The football team at Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, TN, received a special gift from dental students at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) this year: custom mouthguards.
The project, led by UTHSC student Matt Teale, started two years ago when Teale noticed that students in inner city high school football teams could not afford proper mouth protection because of rising poverty, according to a news story in the Baptist Press.
Teale assembled a team of fellow students who worked with donated materials from dental companies to make clear plastic, professional-grade mouthguards, according to the story. Teale's original team of eight students has grown to 22 students in the past two years.
"Doing the actual service is exciting to us, but there is no greater reward than to see the football players get genuinely excited about the finished product," Teale said in the story.
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