Chaney's Blog

Football's Legal Fire Overtakes Juvenile Levels in U.S.

Matt Chaney — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:03:30 GMT

By Matt Chaney

For ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Monday, April 23, 2012

I. Introduction

II. Football Lawsuits Surge Against Schools, Youth Leagues and Personnel

III. Court Defenses and Safety Concepts Hardly Shield Juvenile Football

IV. ‘Concussion Testing’ Unlikely to Prove Valid in Court as Diagnostic

V. Various Injuries and Issues Pose Legal Bombs for Juvenile Football

VI. Should Juveniles Play Tackle Football in America?

Legal crisis threatens American football today and not merely the pro level, where news media fixate on lawsuits by some 1,200 former NFL players alleging mismanagement and deception over brain trauma.

Off spotlight, lawsuits also fly in grassroots football, the juvenile game involving millions of kids, a legal minefield for inherent dangers and lack of resources.

America’s schools and youth leagues stand highly vulnerable in court, generally unequipped for handling tackle football against mounting legal responsibilities, and individual personnel are hot targets for plaintiff lawyers.

Most juvenile programs lack a full-time, certified athletic trainer despite expert consensus such a specialist should constantly monitor tackle football. Meanwhile, traditional court defenses have fallen flimsy in protecting organizations and personnel.

Legal experts warn that a ballyhooed defense for football lawsuit, participant “assumption of risk” or consent, is practically useless regarding players under 18 years old.

Moreover, injury “standard of care” for football, another defense against formal complaint, has devolved into flux.

New theory and recommendation come regularly and varied from competing experts, particularly for managing concussion among athletes, causing confusion and misinformation on football’s frontlines for brain trauma, heat illness, cardiac arrest and more risks.

Thus football’s legal fire stalks everyday coaches, athletic trainers, doctors, school nurses and administrators, public paramedics, even teachers who work with injured student players.

“The liability risk for ‘support personnel around juvenile football,’ to use your term, continues to just get greater and greater,” said Steven Pachman, a foremost defense attorney in sport litigation, during a recent telephone interview with me from Philadelphia.

Pachman, of the law firm Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads, is a popular speaker for practical breakdown and advice on legalities of athletics, appearing before groups like athletic trainers charged with managing safety.

Pachman’s audiences are most concerned about tackle football, the sport in perpetual health crisis for an array of unpreventable hazards.

Serious brain injury is common for the game’s untold thousands of episodic concussions every year, many passing undiagnosed, along with more players likely affected by sub-concussive blows virtually undetectable.

Hundreds of players survive grave conditions each year, caused by or related to the sport, like brain hemorrhage, cerebral stroke, spinal fracture, cardiac arrest, heart attack, heatstroke, organ rupture, non-cerebral blood clots, “compartment syndrome” and staph infection, among football casualties I found during extensive searching of Google information banks for American cases from 2009 to present.

Players die at the annual rate of one to two dozen in American football, for known fatalities, and a hundred would perish if not for modern medical response and trauma care.

Ill-prepared football programs and personnel “are really putting themselves at risk,” Pachman said. “These days in football, because of everything that we’re discussing here, anytime following a catastrophic event a lawsuit is almost a guarantee if a plaintiff can, in any way, point to arguable negligence.”

“And the plaintiff can often do so, multiple ways, whether it’s with respect to inadequate (injury) education, testing, staffing, documentation, policy—the list goes on.”

The worst grid casualties cost a fortune in medical care, and many players lack insurance coverage and cash to pay expenses amidst economic recession. My online review of 219 such cases from year 2011 finds numerous families and schools struggling to fund proper care of the injured, particularly those beset by lasting disability.

“The bottom line is unpaid medical bills result in lawsuits being filed against football organizers and volunteers,” declared insurance executive Tom Sadler, on his business website. “Somebody has to pay for the medical bills!”

Last year at least 20 football players survived brain bleeds or clots that required emergency surgery, the large majority kids, according to reports online. A majority remain permanently impaired, requiring care and monitoring for life, joining surviving victims from decades of football.

“It’s the family (who) will have to take care of these people…,” said Lou Ruvo, a brain-injury activist and philanthropist, “whether it’s a football player, a sports legend, any other athlete, or a veteran coming back from the war.”

Football Lawsuits Surge Against Schools, Youth Leagues and Personnel

When something goes terribly wrong in juvenile football, coaches, trainers and doctors can expect to bear the legal brunt.

“At any moment, any of these football personnel are one (player’s) injury away from a lawsuit that could take down them or their program,” Pachman said. “And that’s what I’m trying to do: instill, to some extent, fear into the organizations I address.”

By outset of 2009, Pachman and other legal analysts gauged a national uptick in legal action against juvenile football. Scientific news and harrowing player stories about brain damage generated waves of negative press for the tackle game.

That spring, seven months before Congress ripped the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell in a hearing, plaintiff attorney Paul A. Slager noted: “Recent revelations about permanent brain trauma suffered by football players raise serious ethical questions and liability concerns about head trauma in sports. Public understanding about the lasting effects of serious head injuries has been growing in recent years.”

Today, at least 18 active lawsuits target defendants in juvenile football, schools, youth leagues and personnel, with the majority of allegations involving brain injuries. Many cases were filed in the past year, according to reports online.

Additional legal complaints include a California football mother’s damage claim for staph infection of her son, denied by school officials, a matter which can lead to civil court.

A charge of inadequate equipment, helmets, drives lawsuits for a trio of teen players who suffered catastrophic brain bleeds and permanent impairment. Defendants besides helmet manufacturers include an Illinois school and a youth league in Florida.

Typically, coaching conduct drives legal disputes, along with a program’s medical preparation and response for casualty.

Cases presently include the high school in Idaho sued for a coach’s allegedly striking a player with a water bottle, causing concussion and laceration. In Louisiana, plaintiff parents target a youth coach, claiming he directed players to intentionally injure their son. In Michigan, a middle-school coach faces litigation for allegedly ramming a 13-year-old player, fracturing the boy’s collarbone.

A Pennsylvania lawsuit charges that concussion mismanagement at a school and “violent instruction” of a coach led to a prep football player’s permanent brain problems. The plaintiff, age 20, claims his constitutional right to an education was violated after his injury at 16, for mishandling by faculty and administration.

Elsewhere, provocative lawsuits allege wrongful death of prep players.

Controversial “concussion testing,” widely adopted yet panned by significant peer review and expert criticism, is at crux of the New Jersey case Ryne Dougherty v. Montclair High School, et al, for the question of erroneous results or misuse of popular-selling ImPACT software.

Dougherty, 16, died of a subdural hematoma suffered during a jayvee game in 2008, presumably of brain re-bleed or “second impact” injury, having been cleared for return to play less than a month following a diagnosed concussion. An athletic trainer administered computerized ImPACT testing to Dougherty a week prior his death.

In the second case, a North Carolina appellate court has ruled sovereign immunity cannot shield a public paramedic from personal liability, leaving him open to be held for “mere negligence.” The complaint Malinda Fraley and David Fraley v. James Griffin can proceed to trial.

Prep football player Atlas Fraley died in August 2008 following an examination by Griffin, then a county EMT. The 17-year-old had called 911 from home, complaining of severe cramping from daytime practice, and responder Griffin recommended the player drink fluids then left him alone. Fraley’s parents later found him unresponsive at home, where he was pronounced dead.

Whether any current football lawsuit reaches trial and jury decision remains to be seen. Confidential settlements are the historical rule for successful civil action against football and the norm carries in recent case resolutions.

Close observers of modern crisis in brutal American football still await a milestone jury trial at any level of the sport, robust and open in allegations, material evidence and testimony.

Jury trials could establish legal standards of care for football casualty while surely upping payouts to successful plaintiffs, especially injured kids.

Since 2009 a handful of injured teens have settled for millions in damages with football schools and personnel, like Zachary Lystedt of Washington state, who reportedly received $14.6 million and inspired anti-concussion laws in some 33 states. Most recently, plaintiff Scott Eveland of California settled with a district and helmet maker for reportedly $4.9 million.

Both plaintiffs sustained brain hemorrhage of collisions while playing high-school football, underwent emergency surgery, and today suffer permanent impairment. Their settlements entail no acknowledgement of wrongdoing on part of defendants.

But sympathetic trial juries, acting autonomously in tallying sums for damages, could have allowed much more to Lystedt and Eveland, given their tragic plights and long-term expenses.

Eveland’s lawyers had estimated his care would cost $25 million for life, and attorney Pachman sees potentially mega jury awards for children and adolescents ravaged by tackle football.

“Once (such) case is in a jury’s hands where a juvenile is the plaintiff…,” Pachman posed, considering the unenviable side of football defendant. “You’re at the jury’s mercy.”

Court Defenses and Safety Concepts Hardly Shield Juvenile Football

In July 2004, a rather desperate official of high-school athletics went to Washington, D.C., to plead his case for lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Robert F. Kanaby, executive director of The National Federation of State High School Associations, wanted politicians to legislate federal immunity from lawsuits for the non-profit NFHS, which devised and published rules for prep athletics nationwide.

“Over the last three years, the annual liability insurance premiums for the National High School Federation have increased three-fold to about $1 million,” Kanaby said before the House Judiciary Committee. “The premiums will likely increase significantly in years to come. Since we operate on a total budget of about $9 million, such an increase would be, to put it mildly, problematical.”

The NFHS was legally beleaguered because catastrophic injuries of prep athletes “are going to occur,” Kanaby said. “And each of those accidents has now been representative to our being sued because we have either passed a rule or failed to pass a rule… And we are in a logjam situation where, no matter what we do, every time there’s an accident or a difficulty that occurs, we are embroiled in a suit.”

