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Sophie Wegenast and Justin Gillham are engineers at the University of Louisville — engineers who admittedly don’t follow sports despite being around a sports-driven campus in a sports-driven town.
But their self-described “nerd hobbies” have made a huge impact on the Louisville men’s basketball team, one that’s allowed a reliable frontcourt starter to play the game comfortably after a bad injury.
Sophomore forward James Scott lost front teeth and suffered major dental and facial injuries on Feb. 8 when a University of Miami player slammed his face to the court while going for a loose ball. The Cardinals sports medical staff reached out to Louisville’s J.B. Speed School of Engineering to inquire about whether the department could construct a protective mask that would allow Scott to return to action without missing valuable game time.
Using 3D printing technology, Wegenast and Gillham, who are part of the Additive Manufacturing Institute of Science and Technology (AMIST), were the two engineers responsible for creating a durable-yet-comfortable polypropylene mask — one of breathable fabric that allows air and moisture to pass while performing high-intense training — that properly molded to Scott’s face. They had the mask ready in a day.
The mask’s design, however, has received equal, if not more, attention as Scott’s play. It has drawn comparisons to the mask worn by the villain Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises,” the 2012 film in the “Batman” series. It also has been compared to the one worn by Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 movie “Silence of the Lambs.” Some have jokingly called Scott the “Silence of the Slams” on television and social media. With Scott being a 6-foot-11 dunker, the nickname makes sense.
The mask received additional publicity as Louisville made its run to the ACC Tournament finals. The Cardinals (27-7) are now seeded eighth in the South Region of the NCAA Tournament and will face ninth-seeded Creighton (24-10) early Thursday afternoon.
“This has been crazy, because doing what we did for this, you don’t learn this in engineering school,” Gillham said. “I learned how to do this by playing with goofy ‘Star Wars’ models on the internet, doing all the nerd stuff like Dungeons & Dragons miniatures and manipulating those. I’m not making goofy masks, but you do the same kind of techniques for working with these digital files. So, we learn all that through doing this stuff as a hobby rather than (from) our job or our schools.”
Wegenast said when working on her engineering degree, she originally wouldn’t have imagined those lessons being used in sports.
“I would have thought, like, biomedicine, something like that. But athletics was never in the cards,” Wegenast said. “To make such a big wave in athletics has been super cool for us, because we’re just the engineers. Like, we’re the nerds. We’re over here at Speed School. We don’t do sports; we don’t really get involved in that. So, to be involved with athletics, it’s just been really a fun, fun thing.”
Scott’s mask is actually the not the first the engineering team has constructed for a Louisville athlete. In 2022, field hockey player Julie Kouijzer was hit in the mouth with a hockey stick while training with the team in Ohio. Kouijzer was cleared to play after dental work, provided she wore protective gear for her face.
Gillham worked with Louisville’s sports medical staff to determine what would be NCAA compliant, then used a 3D scan to construct a mask that covered Kouijzer’s face. After tweaks to the construction, a mask was created that allowed her to breathe and play. That mask was clear and had some similarities to the Jason Vorhees-style hockey mask from the “Friday the 13th” movies.
There also were masks made for players on the men’s and women’s basketball teams to be used during offseason practices. By the time Wegenast and Gillham had the request for Scott, they were already prepared.
“It wasn’t a full face, so that also kind of made it a little bit easier,” Wegenast said. “All the masks we’ve done I feel has led us to James Scott’s.”
Scott’s injury on Feb. 8 required dental work, but he didn’t want to miss time, and the Cardinals had a game four days later at North Carolina State, Scott’s home state. The turnaround time had to be quick. The request for the mask came in on a Monday morning; the engineers had it ready by the next morning.
A scan was done with Scott while his face was still swollen from the injury, but when he put the mask on, it fit with no issues. He started the game against North Carolina State and had six points, four rebounds and two blocks in a 91-66 win.
NBA Champion and UConn/Pistons legend Rip Hamilton shows love to Louisville’s James Scott, saying he wishes he had a mask like Scott!!! pic.twitter.com/l5rQk0lBY9
— 35KYSports (@35KYSportsMedia) March 5, 2025
“I emailed our contacts that were there to see (Scott), ‘Hey did the mask work out? Is there anything we need to change now that we’re not in the rush to get this done?’” Gillham said. “And it was all just praise. It was all love. It was perfect. Everything worked out, and they didn’t need us to do anything.”
Meanwhile, the engineers went to work on making additional masks for Scott as backups — which ultimately was a good idea. Scott was hit in the nose March 5 against Cal, and the hit broke the mask.
“We did a nice, little in-lab kind of endurance test on it,” Wegenast said of the backups. “We knew that it would be good to hold up for him.”
Gillham said it will take a lot to damage the new masks. Testing included Wegenast bending the mask in every way possible and basically anything short of beating it with a hammer. With every test attempted, the mask held form.
Outside sports medicine teams have reached out to Louisville about how to create the masks, as well as for other innovative ideas. Sports fans will associate the engineers with the masks, but this isn’t their career. The lab that is their office is a manufacturing lab. The 3D printing happened to turn into something that has expanded what they do on a regular basis.
“3D printing is more of a tool for making things,” Gillham said. “That works differently than forging or casting or machining or old ways of doing things. That has absolutely nothing to do with our mask. But that’s what we do in our lab here. I’m doing material development for different metal alloys in 3D printing, and that’s my main focus. That’s what I do when I get here to work every day.”
Wegenast and Gillham were invited to a Louisville men’s basketball game this month and were able to watch from a suite as Scott wore the mask. It’s allowed two people who aren’t big sports fans a reason to pay attention to the Cardinals.
It also doesn’t hurt looking on the internet to see what people are saying about the mask and all the memes that have followed.
“It was really cool because our lab, it’s pretty much just me and Justin and a few co-op students working there,” Wegenast said. “To see something from our little space on the big screen, and it’s such an important thing and actually being used for going to the NCAA Tournament, it was really cool.”
(Top photo: Jim Dedmon / Imagn Images)
