By Sean McDevitt
FightingIllini.com

Trent Chesnut, Head Football Equipment Manager for Fighting Illini Football, has been taking care of student-athlete equipment for more than 20 years. From set-up to tear down, he oversees practice and gameday equipment, uniforms, and more. His responsibilities include keeping the team in clean uniforms, gloves, cleats, and helmets. It's his job to make the team shine.

Today, he's making a different team shine—The doctors and nurses on the frontlines dealing with patients diagnosed with the novel coronavirus COVID-19.

Chesnut is part of a team of engineers, physicians, researchers, and designers from the University of Illinois and Carle Health who has developed and launched production of a face shield for health professionals responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

IN THE ZONO

As part of the sanitizing and cleaning process at the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Center, the football program acquired a ZONO Technologies Ozone Cabinet. Bacteria can flourish in crowded practice fields and locker rooms, and amid frequent skin-to-skin contact on the playing field. The ZONO cabinet can disinfect all of an athletes' gear. It boasts the ability to kill 99.9% of common viruses on non-porous surfaces and 99.9% of common bacteria on non-porous, porous and semi-porous surfaces effectively sanitizing the equipment.

The ability to effectively sanitize football equipment led to Chesnut being a part of a local team producing face shields for healthcare professionals.

Over the last few weeks, Chesnut has received plastic tubs containing the various pieces needed for the clear face shields manufactured at the CU Community Fab Lab and elsewhere.

"We sanitize all these individual pieces," said Chesnut. "Then we have to bag all of them right away and get them sealed. We sanitize all of the totes they come as well. We are sanitizing every single piece, and then we send it off back to the Fab Lab, and they take it from there."

A COUPLE OF ZOOM MEETINGS

Getting involved with the face shields group was as simple as two best friends having a chat.

Trent's wife Janet, a healthcare worker at Christie Clinic, was having a conversation with her friend Stephanie Goodly and learned about the face shield project. Goodly said her husband, Lyndon, was going to use a sterilization chamber he had in the research department in Vet Med on campus for the shields.

Chesnut said, "Janet told Stephanie, 'Trent, has one of those machines like that at the stadium.' Lyndon then got a hold of me, and he checked it out. We had a couple of Zoom meetings with a bunch of people from each department and then got rolling. We've been using it ever since. It's been nonstop for the last week, week and a half."

The entire project was cleared through Warren Hood, who oversees football operations.

"His biggest concern was that I was okay with it," said Chesnut. "We have to mask up and glove up just to be precautionary. At first, I thought there might be a chance that we were going to redo masks that had already been worn. However, through the initial meetings, we learned that wasn't going to be the case. It was just going to be sanitizing prefab parts already made. So that relieved the concern for everybody in the football offices. There was no chance any COVID-19 would be coming into the building."

Chesnut spends about four hours a day sanitizing the new equipment pieces each day. The goal is to make a minimum of 2,000 face shields and he believes they've sanitized 500 so far.

SWITCHING GEARS

The same group working on the face shields are starting up making disposable gowns for both healthcare workers and patients.

"It looks like that'll be another piece that we may start sanitizing here in a few weeks," said Chesnut. "I think they got some feelers out to the people in the community to start sewing these disposable gowns. So once they get those all sewn together, we'll sanitize them much like we're doing the pieces here for the PPE, and then they'll package them and send them off to the healthcare facilities."

Making a difference in this way means a great deal to Chesnut and his wife.

"I would much rather be doing this than sitting at home," said Chesnut. "As an equipment guy, there's only so much remote work you can do. But we're hands-on people, that's what we do. We're all about service to the players and the coaches and staff. And now we're just switching gears. We're just servicing the healthcare community, and it hits home with me because of my wife. She wants to do everything she can do to help her fellow coworkers. She's been outstanding and a huge help for me."