“For these (high-school) sports to continue to grow and prosper, the development and enforcement of rules is essential. However, the increased expense of defending litigation is endangering the future of these socially beneficial activities.”

The committee denied Kanaby’s request for shield law but offered advice, not good: The NFHS should mandate athletes and parents sign consent forms, a politician proposed, to assume risks of dangerous sport.

Kanaby persisted, contending that consent offered no real protection “because traditionally the courts have not recognized that you can waive the rights of minors… and most of our participants are minors.”

The politicians ended up laughing, still dismissing Kanaby, but he was correct about injury waivers for kids that hold little legal weight, then or now.

Attorney Steven Pachman concurs. “In the case of minors, they can disaffirm contracts,” he said. “So if you’re under 18, a guardian must sign for the minor, and many jurisdictions will not allow anyone, including the parent, to contract away the rights of a minor. So a release wouldn’t have any effect (in such jurisdiction).”

“One of the topics I talk about, when I speak to these larger audiences on assumption of risk, is that it’s become a really difficult defense on which to prevail in football cases.”

Furthering the point, a sound complaint alleging negligence trumps prior consent as defense. “No one, either a juvenile or an adult, can quote consent to negligence, or quote assume the risk of negligence,” Pachman said.

Even a plaintiff athlete’s own negligence can mean nothing for defendants, after the fact of grave casualty. “I’ve seen cases and have been involved in cases as defense counsel,” Pachman said, “where the injured plaintiff may have downplayed symptoms prior to injury, may have misled athletic trainers or other healthcare providers, and actually these players have played while they’re knowingly symptomatic.”

“And in these cases, their post-injury response (in court) is ‘Well, the defendant knew or should have known of the plaintiff’s condition. Or ‘The defendant should’ve known more.’ Or, specifically, ‘The defendant should’ve had better testing, etcetera, or some other program or protocol in place.’ And the plaintiff’s counter-argument often prevails.”

Pachman summarized: “The bottom line is if there’s a good negligence theory, then consent, assumption of risk, doesn’t necessarily get the defendant anywhere, as defenses in these cases.”

Neither does “standard of care” presently in tackle football, primarily for mysteries of brain injury coupled with near certainty the destruction impacts every game level and too many participants, based on documented cerebral damages of players child and adult, Tiny Mite to All-Pro, living and deceased.

No independent validating research exists, nor expert consensus, for reliable steps in so-called concussion management. No doctor or research team is certain of proper course of action for brain trauma, none is certain about diagnosis and recovery, including no headliner expert of the U.S. military and NFL.

No one is certain about return-to-play protocol of diagnosed concussed football players, young and older. No concept deployed as prevention effort of brain injuries, in football or the military, yet verifiably turns back rates of risk and outcome.

But known error margins are high in concussion management of athletes and soldiers.

Presently, as many as 20 different “expert” guidelines circulate. And realm of sub-concussive blows and trauma is hardly addressed or understood, the groundbreaking Purdue studies notwithstanding, MRI radiology detecting brain trauma in prep players who outwardly appear fine, asymptomatic.

Worse for juvenile football, research and expert opinion continue to suggest young brains are more susceptible to severe injury and poor recovery, for their continuing development through minimally age 14 to as long as early adulthood.

Damage to frontal-lobe regions of the adolescent brain, during its accelerated maturation of cellular “gray matter,” is a prime concern of medicine and science regarding contact sport.

The pediatric health crisis of athletes is a focus of researcher L. Syd M. Johnson, PhD, at Michigan Technological University, who specializes in ethics and law of neurology and biology.

“Research shows that the subtle short-term effects of concussion can last up to a year or more in youths, long after the obvious clinical symptoms have abated,” Johnson stated in an email interview. “Athletes who sustain multiple concussions are at greater risk of long-term neurological effects but also more severe short-term effects, as well as increased susceptibility to concussion. Clearly, the only effective ‘treatment’ here is prevention, but that is difficult to achieve in high-impact competitive sports.”

“A further problem, which is only beginning to be acknowledged, is that concussion may not be the real culprit in football. The chronic, day-to-day, sub-concussive head impacts may be the real danger… Preventing the kinds of chronic head impacts that are just part of the game would be impossible without radically altering the game of football.”

“Return-to-play guidelines are a politically and culturally popular Band-Aid,” Johnson continued, “because they don’t require any substantive change to the game itself. But they don’t address the problem of primary concussion at all—they are only designed to prevent secondary concussions.”

In legal blowups around brain injury of football, for expert contradictions and knowledge gaps, personnel fall through the cracks.

“Because the standard of care is still unsettled in many areas related to the proper management of concussions, (football) coaches, trainers and other healthcare professionals or administrators are highly susceptible to the risk of being sued,” Pachman said.

Despite volatile legal environment for head injuries in football, and the news media’s constant coverage, a remarkable amount of personnel remain uninformed. Coaches and administrators can astonish Pachman.

“We usually have Q&A after I speak before these audiences,” he said, “and I’ll still get these questions that are kind of frightening on the issue of liability risk, like ‘Does my school or does my league need a full-time athletic trainer? Or a full-time physician?’ ”

“And do you really need one to reduce the risk of injury, I don’t know. But if you don’t have one, if you don’t have a full-time athletic trainer guiding return-to-play decisions; if you don’t have a physician; if the athletic trainer is not working under the direction of a physician, as many (state) jurisdictions put it…”

“And you’re out in front of a jury?” Pachman continued. “The plaintiff’s lawyers are going to kill you because they can pick and choose from whatever handbooks, whatever guidelines they want, because there are so many out there.”

“One of the questions I’ve received several times—and this goes back to the question of waivers and consent—is ‘If my (concussed) player or my player’s parent signs a waiver, may I allow this player, a symptomatic player, to return to play?’ ”

“That’s a pretty scary question, at least coming from my perspective as a defense lawyer,” Pachman said. “Some of this causes me to question these inquirers’ basic common sense, but it also says to me there still may be a long way to go before we actually see a uniform standard of care that’s understood by the personnel involved.”

‘Concussion Testing’ Unlikely to Prove Valid in Court as a Diagnostic

Many well-publicized experts, led by neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Cantu and North Carolina professor Kevin Guskiewicz, designate written and computerized neuropsychological testing as legitimate standard of care for cerebral injury in American football.

The claim is contentious and central to the divide between those authorities who believe “safe” football is possible versus those who disagree. The latter side ranges in mindset from mildly optimistic for positive reform to the belief no need exists for the sport, especially where kids are concerned.

The side pro-concussion management is led by commercial developers of testing, “football experts” with MDs and PhDs—supported and promoted by the NFL, NCAA, public schools and youth leagues—who contend their studies validate intuitive-based assessments for detecting brain injury among athletes.

For the burgeoning service industry of brain trauma in sport, so-called concussion testing leads technologies in marketing.

The No.1 product, computerized ImPACT, has racked up thousands of sales for millions of dollars based on a wide public trust—even if without a page of independent literature affirming diagnostic quality.

“Concussion testing” is the popular remedy to crisis in football, touted as solution by news media, coaches, school administrators, game officials, trainers, physicians, researchers, educators and politicians.

But NP assessments have not faced court scrutiny to-date while attracting an impressive opposition that grows louder.

No longitudinal study supports the methods and instruments as valid and reliable for diagnosis and return-to-play assessment, and though ImPACT developers promote the product as “Valid. Reliable. Safe.” their fine print states concussion testing should only be one tool of a multi-faceted protocol. ImPACT developers have ignored my requests for interview.

If anything of real record, concussion testing accumulates denouncement, led by informed critics and a decade of negative peer review.

In the military, officials and insurers say the computerized test ANAM lacks independent validation, and some suggest it a failure. The tool “is insensitive and nonspecific,” Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, Army surgeon general, told lawmakers. “It misses about a quarter to a third of (soldiers) who are concussed and includes about 50 percent of (those) not concussed.”

Christopher Randolph, professor of neurology at Loyola University, has compiled unfavorable reviews on NP testing of athletes for years, recently finding faults in “baseline” testing of ImPACT software—designed and marketed by associates and a physician of the NFL, neuropsychologists Mark Lovell and Micky Collins and neurosurgeon Dr. Joseph Maroon.

“The use of baseline neuropsychological testing in the management of sport-related concussion has gained widespread acceptance, largely in the absence of any evidence suggesting that it modifies risk for athletes,” wrote Randolph, detailing unacceptable ImPACT rates of false-positive and false-negative results for his 2011 article in Current Sports Medicine Reports.

Dr. Bennet Omalu, pioneer football neuro-pathologist, said ImPACT testing is “a fraud” as concussion diagnostic, criticizing anyone claiming it a quick fix, ranging from marketer to politician, for epidemic brain trauma in the game.

“ImPACT testing is not a diagnosis tool,” Omalu, chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County, California, said in a phone interview. “It is a forensic follow-up to monitoring a patient, to evaluate the amount of damage. Using (computerized) testing in the acute phase of injury can actually make the symptoms worse. Am I making sense?”

Journal reviewer Dr. Lester Mayers cites lack of specificity and sensitivity of NP products on mass market. “Basically, they’re all unsuitable for clinical work with concussions,” Mayers said, estimating 20 to 25 percent of afflicted athletes are missed.

The public rhetoric and expectation of ImPACT for solving football’s head injuries, much less protect game personnel in court, leaves independent experts confounded.

