Sign up for email newsletters
Sign up for email newsletters Heating Shoe Sole
Courtesy of Mount St. Mary's University
Mount St. Mary's soccer players Anthony Milazzo, left, and Thunlwyn Garcia have teamed up to create an insole that regulates the temperature in soccer cleats and other athletic footwear.
Courtesy of Mount St. Mary's University
Mount St. Mary's soccer players Anthony Milazzo, left, and Thunlwyn Garcia have teamed up to create an insole that regulates the temperature in soccer cleats and other athletic footwear.
David Sinclair/Photo by David Sinclair
"What we've learned is that it definitely takes a village to get a product to the stages that we're hoping it reaches," Mount St. Mary's junior Anthony Milazzo said.
Courtesy of Mount St. Mary's University
Mount St. Mary's soccer player Thunlwyn Garcia, a senior forward who grew up in Abingdon and graduated from Archbishop Curley, will forgo his remaining eligibility and graduate in May to concentrate on the business he and his teammate, Anthony Milazzo, have started.
Having grown up in Abingdon and graduated from Archbishop Curley, soccer player Thunlwyn Garcia is no stranger to the extreme fluctuations of weather in the mid-Atlantic region. But even he was caught off guard after he transferred for the spring semester of 2020 from Adelphi in Garden City, New York, to Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, nestled against the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“When you transfer in for the spring, it’s not April sunshine. It’s February and freezing,” recalled the senior forward, who goes by “T.” “When I was out on the pitch, I just experienced my toes being frozen, and it was a really uncomfortable feeling. When I looked for solutions on the market, I could not distinguish a perfect solution that was going to remove the pain that I was experiencing. I began a journey to develop and bring to life a product that I felt could do the job.”
Garcia, an entrepreneurship major, teamed with junior midfielder Anthony Milazzo, a biochemistry major, to create an insole to regulate the temperature in soccer cleats and other athletic footwear. Under the company name Ascent Sporting Innovations, the pair has applied for a patent for their product and are hopeful that they could get full approval from the United States Patent and Trademark Office by the end of the summer.
Garcia, 21, and Milazzo, 20, sought guidance from associate chemistry professor Garth Patterson, former chair of the science department and current director of the Palmieri Center for Entrepreneurship who started his own business when he was a student at Purdue in the late 1990s. Patterson, who taught both student-athletes, said he was impressed enough by their plan to join them two years ago.
“To take an idea, to mature that idea into something that clearly no one else had considered in the way they had considered it, to go through the effort of executing on that idea is exactly what we might hope we can get out of all of our students,” Patterson said. “You take the knowledge you have, manifest some outcome with the knowledge, and work toward it. It’s cliche to say it that way, but that’s exactly the kind of success we might hope all of our students would have with whatever resonates with them as individuals, and this clearly resonated with ‘T’ and Anthony.”
“I am so impressed by our students’ innovations,” Mount St. Mary’s President Timothy E. Trainor said in a statement. “This is the magic of the Mount: Faculty working with students to find the intersection of their passions and talents and carving their path to living a life of significance in service to God and others.”
Estimates of Americans who have suffered foot pain at some point in their lives range from 75% to 87%. Patterson called the ability of the insoles developed by Garcia and Milazzo to warm cold toes or cool overheated soles “the special sauce.”
Milazzo said the product was initially designed for people who work or exercise in colder regions.
“People who live in colder regions, for their day-to-day activity, they’re going to require something like this to increase the comfortability of just going about their daily lives,” he said.
Garcia and Milazzo have assembled a group that includes a senior nuclear engineer specializing in thermodynamics, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and two alumni in the managing partner of a wealth management firm and a patent attorney. The duo also worked with professor and MBA director Nancy Kimble to form an intern team to conduct financial and marketing research, and Garcia reached out to fellow Archbishop Curley graduate Anthony Dragisics, a senior midfielder at Villanova, to head the interns.
“What we’ve learned is that it definitely takes a village to get a product to the stages that we’re hoping it reaches,” Milazzo said. “That’s kind of how we view the product, and we’ve brought all of these people around us to help us reach this common goal of progressing the company to the highest level it can get to.”
Patterson praised Garcia’s and Milazzo’s work in raising funds and applying for the patent.
“If you look at the team they’ve put together, it’s been done significantly on their own,” he said. “They really found the right people. That’s true for their corporate attorney, patent attorney, advisers on their board, how they’ve secured their first seed level of financing. All of that work was surprising in how quickly and how efficiently in getting the right specific people there they were able to do that.”
While Milazzo has one more year of eligibility and plans to play for the Mountaineers next fall, Garcia said he plans to forgo his remaining eligibility and graduate in May to concentrate on the business. As eager as he is to hear from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Garcia said the wait has been filled with work on refining the insoles and building the company.
“So we’re very busy,” he said with a laugh. “It deters the waiting phase a little bit, but it’s always in the back of our minds, and we’re excited to have a full grant soon.”
Despite juggling school, soccer and a social life with the business idea, Garcia and Milazzo said the exertion has been worth only a few hours of sleep.
Thin Shoe Inserts “It’s our vocation,” Garcia said. “We feel compelled, passionate, excited that we get to wake up and be in the pursuit of something big here. When you have that mindset, you’re not thinking about the long hours. It’s the result of those long hours turning into something special. We’re waking up every day with that mindset, and it just gives us energy. Whether it’s one-hour or five-hour meetings, we feel excited and energized to go out and do this.”