New Designs for the 2025 Season

2024 Playoff Page

The 2024 season kicks off!

8/30/24: Football has returned, and we're ready to cover the new helmets across the state here! If you're looking for a helmet-centric refresher on Nebraska high school football, here's a guide to what the site has to offer for you:

• It's the start of a new two-year classification cycle, and you can find the new classes with district assignments and class maps here: 24-25 Classes

• We're tracking new designs as we spot them around the state, and we have a few already at New in 2024

• Need to jog your memory on how teams faired last season? Check out the 2023 Playoff brackets

Our 24' Summer Plans: County-by-County

5/29/24: We're counting down the 93 days until high school football returns by running through the 93 Nebraska counties, 1 per day, and sharing all the historic helmet designs we've come across over the years working on the project. We'll have some sort of page set up here on the site here for the project eventually, but for now it'll just be on our Twitter page: you can see the thread for Adams County here!

UPDATE: looking for a specific county? Here's a list of where we've been so far with links to find the start of each thread! 

Looking ahead to 2024: Offseason plans

12/2/23: With the 2023 season in the books, I thought I'd share a tentative outline of the plans we have at the site for the long months ahead without Nebraska high school football. Next season will start a new two-year classification cycle, which means a few changes around the site: once classifications are released, likely sometime next week, we'll start moving schools around to their new class pages. We'll also have new maps to make for each class. Then, on February 7, the new schedules for 2024 and 2025 will be released. We haven't done schedule graphics in the past, as more than 250 schools playing football presents a significant amount of work, but I've got a few potential ideas on sustainable ways to make something happen that I'll be thinking about for the next few months. Following that, as we go through the spring and into summer, we'll be keeping an eye out for new designs around the state: either coaches teasing new designs on social media or new shell colors showing up in pictures from summer camps. New-helmet-watch will kick into full gear as practice starts in August and we get ready for Week 0 games on August 23, 2024. Besides things on this timeline, I'll be touching up the playoff graphics from past years where I was still figuring out the formatting and maybe starting to work back through playoff brackets from before the site restarted in 2020.

Back for 2023: What's new @ NHSHP

The long offseason is nearly over, and we've been hard at work here to get ready for the '23 season to kickoff. As you get ready for the return of Friday night lights, here's a rundown of what we're bringing to the new season here on the site:

• New in 2023: Every new design we spot around the state this year, all in one place. We started this last year but fell behind updating it, but hopefully this year we can keep up with all the new looks around the state. We've already spotted some before the games even start, so take a look! If you know of a new helmet design around the state, let us know: you can email us at nehshelmets AT gmail.com, or DM us on Twitter (or whatever they're calling it) @nehshelmets.

• Full state map: We've doing the maps by class for a couple seasons now, but we were stilling looking for a way to have every helmet in the state on one map (without it being an incomprehensible mess). Now, we have an attempt ready for public viewing! You can zoom around to different areas of the state and check and uncheck different classes to change which schools appear.

NEW: Playoffs are here, and you can see the helmet brackets here!

2022 Season!

We don't know about you, but we're feeling ready for the '22 season here at NHSHP! Check through the Class by Class pages to see who's moved up or down, see how the new classes look on the maps, remind yourself what happened last year with all the playoff brackets, and see what new designs we might see on the field this year!

2021 Season Kicks Off! What's new here?

It's that time of year again, where all the hard work you put in over the offseason shows itself on the field. We've been hard at work here on the site as well. We've got two major additions to the site for 2021: maps and state champs. You can check both of them out through the top menu, and stay tuned for updates as teams debut new designs for the season!

Playoff Time! Check out our new 2020 Playoffs pages to watch how the brackets shake out!

The 2020 NSAA Football Playoffs are upon us! Class D1 and D2 kickoff their first round Thursday the 22nd and A follows Friday the 23rd. We want to be one your favorite stops this playoff season, and we've got the helmets to keep you coming back. There's a whole new section of the site to house all this: you can see it on the upper right. We'll be posting round-by-round updates on the helmet matchups across the state and across the classes, so tune in this weekend to see who advances to play who in A, D1, and D2, and to see how the brackets shake out in B, C1, C2, and D6! And then come back every weekend to see how these playoffs shake out, helmet-wise!

-Ryder, October 21, 2020

We're back! The Nebraska High School Helmet Project relaunches in 2020!

I'm pleased to welcome you back and welcome some of you for the first time to the Nebraska High School Helmet Project.  I'm Ryder Mays, the son half of the father-son duo that ran this project starting way back in 2006. The other half of our duo, my father Greg, is the writer and voice of the Suiting Up Varsity podcast and its Twitter feed.

We updated the old site across 6 football seasons from 2006 to 2011, before I started high school and we stopped regularly working on the site. In our turbulent 2020 moment, however, we decided to revisit old hobbies, dust off the old photo editing software, and relaunch the Project.

Our basic goal is simple: to provide an accurate representation of the football helmet worn by each high school football team in the state of Nebraska. Using the template from our inspiration,  Charles Arey's great "The Helmet Project," we've created a right and left side representation of each team's helmet design, using the best information we could find from the 2019 and 2020 season.

What you'll find on the site today is our first run through for every team in the state. This was pretty much my first time working on any sort of graphic design project since we last updated the old site in 2011, so it took some time and work to shake off the rust. You can consider what you see here to be a first draft of sorts. We'll keep updating these helmets, improving the quality of the images and providing changes to the designs as we see them this season.

Beyond our primary goal, I'd like to take a moment to talk about some future work you may see here on the site. We might look into the inclusion of some past designs we can find for schools. We worked on, but to my memory never released, a map of the state with every helmet on it. I would love to revisit that now, along with other possible maps (such as a historical timeline map where you can see co-ops, consolidations, and new schools change the map, or maps of smaller regions within the state). We may also work on some graphics for the upcoming playoffs this fall.

If you'd like to keep up on new developments here as we relaunch, you can follow our new Twitter! We'll posting about new design updates and site changes, as well as sharing photos from across the state. Also, stay tuned to the Suiting Up Varsity podcast feed, where we may have an episode discussing the relaunch of this project soon.

Have you spotted a new design we've missed? See something wrong with your school's design here? We'd love your help! You can send info to us at: nehshelmets AT gmail.com. What helps us the most: photos of both the right and left side and front of the helmet, confirmation of face mask colors (sometimes navy, purple, and dark green can be difficult to discern from black), and a picture of the helmet decal or a digital file of the logo used.

-Ryder, September 21, 2020