“The response is infantile,” said Mayers, director of sports medicine for Pace University Athletics, during a phone interview. “The ImPACT people have taken over the idea that somehow they can tell you when it’s OK that the athlete goes back.”

Insurers see problems already, before a possible trial test like the pending Dougherty family lawsuit. Some insurers determine computerized concussion testing raises liability risk for schools and personnel and decline to underwrite the practice, for concern of either misuse or faulty technology.

Most recently, a statement of the Army Surgeon General’s Office reads in part: “the scientific community has yet to identify an objective biomarker or other test that accurately determines when the brain has completely healed from the concussion.”

State governments stop short of explicitly mandating suspect NP testing for school athletics, among anti-concussion laws passed nationwide. Indeed, politicians know a large portion of juvenile football cannot afford the purchase and employ of software applications.

The typical statute does present an implied standard of intuitive-based brain assessment, serving society’s predominant goal for quickly returning injured athletes. But politically charged perception of effectiveness, buttressed by media and echoed by law, does not guarantee proving validity or even reasonableness of concussion testing in court.

And critics deride new measures as minimalist, anyway, except for effecting increased liability risk and caution around contact sports. The laws’ commonly broad language require removal of a presumed symptomatic competitor until clearance by a general practitioner or lesser technician, most assuredly involving NP testing.

Resultant practices in juvenile football are less than ideal overall, or legally inadequate, according to follow-up reviews and observations.

Many athletic trainers do not understand or want to employ computerized assessments like ImPACT while many physicians feel challenged or reluctant as well.

Dr. Charles Tator, Canadian neurosurgeon and researcher on sport-related brain trauma, emphasizes no objective assessment protocol exists, much less a user-friendly model employed in minutes on an acutely concussed athlete who cooperates and reliably self-reports.

“The best method of assessing the effects of a concussion is through a trained observer, a trained physician and a compliant patient. If you have a physician who isn’t trained and a patient who does not want to be compliant, you get nowhere,” Tator told The Toronto Globe and Mail.

“There are two types of cognitive tests. There is the interactive test—20 minutes, $50—where you come up with a numerical score as a baseline and redo half-way through the (athletic) season and see the difference. Sounds good on paper, but does it work? We don’t know the answer. Some doctors and experts rely on these tests, while others say they’re unproven.”

“I’m somewhere in the middle,” Tator continued, “but I know this: I rely on formal, neuropsychological testing, by which I mean a few hours of a neuropsychologist’s time to assess a player’s cognitive functioning. It’s very costly, unfortunately, so you can’t apply it to everybody.”

In American sports medicine, authorities tell me that many neurologists cannot handle concussion in athletes until years of acquired experience, extensive trial-and-error along sidelines.

Even Dr. Cantu, NFL brain researcher and drafter of NP testing format, a foremost promoter of “concussion management,” an authority trusted by millions of parents and children in American sport, had to acknowledge in late 2010 that “the majority of physicians who are in practice today would not be qualified to manage athletic concussions.”

All sum, “concussion testing” likely cannot prove effective and defensible as a “reasonable” standard of care, per tort definition, for tackle football organs and personnel in America.

Various Injuries and Issues Pose Legal Bombs for Juvenile Football

For additional hazards of American football, cardiac ailments and heat illness together send scores if not hundreds of athletes and personnel to hospital ERs annually. Many football fatalities are related, including at least a dozen players in 2011, along with two coaches, a referee and a cheerleader.

Cardiac and heat-related illness are classic emergencies of the sport, often intertwined in casualty, and modern standards of response are proving effective and necessary lifesavers, according to consistent positive outcomes and a jelling consensus.

Unfortunately these preventions necessary around juvenile football—portable defibrillator machines, iced cooling tubs, sideline medical support and ready ambulance—rarely become reality, standing cost-prohibitive instead for most schools and youth programs.

A host of safety recommendations and policy bombard juvenile football these days, for deficiencies, casualties and scrutiny of the environment.

Informed critics include parents, doctors, researchers, lawmakers and acquiescing football organizers who deflect blame from themselves.

Tackle football for kids, critics say, needs state-of-art helmets properly maintained and replaced, and proper-fitting pads for every player.

Practice time and hit counts must be reduced, they recommend, while coaches and trainers should record and report all injuries.

Laws in most states now require concussion education and policy administering of coaches and trainers, but critics say football support personnel also should comply with the American Disabilities Act.

Coaches should properly handle steroid use and hazing by players, and coaches should recognize and report child sexual abuse, among contemporary complaints or proposals by voices in news.

Pop Warner Football officials currently lead the call for coaches to teach dubious “proper tackling” or “proper contact,” for the improbable objective to avoid head impacts in a forward collision sport.

Size limits of juvenile players should be instituted and governed by personnel, say some observers, and a louder call proclaims practice and games should never be held in oppressive heat. Expert consensus says football staffs must ensure players are properly hydrated at all times.

Football personnel are expected to recognize spinal injury, internal bleeding and heatstroke, among potentially mortal conditions, and act quickly, carefully and decisively.

Emergency paramedics and ambulances should attend every football game, critics contend, and every player susceptible to sickle-cell trait should be screened.

School nurses and teachers should shepherd concussed football players academically, say experts and parents, through class and makeup work of recovery periods that can last a month, year, longer.

Lavish recommendations for football go beyond hi-tech helmets to critics’ demand for advanced heart screens such as EKG, presumably for millions of juvenile players each season. Experts suggest advanced radiology for brain imaging, notably “functional” MRI, to better identify and monitor trauma. Insurers do not cover such testing.

Football parents want million-dollar fields for their children, synthetic surfacing that supposedly reduces injury, with regular disinfecting of surfaces at all facilities to battle spread of staph infection.

Practically anyone around football issues will agree qualified trainers should be stationed throughout the sport, on vigil.

As for thoughts on funding such plans, few are heard but skepticism.

“In a perfect world there should be a certified athletic trainer at every single high school in the nation,” remarked Barbara Fiege in Los Angeles, commissioner of interscholastic sports where urban-core schools struggle to stay open, for budget slashes.

In New Jersey schools, athletic directors eliminate coaching positions for sports already thin in adult guidance, among department cuts. A 2011 poll of local athletic directors by The Newark Star-Ledger found: “Seventy percent of ADs are ‘much more’ concerned with budget issues than they were a decade ago or at the beginning of their tenure.”

For risk, casualty and legalities surrounding juvenile sports, about a third of athletic directors were “always” worried about safety and liability, the newspaper found.

All were mindful of brain injuries and ramifications, with 60 percent of respondents “often” or “always” concerned about concussion management.

“It seems like the first response when someone gets injured is to sue first and gather information later,” Steve Jenkins, athletic director of Bloomfield High, told The Star-Ledger. “We don’t want to do a better job with concussion management because we’re scared of being sued, but because we want to treat the kids better.”

Nationwide, football workers weigh heavily their legal vulnerability, according to numerous reports, surveys, insiders and associates.

Personnel should be concerned, with national figures showing about one in five Missouri schools have a full-time athletic trainer, for example, and about one in six across Kansas.

In Pennsylvania, iconic gridiron hotbed, a large majority of schools reportedly have “access” to athletic trainers, but the setup remains subpar. Youth leagues are woeful for response to emergency always lurking at a football field.

“For one thing, most area high schools have athletic trainers present at sporting events, but it’s not universally required across the board,” observed journalist Stefanie Loh, for the Harrisburg Patriot-News.

Athletic trainer Jeff Shields said, “Most of the youth sports never have a sports medical professional, and rarely do they have an athletic trainer at their events.”

Lawmakers in several states have proposed but backed off mandating a certified trainer for every school, despite tackle football, where liability entails practices, games and training workouts. The University of Southern California recently settled civil action with a former player who sued for injury during a weightlifting session.

If many states passed a statute requiring full-time athletic trainers for tackle football, most school and youth programs would close for lack of compliance.

“The idea came up in Georgia a few years ago,” Paul Newberry reported last summer for The Associated Press, “only to get shot down in the Legislature.”

“The education lobby was able to convince them that not every school can afford to do that,” said state athletics official Ralph Swearngin. “The situation would be very difficult to pass any kind of requirement that you had to have an athletic trainer, even though it’s vitally important.”

But the requirement already exists as recognized standard of care, which, in event of severe casualty and legal complaint, can work either in defense of a program with an ATC or against a program without.

Numerous experts and case events support the premise for tackle football. During 2011, certified athletic trainers helped saved young players stricken by brain bleeding, cardiac arrest, heatstroke, non-cerebral blood clots and organ rupture.

Neurologist Dr. Anthony Alessi works in contact sports and serves for the American Academy of Neurology (AAN)). “Many high schools say they can’t afford to have an athletic trainer. I say that means you can’t afford to have a program,” Alessi told WebMD.com. “The presence of a certified athletic trainer makes your program safer by every measure, and if you can’t afford to make the program safe, then you should be closing it up.”

In 2010 the AAN released revised recommendations for managing brain injury in athletics, foremost that a program must staff an athletic trainer and secure an associate physician.

“The five recommendations may strike fear in policymakers—state and local legislators, local school boards and superintendents, public health officials—because of the potential fiscal and practical impact,” attorney Kathleen Dachille wrote for PublicHealthLawNetwork.org.

“Mandating the presence of an athletic trainer at all practices and games is fanciful in a school district where the kids share cleats and other equipment. Requiring release by a medical professional trained in brain injury will mean that young athletes lacking health insurance will be sidelined, possibly unnecessarily. We know the benefits of keeping kids active and involved. But the AAN recommendations cannot be ignored.”

