitchen of their home on the early mouthguard process. He recalls how the family’s Electrolux vacuum cleaner was pressed into service for the mouthguard process. “I’ll never forget that thing. He hooked it up with a hose and the kind of black tape you use on a hockey stick,” Chris said.

William Godwin’s interest in hockey was one of the driving forces for the mouthguard research, said Chris, a retired research scientist from the U-M School of Public Health. William Godwin, a native of Canada, had played lots of hockey, including with a professional team, and Chris and his three brothers all played hockey when they were growing up. So William Godwin’s quest to keep improving the mouthguard had personal benefits for his sons in addition to those for the U-M hockey and football players.

Chris, who lives near Chelsea, Michigan, said his father chose not to patent any of his mouthguard methods or the resulting machines that facilitated the process. “Dad was very insistent that the process not be patented because he wanted it to be accessible to all the dentists at a low price. He was very diligent about that. He wanted the technique and all of it to remain open.”

Promoting mouthguards so they would be widely available and widely used was the second part of William Godwin’s mission. After refining the process to make them, Godwin was an outspoken advocate for their use. Among his efforts was chairing a statewide committee that was instrumental in passing a 1962 law mandating mouthguards for all Michigan high school athletes, well before the NCAA did the same for college football in 1973.

Godwin is also credited as a founding member, in the 1980s, of the International Academy for Sports Dentistry, which is a forum for dentists, physicians, trainers, coaches, dental technicians and educators interested in exchanging ideas related to sports dentistry. In 2002, the more than 1,100 members of the Academy gave Godwin its Distinguished Member Award for “a lifetime of dedication to sports dentistry and for significant service to mankind.”

As the members of the U-M football team gathered at the Mouthguard Day in July, the dental school faculty were using the modern materials and methods that are a direct result of the pioneering work begun by William Godwin more than seven decades ago. What was then a rarely used piece of protective equipment is today used all over the world by millions of athletes, far beyond the original Wolverines who were the early beneficiaries of Godwin’s quest. Godwin’s legacy is an important chapter in the 150-year history of the School of Dentistry. It lives on every time any athlete takes out their mouthpiece and flashes their perfect smile.

Source: https://dent.umich.edu/