Sounds like the price of Xeniths have dropped precipitously ... I remember attending a presentation at the TAPPS meeting where the head honcho from Xenith (a former Harvard QB who became a physician and decided to start the helmet company, I thinK) was talking about the product ... he mentioned that it was significantly higher than a normal helmet and the $500 number stuck in my head (but then again, I suffer from Irish Alzheimers ... that's where you forget everything but the grudges).
His idea was to encourage the parents to buy the helmet (paying 1/4 of the cost each year) and keeping the helmet at the end of their football days at your high school. Cripes, it's nice to see something that's gone down in price (and gas doesn't count ... oh, by the way, there was a big gas price war in New Braunfels going on with the opening of the new Buc-ees convenience joint).
As for tracking each helmet's use, I doubt most schools do that. However, it wouldn't be difficult to set up a simple excel spreadsheet, putting an inventory number on each helmet and tracking its use ... conceptually, it's no different than tracking a textbook used by a kid, and adding any service (including reconditioning) as it was performed. Again, I expect you'll see more annual reconditioning of helmet than the currently accepted standard of bi-annual reconditiong.
I remember when we first bought our helmets in 2003 starting the program, the guy from Riddell (God rest his soul, he's passed away a few years back) told me that all the local public schools did bi-annual reconditioning but some of the larger private schools did it every year.