A legitimate standard of care in football, properly planning for and responding to an incident of the game’s predictable bodily calamity, does not mean saving a life in every instance.

The standard does mean having “reasonable” measures in place though, which attorney Steven Pachman does not see often enough around juvenile football in America.

“It’s hard to believe with all that’s been written, and all the knowledge out there now, how some potential defendant targets like schools—many of which just don’t have the money—are still doing less than the bare minimum,” Pachman said.

Should Juveniles Play Tackle Football in America?

King Football, as erstwhile sportswriters dubbed it, remains a major American institution, vast in market, appeal and influence.

But quakes jolt its underpinnings now, mushrooming legalities spurred by player tragedies and damning revelations of brain injury through impacts.

All the while, cultural confidence erodes in tackle football as a beneficial experience for children, and halting parents include players themselves, of the NFL past and present.

Chip Oliver, counterculture author and former Raiders linebacker, has long scoffed at football. He believes the game utterly corrupts public education, among institutions poisoned.

“Maybe it’s time for people to get real about current economics and what’s going to happen in the real world,” Oliver wrote in email. “I for one have had enough of football, period. (Education officials) always fall back on the claim it builds character when in fact the opposite is true.”

Dave Pear, former Raiders defensive tackle and legendary activist for disabled NFL retirees, says the football institution must fully acknowledge hazards in public.

“Football players youth to professional should be made aware of the dangers of this violent and brutal sport,” Pear commented in email. “Parents need to know what these dangers will do to their children.”

Troy Aikman, broadcaster and Hall of Fame quarterback, has discussed his changed viewpoint with journalists. “I believe, and this is my opinion, that at some point football is not going to be the No.1 sport,” Aikman said, adding that officials of the NFL entertainment monolith are “very concerned about concussions… the long-term viability, to me anyway, is somewhat in question as far as what this game is going to look like 20 years from now.”

“I think that we’re at a real crossroads as it relates to the grassroots of our sport,” said Aikman, concussed multiple times himself as athlete. “Because if I had a 10-year-old boy, I don’t know that I’d be real inclined to encourage him to go play football, in light of what we are learning from head injury.”

Like Aikman, Browns linebacker Scott Fujita has daughters only, three girls in a family complete for him and wife Jaclyn. Fujita is relieved knowing football will not be a parental issue for him, and he says active NFL players are sobering about risks, worrying particularly about cognitive outcome.

“Some of the information that’s come up this last year, year and a half, it’s alarming to a lot of guys,” he said in a phone interview of February 2011.

“There’s not a day goes by in the NFL locker rooms where guys don’t look around and say, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ Much like, I would think, professional boxers. I would think that every professional boxer, at some point in his career, says, ‘What the heck am I doing?’ The difference though, I don’t see a heavyweight boxer getting his head beat-in the week before a big fight. And that’s where football needs to start to evolve.”

“If I did have a boy, would I want him to play football? I certainly wouldn’t encourage it,” Fujita said. “I would do everything I could to discourage it. If that were something that he wanted to do, I wouldn’t stop him from doing so. But I would promote golf, tennis and a lot of beach activities, before I would want him on a football field.”

“Football, to me, is the best game in the world—it’s just dangerous,” said Fujita, 32, a players’ leader in their union. “And we have to figure out the best way to move forward with it; otherwise, football’s not going to survive. I mean, who knows a decade from now whether there will even be football anymore. And I think that’s just kind of the harsh reality that’s approaching this, isn’t it?”

Fujita is among game insiders in every level who rebuke talk about “safer” football, including referees for colleges and preps who request anonymity.

Fujita rejects anything suggesting “proper tackling” and “behavior modification”—or “taking the head out” of football, as Dr. Cantu promotes; this impossible idea also ignores catastrophic grid casualties of blasts below neckline, which cause a few fatalities annually while damaging internal organs and arteries of scores of players hospitalized in ICU.

Obviously, tackle football is incorrigible for brutal head-on collisions. No safe impact is possible, as many parents want to believe through rhetoric of opinion leaders like Cantu.

Fujita said, “I drop in on Pop Warner games every now and then, I pop in on high-school games, because I love watching football at lower levels. And not only are there helmet-to-helmet hits all the time, kids trying to knock each other out, but everybody’s getting coached to do that.”

“The point is, what’s going to be the effect for football down in the high schools?” posed David Meggyesy, author, retired NFLPA administrator and former Cardinals linebacker. “How is (brain injury) going to be handled for kids? How can you handle that?”

Not well in juvenile football, at least so far, says “A Concerned Mom,” a lay critic producing prolific and insightful reader commentaries on TheConcussionBlog.com.

“I hear people talk about trickle-down safety from the NFL and can’t help but think… what? As a society we seem to be expecting a higher standard of care for highly paid adult professionals than we do for our children,” Concerned Mom wrote.

The mother, who requests her real name remain undisclosed, became involved in football health issues after her 8-year-old son suffered a concussion at youth practice. “He tackled high, clashed facemask to facemask (with an opponent), and then rebounded to the ground,” she wrote on TCB. “He was hauled up to his feet, and was left standing and crying on his own—coaches restarted the tackle drill, so I had to go get him.”

A doctor affirmed the boy’s concussion through balance testing. “The school didn’t really know how to put in place academic accommodations,” Concerned Mom wrote. “He’s being withheld from contact sports for a year because his symptoms lasted so long and because of his age.”

The boy had found youth football through a friend and enjoyed the sport initially, until contact began and injured him seriously.

“One issue that really bothers me is I never really wanted him to play football,” Concerned Mom recounted, “but I thought if youth football was really that risky, children wouldn’t be allowed to play. I thought smaller bodies resulted in smaller impacts and I put too much faith in the helmet for providing protection.”

Indeed, children should not play tackle football according to a growing field of pediatric research and expert opinion, at least until kids reach high school.

Dr. Ann McKee, sport neuro-pathologist and research colleague of Cantu, issued warning on youth football last spring in Chicago.

Speaking at a seminar on brain injury, McKee, who like Omalu has found CTE tauopathy in deceased teen football players, suggested high risk of permanent damage for kids in collision sport.

“This is a problem that is not going to be solved by (helmet) technology,” McKee said. “I don’t think 10-year-olds need to play tackle football. I’ve already told my son he’s got to stop playing.”

General practitioners second the point in news, letters, reader comments, chat forums, while several peer experts of McKee likewise denounce tackle football for most or all youths.

Dr. Alessi, who speaks on sport-related concussion, contends no child should participate in violent sport until high school. “A lot of people will say that Pop Warner football is the beginning of an NFL career,” the neurologist said. “I can tell you from my experience it’s the end of an NFL career. They get injured (cerebrally) and are never able to come back.”

Dr. Omalu, neuropath and medical examiner, says he does not care to influence football policy, but he does believe juveniles should not play the tackle game.

“There is no reason, no medical justification, for any child younger than 18 to play football, period,” Omalu told MedPageToday.com. “The brain is not fully developed until about age 18. Impact to the head in younger people may not cause any obvious damage that can be seen on CT or MRI (scans), but on the cellular, epigenetic level there is damage.”

Omalu advocates special care for brain-injured children, including a minimal three-month layoff for a diagnosed concussion beginning with strict isolation from external stimuli. Most concussed football players undergo computerized NP testing within 72 hours of injury, a harmful practice, Omalu argues.

The historic discoveries during autopsy of prep football players by Omalu and McKee—chronic traumatic encephalopathy and axonal-fiber injury in the adolescent brain—lead a contemporary wave of research conclusions in pediatric neurology.

Research estimates of concussion frequency in juvenile American football range as high as a hundred thousand or more annually.

Studies find youth-league players collide in forces comparable to college football, find that one concussion can cause loss of IQ, and find that children take longer to recover from concussion, suffering headaches and lingering cognitive deficits worse than adults.

In general population, young people with brain injury appear more prone to violence in immediate phase and the longterm; research also suggests that early trauma can alter gene pathways, laying groundwork for disorder like dementia.

Canada has aggressively undertaken research of pediatric brain injury, particularly in contact sports hockey and football, producing studies that grab attention in the United States.

Recent findings in Montreal suggest teen athletes are particularly vulnerable for harming the cerebral frontal lobe, with concussion effects lasting six months to a year, often undetectable by standard assessments.

“These frontal regions of the brain… oversee executive functions responsible for planning, organizing and managing information,” said neuropsychologist Dave Ellemberg, author of the study utilizing electrophysiology. “During adolescence these functions are developing rapidly, which makes them more fragile to stress and trauma.”

In the legal arena, authorities see a possible benchmark for age limit to high-risk football in America—adulthood, as Omalu alludes. Basically, “assumption of risk” appears untenable for allowing juveniles in the blood sport, and the age cut-off could manifest over cerebral trauma.

“A principle of assumption of risk doctrine… is that an activity can’t be so harmful as to violate public policy,” law professor Gerard Magliocca wrote in December 2009. “Put another way, knowing consent is not enough—that’s why dueling is illegal. At what point will the evidence about brain injuries from repeated blows to the head, especially if causation can be established for injuries to young kids or high-school players, raise this problem for football?”

One year later, Magliocca spoke with me by telephone from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. “Clearly, people know when they play football they could get seriously hurt,” he said. “The question is: Are they aware of the kinds of injuries they could be exposed to? And I think here it’s fair to say, no, I don’t think people knew that repeated blows to the head, that weren’t concussions, could do serious damage if you add up enough of them.”

“Now, the more interesting question, I think, is: What about for young kids, Pop Warner football, something like that? Is it possible we might get to the point where we say you can’t have kids under a certain age playing tackle football?”

