Coach scores with headsets

WITH NEARLY EVERY Rhode Island high school football coaching staff owning Porta Phone headsets to help communicate during games, Paul, left, and John Hooper Jr. have built a winning franchise together with their father, Porta Phone inventor and former coach John Sr. /
WITH NEARLY EVERY Rhode Island high school football coaching staff owning Porta Phone headsets to help communicate during games, Paul, left, and John Hooper Jr. have built a winning franchise together with their father, Porta Phone inventor and former coach John Sr. /

There was one thing John Hooper Sr. had trouble with when he was a head football coach at a small New Jersey college decades ago: calling plays.
The clock would be ticking unrelentingly as he sweated over which play from his playbook would be best at that point in the game, then a player would have to rush the call to the huddle.
“You don’t have much time,” he said recently. “And I needed help.”
Out of that dilemma, a business was born.
Despite having no training in electronics, Hooper built a pair of headsets connected by wire so he could communicate with spotters in the press box – a novel idea in the early 1960s. Soon he was getting calls from interested coaches.
That was the start of Porta Phone Co. Inc., a business that has grown from a part-time, home-based venture selling its wired products to football teams to a 30-employee company that provides wireless communications systems for sports, industry and even hobbies.
Porta Phone and its Narragansett manufacturing plant are now operated by Hooper’s sons, John Jr. and Paul.
“The business was always a struggle,” the elder Hooper said recently, recalling how in the early years he coached while running Porta Phone part time. “But they’ve got it going pretty good.”
Indeed, thousands of football teams at high school and college levels nationwide – and even some in Japan – use their products.
Most every high school team in Rhode Island owns Porta Phone headsets. “They get a dose of home cooking,” says the younger John Hooper, referring to their discount prices. “We take care of our local people.”
Even where high school football can take on mythic proportions, Porta Phone is there. A quick check of computer records by John Hooper Jr. shows that 785 teams in Alabama alone have purchased a Porta Phone system in recent years.
And on the team in Odessa, Texas, on which the book and movie “Friday Night Lights” is based, the coaching staff communicates through the Hoopers’ products.
The Hoopers run the business, but you wouldn’t know it by their easygoing demeanor. One of the Hoopers’ dogs dawdles unleashed through the plant. Walls are covered with photographs of fishing trips. In fact, fishing – a big pastime for the family — is the reason why the Hoopers moved the business to Rhode Island from New Jersey in the 1980s.
In offices and on the manufacturing floor headsets hang from everywhere like bizarre Christmas ornaments.
Over the years, products have evolved from wired headsets to the push-to-talk wireless kind – communication much like a walkie-talkie – to a duplex system that’s more like talking on the telephone.
“Coaches need to interrupt each other,” Paul Hooper explains. “Maybe a coach has to shout that a timeout needs to be called now.”
Porta Phone’s latest products allow eight people to talk to each other over two channels – one for offense coaches, the other for defense.
The latest headsets feature voice inversion scrambling to prevent eavesdropping, and they also feature “frequency hopping,” a technology that allows users to avoid the FCC licensing that other wireless systems might require. And there’s no need for a base station.
There’s been a downside to all the technological changes in recent years, the Hoopers say. It has stoked competition, as newly developed high-tech communication methods have been tweaked to be used for football.
And the amount of money teams have available to pay for a communications system is shrinking, too. “It’s getting more challenging for us,” said John Hooper Jr. “Especially the way school budgets are being cut.”
That’s why the company has diversified, forming a subsidiary called Eartec Co. that sells systems for non-athletic purposes. The Hoopers are finding the uses are endless.
Eartec’s duplex headset systems have been used by crane operators, theater and TV productions, horse-riding instructors and even yacht owners who struggle to communicate with helpers while docking.
Snack-food giant Frito-Lay is looking to integrate Porta Phone’s headset into its warehouse system, where workers can use speech to keep inventory counts, according to Paul Hooper.
Still, football is two-thirds of Porta Phone’s business.
Why not sell the systems to NFL teams and big-time colleges? John Hooper Jr. says the demands of those leagues would overburden the small company. “Better to put our resources toward 10,000 customers than just 100 customers,” he said. •
company profile
Porta Phone Co. Inc.
OWNERS: John Hooper Sr., president; John Hooper Jr., vice president; Paul
Hooper, treasurer and secretary
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Wireless headset communications manufacturer
LOCATION: 145 Dean Knauss Drive,
Narragansett
EMPLOYEES: 30
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1961
ANNUAL SALES: WND

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