Concussions are a growing concern in contact sports, especially for football players who sustain repetitive blows to the head. The football helmet market, evaluated to 212 M$, is shared between a few major sport equipment companies. Although these companies release new helmet models every year, innovation in protective mechanisms has been quite limited and raises concerns about the protective capacity of current helmets on the market. It is thought that the predominant factors limiting helmet efficiency are the lack of fit between the helmet and the player’s head as well as the incapacity of liners to redirect impact energy in strategic directions. It is now clear that helmets should not only absorb linear impacts but also rotational ones. Faced with this major issue, the NFL helmet challenge aims at fostering the development of football helmets that minimize the risk of brain injuries. The announcement of the NFL initiative piked curiosity of four Montreal-based companies (Kupol, Tactix, Shapeshift3D, and Numalogics) and an academic institution (ETS), with a focus on what combination of expertise would be a “game-changer” for the design of protective helmets. By creating the Kollide consortium, they decided to join their forces to face the challenge and design the next generation of football helmets. In one year, a numerical-experimental design approach based on the new capabilities offered by additive manufacturing (AM) was created to build helmet prototypes composed of a soft shell and a custom-fit liner made of a network of lattice structures optimized to absorb and redirect impact energy in specific directions. AM changes the paradigm of how products are conceptualized and expands the range of possibilities for manufacturing novel architectural parts. At the end of this epic journey, the helmet performance score of the final prototype was better than the scores of current helmets on the market, which was promising. But did we win the challenge? Stay tuned.