Magliocca envisioned scenarios for that development but not a new law. “It’s very hard to imagine a court coming in and basically saying that football is contrary to public policy in general,” he said. “I mean, that could only come from a state legislature or Congress.”

Settlements and jury awards against football defendants, however, could push one vested group to act decisively against the sport—insurance carriers.

Juvenile American football stands exposed in this sense, according to authorities of law, medicine and science, particularly for no discernible standard of care as yet. Maintaining reasonable medical preparation and response for schools and youth leagues would amount to covering parameters of a large war, every year.

Attorney Steven Pachman said: “From a starting point, if we can assume that following a catastrophic event a lawsuit is almost inevitable, then that’s never the ideal situation. I’ve seen schools that, following one catastrophic event, are forced to terminate their football program; they might not be able to get insurance. I’ve seen certain programs that are so small they can’t even afford insurance anymore (before a major casualty); imagine a small neighborhood league that suffers a catastrophic event.”

No interview requests were made of active insurance personnel for this analysis, but current events in American football signal carriers are increasingly reluctant to underwrite damages for the environment.

Insurers are denying responsibility for liability in football lawsuits, disputing paying costly settlements and awards, and denying medical coverage for injuries from minor to catastrophic, whether suffered by child player or adult.

Insurers are denying liability coverage for two notable entities in the sport, Penn State University and Riddell Sports Inc., and will defend the decision in court.

Lawsuits are hitting PSU for alleged molester football coach Jerry Sandusky while Riddell faces complaints by players alleging inadequate helmet protection against brain trauma.

In turn, both PSU and Riddell have filed suit against insurers for denial of coverage in legal defense, according to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and journalist Irvin Muchnick of ConcussionInc.net.

In addition, catastrophic injury is flashpoint for coverage controversy, with football survivors facing immense financial toll. These victims of football’s worst outcomes often lack or are denied coverage at outset, acute phase of injury.

Coverage also can end for survivors requiring lifetime care, in relative few years. Recently in Illinois, football quadriplegic Rasul “Rocky” Clark of Illinois, 27, died following cancellation of private insurance providing optimum care. Clark, an inspiring, determined young man through his paralysis, lived 11 years after suffering a broken neck during a high-school game.

Some carriers acted similarly in the 1980s, dropping football clients for liability and medical premiums over documented revelations of epidemic injury and steroid abuse in the sport, as chronicled in historical sections of my 2009 book, Spiral of Denial.

In conclusion, juvenile football is unmanageable and becoming indefensible in the litigious, contemporary United States.

When Magliocca and I conversed in December 2010, he discussed convergence of events that could spell doom legally, morally, thereof, for tackle football involving kids.

Magliocca envisioned a storm of negative research findings and player tragedies, including suicides, compounded by failures in prevention measures such as concussion testing, rule changes and “proper contact,” and, finally, he saw parental disillusionment.

Today Magliocca’s football scenario is materializing, save the collision death of a superstar player on live TV, and stay tuned for that grisly precedent in the incurable carnage of tackle football.

So the tumblers click into place for dramatic remake or complete extinguishing of the sport considered American bedrock not long ago, during football’s reign of blind devotion by society, forever lost.

“The industry that is contact sports in North America is not going away any time soon. But it is in trouble,” observed Arthur Caplan, bioethics professor and speaker at the University of Pennsylvania, commenting recently for MSNBC.com.

“If the NHL and NFL cannot make their games safer, those who insist on the big hits will find fewer pros available to play because more parents will chose safety over risk. As evidence grows about the toll concussions take on the pros, the chance that a parent will let a child take those risks gets smaller every day.”

Matt Chaney is a writer, editor, teacher and restaurant worker residing in Missouri, USA. Email him at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information, visit the homepage at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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Football Researchers Fumble Another UNC Study

Matt Chaney — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:13:33 GMT

Minimally 2 Player Deaths Overlooked, Likely More of 2011

2010 Fatality Apparently Misidentified as 2011 Football Case

National 'Research' Continues in Error for Grid Casualties

By Matt Chaney

ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Wednesday, February 22, 2012; updated February 22, 2012

The official sounding, widely quoted Annual Survey of Football Injury Research only officially gets worse.

The 2011 report on fatalities in American football, freshly posted on the University of North Carolina website, is erroneous like its 2010 predecessor but in startling fashion.

The new report, co-authored by Frederick Mueller and Bob Colgate for the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research Center (NCCSIR), at UNC-Chapel Hill, is missing a minimum of two football fatalities during 2011, teen players Alec Mounkes and Jerson Tizol.

The 2010 NCCSIR report, posted a year ago this month, also missed at least two football fatalities.

But the 2011 report appears to mistakenly include one of those cases missed for 2010!

Quadaar White, 15, suffered a catastrophic neck injury on Aug. 24, 2010, during football practice for a neighborhood youth team in Upper Darby, Pa.

Witnesses said that White, on defense, led with his head for tackling an opponent and was struck by a knee. White lay on the ground when paramedics arrived, paralyzed and not breathing, and he died a week later, reportedly in the early morning of Aug. 31, 2010.

Yet for the new “study” at the UNC site, supposedly 2011 football, White appears to be included among four “direct” fatality cases on page 15, briefs that do not include names and places. One brief states White’s case in almost exact detail:

A 15 year-old youth football player was injured while participating in a practice scrimmage on 8/24/2011. He died on 8/30/2011. He was playing defense making a tackle with his head in a down position. The top of his head hit the ball carrier’s knee causing a fractured cervical vertebra.

Last summer, this blogger reported the omission of White for the 2010 data, then I reported the miss of Ben Bundy, 20, a football player at Southwest Minnesota State University who died of brain aneurysm suffered in a team workout that February.

Mueller, a UNC professor of sports medicine with a PhD in education, and Colgate, assistant director of the National Federation of State High School Associations, were not contacted for comment prior to this post.

Mueller, director of the NCCSIR and lead author on football reports, has declined my interview requests and ignored my posts regarding his faulty data, for months.

Renowned NFL researcher Dr. Robert Cantu, of Boston, compiled medical data for the 2011 fatality report at North Carolina. The NCAA provides major funding for the NCCSIR.

Besides the apparent mix-up regarding White, the 2011 report commits two glaring omissions: Mounkes, 13, a middle-school player in Kansas dead of blood clots following a football injury; and Tizol, 15, a high-school player in Texas who died of brain bleeding from football, reportedly.

Further 2011 deaths of players are overlooked by the new UNC document, candidate cases for qualification as game-related, including:

*Marcellis Williamson, 23, former Ohio University noseguard training for the NFL draft, who died April 27 of a blood clot in his lung.

*Andy Collins, 27, free-agent pro quarterback of indoor football, who died on Aug. 1 in Florida, working out on a hotel treadmill. Preliminary autopsy indicated heart attack as the cause.

*Kishon Cooper, 8, a youth-league player in Florida who collapsed while training for football at home on Sept. 5; he died later at a hospital, possibly of heat complications.

*Aaron Harris, 18, prep offensive tackle in Alabama, was stricken with kidney problems during a week he practiced football and played a game for his school. He died of reported kidney failure on Nov. 1.

For more information, see my Feb. 8 post on ChaneysBlog, “26 Football Fatality Cases of America 2011.” Link to the new UNC report is http://www.unc.edu/depts/nccsi/2011FBAnnual.pdf.

The 2011 UNC report is correct for 15 deaths listed on pages 15-18, annotated cases that do not include names noted here: Ridge Barden, 16, who died of subdural hematoma; Kainen Boring, 17, brain injury; college player Derek Sheely, 22, severe head trauma; Tyquan Brantley, 14, complications of sickle cell; Latrell Dunbar, 16, acute cardiac arrest; Samuel Gitt, 17, cardiac arrest amid heat factor; Forest Jones, 16, heatstroke; Luke Killian, 16, heart ailment; Isaiah Laurencin, 17, heatstroke; Brian Rushing, 17, undetected heart condition; Don'terio Searcy, 16, heat complications; Ryan Smith, 16, blood clot in lung; Al Smith, Jr., 15, heatstroke; Montel Williams, 15, cardiac arrest with possible sickle cell complication; and Garrett Uekman, 19, college player who died of cardiomyopathy

Meanwhile, Mueller and Cantu have yet to address their fault-ridden reports of 2010 and 2009 on survivors of catastrophic injuries in American football.

My extensive Boolean searches of Google banks have located about 165 survivor cases during 2010 and 2009, casualties of catastrophic injury to brain, skull, spinal cord, vertebral column and/or heart.

My finds exceed by about 100 the survivor cases published by Mueller and Cantu for tackle football during those years. The researchers have declined comment and refused my offer to forward the casualty names they have missed.

The annual reports by Mueller, Cantu and Colgate are accepted without question by medical journals and the CDC, with data disseminated worldwide as valid epidemiology on catastrophic injury in American football.

Matt Chaney is a writer, editor, teacher and restaurant worker living in Missouri, USA. His 2001 graduate thesis study for an MA degree at the University of Central Missouri was qualitative media analysis of 466 football reports, historical print coverage of anabolic steroids and HGH in American football, largely based on electronic search among thousands of news texts from the 1970s through 1999. For more information, including contact numbers and his 2009 book, Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the homepage at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

Modern Med Prevents 100 Football Deaths, Likely More

Matt Chaney — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:17:49 GMT

Only Trauma Care, Not ‘Safer’ Football, Foils Annual Massacre

Grave Injury, Costs Still Hit Hundreds of Families, Many Schools

Cantu and Mueller Refuse Redress for Faulty UNC Studies

By Matt Chaney

ChaneysBlog

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Rest uneasy, American parents, because tackle football remains barbaric like 1905.

Modern helmets and pads accomplish nothing for your players except heightening ferocity of their collisions, injury and pain.

No, President Teddy Roosevelt didn’t save football way back when. He didn’t alter ridiculous dangers and set the game on saner course, as goes the fairytale largely borne by officials and sport media.

And certainly nothing is changing today for better health of football players. New equipment and football-funded “research” do not create safe environment in the blood sport.

Officials and associate “experts” never have reformed football dangers, which they cannot believe possible. Their historic smokescreens begin with the folk hero “T.R.”

Roosevelt only preserved football against abolitionists a century ago, cloaking and sanitizing football’s barbaric nature for public perception and consumption.

The wily politician appointed a body of bureaucrats as overseers that became the NCAA, which tells us everything, while passing along his magic phrase: “safer football.”

And the sport carried on in rising popularity, cresting as entertainment monolith and predominant cultural force, endorsed by every vital institution—but now facing lawsuits by the dozens.

Because football remains utterly dangerous, amounting to simple mass carnage, and likely worse than ever, given case notes on 23 deaths of 1905 collected and posted by game historian and blogger Tom Benjey.

Juxtapose Benjey’s collection for comparison to 219 casualty cases for 2011—see annotated cases in my Feb. 12 post on ChaneysBlog—and the violence of football in notorious 1905 seems quaint, if not “safer.”

Setting all cases on equal response terms, the primitive medicine of 1905—or leaving state-of-art trauma care out of the equation—football today would kill hundreds annually or more, given both the publicized grave casualties and the assuredly large number undisclosed in public for numerous limitations on information (see my recent posts).

And while head injuries dominate current debate over football, blows to torso and legs are likewise lethal.

So-called “proper” techniques of hitting, allegedly to avoid head contact, resolve nothing by encouraging players to strike below necklines.

Body shots have always mutilated and killed players. In fact, internal injury led causes of death that Benjey accumulated for 1905 fatality cases, not brain or spinal trauma, among reports from period newspapers and magazines.

Deaths such as 1 player killed of kidney rupture and 1 of heart laceration from fractured ribs, suffered in football collisions that year.

In comparing 2011 football deaths, 26 case leads that I located online, no autopsy cited organ rupture and bleeding as causal agent.

I found, however, 50 football survivors of organ trauma in 2011, nasty injuries ranging from severe to catastrophic for lung, kidney, liver and spleen. Many victims are still recovering.

At least half required emergency surgery to control internal hemorrhaging, according to details available in Google banks, and apparently would’ve died a century ago for lack of effective medicine and care.

In another category, non-cerebral blood clots, the condition killed at least 1 football player in 1905 and at least 2 in 2011, all developing from leg injuries.

Last year at least 12 players survived non-cerebral blood clots originating of collision and owe their lives to modern medical response, including athletic trainers, paramedics and ER surgeons.

Many more football survivors of bodily catastrophe in 2011 would’ve faced stark odds or hopelessness for survival in 1905, including for heatstroke, cardiac arrest, heart attack, compartment syndrome, brain bleeding, neck fracture and deadly infection (antibiotics weren’t introduced until World War II).

In sum, among known grave casualties last year, more than 100 football players would’ve succumbed with a 1905 medical response, not only the 20 or so who died.

Obviously, annual healthcare expense of football casualties today is monumental for their families and society at-large, totaling billions of dollars.

All self-sustaining Americans pay to support gridiron carnage, particularly in our standard consumer pools of medical and liability coverage. The sport of tackle football holds no special designation for risk and casualty by insurance carriers, not yet.

And “catastrophic injury” insurance for athletics, carried by schools and colleges in coverage co-ops, does not pay off in every case, such as for family and school of a Georgia football player, age 16, who died in 2011 after a week hospitalized in ICU. Apparently, government Medicaid and local fundraising are paying toward final cost of the teen’s healthcare and funeral.

Meanwhile, media-privileged football “experts” are no help in the mushrooming mess, preferring to stay mute on any critical question.

These game-connected medical doctors and PhDs speak only to friendly reporters who parrot their flimsy “study” numbers and silly theories, supposedly reforming tackle football but serving to propagate dangerous, irresponsible mythology of a manageable environment.

Indeed, one father of an aspiring youth player recently spoke of “happy medium” football for his son. Countless parents buy the lie, believing their children can play this game without suffering dire consequence to themselves and friends.

It’s pathetic, an American travesty of spin and public delusion, and a multitude of silent, football-pandering doctors are foremost to blame.

Dr. Robert Cantu won’t speak straight, being football’s celebrated neurosurgeon and injury historian, as he promotes his pending book for guiding parents in the game.

Cantu and more renowned football “researchers” want to ignore my online review producing 219 severe casualties for 2011, especially my findings that confront their study claims and pressure their connections to funding or other political influence.

Since October, Dr. Robert Cantu and professor Frederick Mueller have declined comment on my online results that prove major faults in their annual “catastrophic injury” reports, published under auspices of the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Cantu, based at Boston University, where his Sports Legacy Institute receives $1 million from the NFL, addresses his Carolina cohort as “Dr. Mueller,” a UNC professor in sports medicine and former football coach who holds but a PhD in education.

The NCAA primarily funds the UNC center and reports by Mueller and Cantu, with data presented as valid epidemiology and repeated at face value by medical journals and the CDC, not to mention witless journalists like me, formerly.

The Mueller-Cantu numbers are terribly flawed, beset by underreporting only recently exposed through electronic searches that document their misses, football case leads in news that triple and double their data for 2010 and 2009, or “total” numbers, as they stated, for catastrophic brain and spinal injuries.

My first clues to their underreporting began when I played prep and college football decades ago, close to death and catastrophic survivor casualties who weren’t recorded. These injuries affecting friends and acquaintances included two fatal of cardiac problems, apparently, an offensive tackle hit by blood clots following knee injury, and a ruptured spleen, removed within an hour at the local ER; the linebacker got blasted in a practice, on pass rush, halted in stride at midsection by jab punch of an offensive lineman.

In the 1982 season, I experienced bodily calamity by turning a knee inside-out on a pass rush, involving no contact in the moment but likely originating from previous collision in sandlot football. Every ligament class was destroyed or damaged, along with meniscus, and the deep peroneal nerve channel was yanked and shredded five inches, rendering my foot permanently “dropped” of peripheral nerve paralysis.

A few years later, as a journalist, I was disappointed to learn Mueller and Cantu only tracked paralysis cases resulting of insult to the spinal-cord nerve bundle.

I knew of several “drop foot” football players like myself, including NFL running back William Andrews and Nebraska quarterback Turner Gill, yet we weren’t included in “total” injury data.

Today, I find up to a half-dozen such football injuries in a given year, like 2010, and only among limited cases available through Google.

Beyond inexcusably narrow scope of injury categories by Mueller and Cantu, I came to realize, through my extensive electronic searching of football health topics beginning in the 1990s, that they apparently didn’t gather adequate numbers from the brain and spinal cases online.

The final days of 2010 and subsequent UNC report clinched my observation. Dealing directly with Cantu was an eye-opener.

First, as Cantu defended invalid “concussion testing” during a telephone interview with me, he outright scoffed at my mention of at least 11 known football deaths of the year, cases I had collected and already posted on my blog!

I immediately corrected the presumptuous, erroneous doctor, or scientist, by informing him I would forward the 11 cases soon as we hung up the phone, and I did, along with additional football deaths I subsequently located. No way would Cantu have found all those 2010 cases without me.

Next, astonishingly, Cantu or Mueller, or the former's press person, missed one file I forwarded, a 2010 football collision death I’d found, 15-year-old Quadaar White, youth player in Upper Darby, Pa.

In February 2011, UNC posted the erroneous Mueller-Cantu data for 2010 football on the university’s Website, and the researchers have since ignored my public and private communiqués regarding their sizable underreporting, beginning with omission of White and the February 2010 death of college player Ben Bundy.

The misses on 2010 survivors are atrocious, including cases of brain impairment and spinal paralysis I’ve found, wholly overlooked by Mueller and Cantu.

For 2010 and 2009 combined, I’ve located online about 165 survivor leads fitting catastrophic definition of Mueller and Cantu, or about 100 above the cases they’ve gathered, confirmed and published for UNC.

But they decline my offer to forward those names, probably because they’re presently occupied with the 2011 cases I’ve dropped in overwhelming quantity.

Their chances are slim for a February publication date this time, and Mueller and Cantu obviously have to postpone exam and revision of their erroneous data infecting “safer football” trend claims they’ve constructed since 1977.

My 100-plus survivor leads for 2011, currently in review by Mueller and Cantu, will finalize a record number for UNC reports, given the current high mark of 63 for 2008.

Meanwhile, the useless 2010 report remains posted on the university site, a year running, verifiably incorrect in every category of injury allegedly studied for football.

Mueller and Cantu issue a lofty, careless proclamation in the Introduction:

“The primary purpose of the research… is to make the game of football a safer sport.”

Right. The real-world actions of Mueller and Cantu just make football seem safer, serving the goal of people close to them, especially providers of funding.

Thus the hireling experts and football promoters can count mission accomplished, ever since wily old T.R.

219 Football Casualties Severe to Fatal in America 2011

Matt Chaney — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:42:22 GMT

Online Review Produces Unprecedented Collection of Gridiron Mishaps

By Matt Chaney

ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Sunday, February 12, 2012

Updated February 13, 2012; corrected February 15, 2012, removal of 1 duplicate case

Last fall in Oklahoma, athletic trainer Dan Dodson saw the horrific side of tackle football become manifest.

Grave injury struck down three teen players under Dodson’s watch, leaving one dead, from one team.

In a span of barely three weeks, Edmond North High School became site of perhaps the worst cluster of acute casualties in known history of American football.

Junior player Ryan Smith died on Oct. 12, likely of blood clots originating from leg fractures that the 16-year-old suffered at football practice the day before.

Two weeks later, sophomore Dillian Barrett, 15, was hammered in a collision during practice at Edmond North, breaking a rib that caused lacerations of his liver and spleen.

Then, on Nov. 4, sophomore player John Liles took a lethal blow at practice, damaging internal organs, and the 15-year-old underwent emergency surgery for removing spleen and part of his pancreas.

Questions rose in aftermath about Edmond North football, seeking explanation for the team’s catastrophic injuries, and school trainer Dan Dodson pointed to obvious culprit in the sport itself.

“It is a lot of injuries from one school,” Dodson conceded for KFOR-TV, “but you gotta look at the nature of the sport they’re playing. Football is a violent-contact sport.”

Unequivocally.

No matter how football advocates always spin the violence, regardless their talk of solutions always in progress, the tackle sport rolls on as predictable mass carnage, maiming players by the thousands annually, killing far too many—and at much higher rates than acknowledged by game officials, associate researchers and the adoring public.

This report presents an unprecedented collection of injuries surrounding football in a given year, 219 cases ranging from severe to fatal during 2011, with the large majority juveniles. The list is comprised strictly of information available in Google banks.

The annotated cases below are 193 survivor casualties and 26 fatalities, with players ranging in age from 5 years old to 50 and including 1 female.

Here is the breakdown by category of injury or diagnosed condition, in listed order, of these cases located for American football during 2011:

*4 survivors of “compartment syndrome,” including 1 with leg amputation.

*8 survivors of heatstroke or related illness.

*12 survivors of non-cerebral blood clots mostly originating from leg fractures.

*16 survivors of lung collapse or injury.

*12 survivors of kidney rupture, bruising or malfunction.

*6 survivors of liver laceration.

*15 survivors of spleen rupture or injury.

*1 boy who survived numerous internal injuries.

*2 survivors of facial fracturing, including injury to orbital sockets.

*5 players hospitalized in critical care for infection, including MRSA.

*1 case of knee injury involving paralysis of the peripheral peroneal nerve.

*8 survivors of cardiac arrest or condition and 1 survivor of heart attack.

*17 survivors of brain bleeding requiring surgery, with about half of them still in recovery.

*2 survivors of vessel rupture and stroke requiring surgery, including 1 yet in recovery.

*4 survivors of brain bleeding requiring hospitalization without surgery, including at least 1 yet in recovery.

*1 survivor of brain seizure requiring surgery, caused by a congenital artery tangle known as AVM, with rehabilitation underway.

*2 survivors of head and/or neck injury causing nerve damage.

*1 survivor of skull fracture.

*5 additional survivors of severe or catastrophic head injury or condition.

*20 spinal cases requiring surgery, largely for stabilizing vertebral fractures, including at least 6 victims experiencing continuing paralysis for insult of the spinal-cord nerve bundle.

*49 spinal injuries of no paralysis that did not require surgery, with large majority of cases involving fracturing of vertebral column.

*1 survivor of staph infection in spinal column, no paralysis.

*26 fatality cases surrounding tackle football in 2011, a collection first reported last week in this space, including 23 players and 1 coach, 1 referee and 1 cheerleader, .

This report makes no claim of epidemiological quality on American football beyond the apparently reliable scope of death numbers generating from news accounts every year, available particularly through electronic search.

Among categories above, an untold large number of football injuries goes undisclosed every year, and Google cannot include all reports by local news media, which in turn only publicize a fraction of casualties and typically sidelined players of prominence, like varsity starters in a prep program. The majority of juvenile survivors below were standout players already making news in their local regions, prior injury.

Medical databases, incidentally, are not yet capable for harvesting valid national roundup of catastrophic injuries in tackle football, a vast, high-risk population of about five million players spread among tens of thousand programs across 50 states.

For further discussion on the problem of underreporting survivor cases, beginning with disclosure limitations, see recent reports on ChaneysBlog.

The Jan. 4 post, “Football Researchers Mum on Faulty Injury Statistics,” features insight of epidemiologist Charles E. Yesalis, ScD, professor emeritus of health policy and administration at Penn State University.

For example, the supposed authoritative reports of the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research (NCCSIR), University of North Carolina, are instead proven invalid as epidemiological study, minimally for years 2009 and 2010, because of insurmountable limitations recently demonstrated in part by my extensive review.

For those two years together, I currently hold about 100 candidate cases for “catastrophic” designation missed thus far by NCCSIR researchers Frederick Mueller and Dr. Robert Cantu. Both men, funded by football organizations, have declined comment while ignoring my offer to forward their missing cases for 2009 and 2010, still available through Google.

Meanwhile, no case in this report qualifies as medical study, with each requiring expert follow-up for data verification and additions—and hopefully on part of researchers beyond merely Mueller and Cantu at UNC.

While football apparently caused or contributed to the large majority of injuries below, per medical details in news reports, some cases will not qualify as game-related for either verifiable elimination or because no evidence exists to establish a link.

Regarding casualty survivors of 2011, Mueller and Cantu are examining 111 of my list for their report upcoming, only those cases involving trauma to brain, skull, spinal cord, vertebral column and/or the heart. Their current high tally of such survivors is 63, for year 2008.

The Mueller-Cantu reports of 2009 and 2010 currently list 44 and 24 survivors, respectively, of catastrophic football injuries by NCCSIR classification. The numbers are far short of my electronic harvests totaling about 165 such survivors for those years, names currently available in Google. The UNC team also missed at least 2 football-related deaths for 2010, still online.

Mueller and Cantu do not recognize survivors of football’s catastrophic risks such as non-cerebral blood clots, organ rupture and heatstroke.

Meanwhile, terrible health outcomes already beset American football players in 2012, such as 1 fatality and 1 case of cerebral stroke I have retrieved from Google.

I probably will sandbag my 2012 casualty collection until next year, to post it following publication of the Mueller-Cantu report they can compile without my assistance, unlike for 2011.

Then we can compare results once again—or at least I will.

219 Casualties in American Football of 2011

By Matt Chaney, mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com

Online Reports of Compartment Syndrome Requiring Surgery, Football 2011

Sept. 3: Jacob Rainey, teenager, Virginia, senior quarterback for Woodberry Forest School, projected as a top college recruit in 2013, suffered femoral artery burst of a leg during a preseason scrimmage, among contact injuries when he was “tackled from behind.” Surgeries followed in hospital, where “compartment syndrome” developed in the lower leg, cutting blood flow and killing tissue. “Once I got compartment syndrome, that changed everything,” Rainey later recalled. Doctors amputated the lower leg a week after the tackle injury. “I don’t know ‘why me,’ ” Rainey said in late November. “I’ve never asked myself that question. I think that would just make me feel sorry for myself, and that’s the last thing I want to do.” Sources: The Daily Progress, The Associated Press, and MaxPreps.com.

Oct. 28: Kirk Kaliszewski, teenager, California, senior running back/linebacker for Ramona High School, sustained a calf injury during a game. Compartment syndrome developed of the injury, damaging nerve, artery and muscle in the area, and Kaliszewski was hospitalized for surgery to remove tissue. Kaliszewski was sidelined the remainder of football season. Sources: North County Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Romona.Patch.com and Romona Sentinel.

Nov. 28: Ryan Gill, 17, Arizona, linebacker for Yuma Catholic High School, was struck in a thigh muscle during a state-championship game and played on while injured, through the second half. Two days later, Gill was rushed to a hospital for an emergency fasciotomy operation to combat compartment syndrome of the muscle; he underwent three additional surgeries during eight days hospitalized. “Physically, he’s a beast,” said coach Rhett Stallworth said of Gill. “He made a huge sacrifice for everybody but it helped ensure that we won the football game. It’s the kind of the thing that legends are made of.” Gill rehabilitated and returned to athletics less then two months following the injury, competing in school wrestling. Gill, a 4.0 student, had an academic scholarship to Arizona State University and did not plan to compete as an athlete in college, according to The Yuma Sun.

Dec. 24: Marshal Yanda, 27, Maryland, offensive guard for the Baltimore Ravens, was injured during an NFL game then hospitalized for what the franchise described as a “thigh contusion.” Actually, Yanda was kicked in a lower leg and compartment syndrome developed, threatening to kill tissue that could lead to amputation or even become fatal. “I got leg-whipped in my calf area,” Yanda said weeks later. “They had to do emergency surgery that night and slit the muscle open to release the pressure. It was a nasty scar and shitty way to spend Christmas Eve, but that was the way it was.” Yanda played the next game for the Ravens, with stitches removed afterward, then the post-season rounds. Sources: Ravens24x7.com and Baltimore Sun.

Online Reports of Heatstroke or Related Survivor Cases, American Football 2011

July 11: Jordan Hawthorne, South Carolina, sophomore lineman for Greenville High School, was stricken during morning team workout as local temperature would later reach the mid-90s and about 100-degree index. Hawthorne, listed as 5-foot-10, 200-pound defensive lineman, reportedly passed out but regained consciousness before transport by ambulance to a local hospital, where he spent the overnight in ICU. Source: WPSA-TV.

Aug. 1: Ciani Davis, 17, Texas, offensive/defensive lineman for his 6-man team at Advantage Academy Charter School, collapsed of heatstroke in morning practice. Paramedics found 108-degree body temperature for the teen, listed at 6-foot-4 and 350 pounds, and he was placed in medically induced coma for 48 hours. Davis was hospitalized for a week, mostly in ICU, and began outpatient rehabilitation. Sources: WFAA-TV and KDFW-TV.

Aug. 2: Dustin Snow, 17, Ohio, offensive tackle for Wauseon High School, collapsed at team lunch break after a practice. The 6-foot-1, 285-pound teen slipped off a chair, tried to stand up, then a teammate caught his fall. Emergency response resulted in helicopter life-flight to Cleveland, where Snow was hospitalized in critical condition before he began to recover. His father, Bob Snow, said, “It was a nightmare the first 24 hours.” Dustin Snow, a 4.0 student ranked No.1 in his senior class, was discharged from hospital after a week and soon spoke with reporter Bill Bray: “I barely remember [Aug. 2] practice,” Snow said of the hours leading to his collapse, continuing: “It was severe dehydration. … The first thing I remember I was waking up in the hospital with the [ventilator] tube in my mouth. … I was really freaking out. … I had so much lactic acid in my body that they had to put a room full of fluids in my body. They had seven IV bags hooked up to me at one time. My kidney function was very close to dead as was my liver function. That started to affect all my other organs and my stomach began having problems functioning as well. I couldn’t digest food and it was really bad.” Snow will no longer play football; in addition to his heat illness, he has learned of “an extra bone growth in the back of my head,” discovered during hospitalization, which doctors warn could damage his spinal cord on impact. Sources: Wauseon Reporter and Toledo Blade.

Aug. 9: Two unidentified teenagers, Texas, players for Odessa Permian High School, suffered “severe heat exhaustion” that injured their kidneys during a practice session in extreme heat, Robert Guaderrama reported. Laura Tindol said her sons on the team were hospitalized for two days, treated with intravenous fluids, because the school held summer practices outside between 3 and 9 p.m. Coach Gary Gaines said there were no other times available for football practice, during an interview with KOSA-TV.

Aug. 10: Clay Huskey, 14, Alabama, player for Buckhorn High School, collapsed of heatstroke during a water break at afternoon practice. Coaches applied ice to Huskey’s body while awaiting paramedics. The teen was hospitalized for three weeks, including 17 days in ICU, as chronicled on Facebook by a deep thread of relatives, friends and more followers. For about a week Huskey was basically comatose, wracked by high fever and body pain, then had to overcome a lung infection and surgery. Upon his hospital release at day 21, Huskey faced “a lot of physical therapy,” Denise Sisco Shockley reported online, “and he will be out of school another 4-6 weeks, but he is healing. Thank you, God, for answering our prayers!” Sources: Shockley on Facebook.com and WAFF-TV.

Sept. 2: Clay Callahan, teenager, Ohio, junior lineman for Conneaut High School, was stricken as primarily 100-degree heat and humidity sent six players to local hospitals from a game between his school and Champion High. Callahan was unconscious in critical condition, hospitalized on ventilator for an overnight before discharge after about a week. Candy Oliveira, identifying herself as a relative of Callahan on Facebook, wrote on Sept. 7: “I have been to other high school football games and have seen large ice coolers with towels soaked… . My nephew showed multiple signs of HEAT STROKE prior to his unconsciousness.” Callahan, whom his aunt described as “very lucky,” returned to the Conneaut team for the Oct. 14 game, reports sportswriter Don McCormack. Sources: Ashtabula Star Beacon, WJW-TV, Oliveira on Facebook.com, InAshtabula.com, and Conneaut Area City Schools.

Oct. 8: Jason Foster, 22, Rhode Island, offensive tackle for Rhode Island University, suffered severe heat illness during a game and was hospitalized, according to The Portland Press Herald.

Online Reports, Survivors of Non-Cerebral Blood Clotting, American Football 2011

March, circa: Evan Hailes, 18, Pennsylvania, a lineman for Pennsylvania State University, experienced what he thought were cramps in a leg during winter conditioning drills. After twice driving to Virginia and back, for his grandfather’s death and funeral, Hailes fell short of breath and was hospitalized for about a week, diagnosed with blood clots in lungs and the leg. He did not participate in contact drills of spring football and was placed on blood-thinning medication about six months, countering threat of clots. In August doctors cleared Hailes to resume football, and he played in games as a reserve defensive lineman for Penn State. Sources: FightOnState.com, PennState.247Sports.com, Centre Daily Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and ESPN.Go.com.

April: Nermin Delic, 19, Kentucky, defensive lineman for the University of Kentucky, underwent emergency surgery for a blood clot. The life-threatening condition followed his operation to repair a torn groin muscle, an injury from spring football. “In the second week of April, I was walking to class and my arm was turning blue,” Delic told reporter Drew Brantley. “They told me I had blood clot. I spent eight days in the hospital. I had some internal bleeding and a two-foot tube down my throat. It made me realize some things.” Soon after, Delic had surgery to remove a rib, and he chose to leave football and the university. In July, however, the 6-foot-5, 260-pound athlete announced he would return to UK and the football program in 2012. Sources: Dalton Daily Citizen, BleedBlueKentucky.com and Lexington Herald-Leader.

Aug. 20, circa: Christian Bonnell, 17, California, linebacker for Arroyo High School, underwent surgery for blood clots near his spine following a shoulder injury during a practice session, according to The San Bernardino County Sun.

Aug. 27: Jacy Dike-Pedersen, 16, California, fullback/linebacker for California School for the Deaf, experienced difficulty breathing during a scrimmage; two days later, an arm became swollen. Doctors found blood clots in his upper body and Dike-Pedersen entered ICU for drug treatments and then surgery to remove a rib, Phil Jensen reported. The 6-foot-3, 185-pound honors student began taking blood-thinning medicine and he returned to school in three weeks. Dike-Pedersen considered returning to football if possible, according to The Oakland Tribune.

Sept. 2: Tyler Story, teenager, Texas, receiver/linebacker for Decatur High School, sustained a severe knee injury in a game; a blood clot developed and the teen underwent emergency surgery lasting five hours. A family member reported damage to the artery and nerves, and Story stayed weeks in ICU. Sources: Wise County Messenger and Jeff Jones on Blogspot.com.

Sept. 7: Dustin Harvey, teenager, Kentucky, senior running back for Calloway County High School, suffered blood clots in a leg. Coach Josh McKeel said, “I haven’t talked to his (Harvey’s) doctors, so I don’t know if it could’ve been because of a hit he took. Looking on the film (of the Sept. 2 game), there is one (hit) we think could be it.” Harvey was treated with drugs and doctors determined the blood clots had dissipated by late October. Harvey did not return to football during the season. Sources: Murray Ledger & Times and Paducah Sun.

Sept. 30: Montrell Baldwin, teenager, North Carolina, junior running back for New Hanover High School, suffered fractured ribs and more injuries of an opponent’s hit during a game. Baldwin was hospitalized for an “impact” blood clot and internal bruising, The Wilmington Star News reported.

Oct. 8: Andrew Gonnella, 21, Maryland, offensive guard for the University of Maryland, suffered a dislocated knee in a game that included compound bone fracture, leading to surgery that night. Three days later, Gonnella developed a blood clot and was hospitalized. Sources: Washington Times and Baltimore Sun.

Oct. 12, circa: Kyle Nunn, 22, South Carolina, offensive tackle for the University of South Carolina, was sidelined with a herniated lumbar disc after a game on Sept. 24. Soon blood clotting developed in a leg, requiring emergency surgery. “It’s really scary when you wake up and can’t feel your leg,” Nunn said. “As soon as the surgery was over, all the feeling came back and everything was good.” Back surgery followed for Nunn in hospital, then rehabilitation, and he returned to football practice in December. “Coach (Steve Spurrier) thought I was ready to play so I figured it’s time for me to come back,” said Nunn, who played a full game on Jan. 2, 2012, his final competition as a collegiate player. He remarked, “I know all the seniors put their bodies on the line, including myself. … I felt great.” Sources: ESPN.Go.com, Charleston Post and Courier, Anderson Independent Mail and The Sports Xchange.

Oct. 21: Andy Siemens, teenager, Oregon, senior quarterback for West Salem High School, suffered a fractured leg bone during a game. Surgery stabilized the break with screws and metal plate and Siemens was released from hospital only to be readmitted in critical care. “He had blood clots in his lungs and lower legs,” said coach Shawn Stanley. “He’s going to be on blood thinners for six months.” Sources: Salem Statesman Journal and Portland Oregonian.

Nov. 4: Nick LaSpada, 18, Massachusetts, touted quarterback of Billerica Memorial High School, was diagnosed with blood clots detected by CT scan. LaSpada had experienced fatigue for most the football season, until the known condition finally sidelined him at least six months. LaSpada was hospitalized briefly. “He has blood clots in his lungs,” said Joe LaSpada, the player’s father. “They’re not positive yet but they are thinking it’s the result of a hit he took in late August or early September in the leg and moved to his lungs. At first they thought it might be pneumonia. He had two rounds of antibiotics and it just wasn’t going away. He just wasn’t feeling well. He had no wind at all when he ran. … He’s on blood thinners. He’ll be on it for six months.” Nick LaSpada, an honors student, hopes to play football in college. “The biggest thing right now is getting healthy,” he said three weeks after diagnosis. “I’m going to do what the doctors tell me so that in six months I can get back out there on the field.” Sources: ESPN.Go.com, Boston Herald, Boston Globe and North Andover Eagle-Tribune.

Dec. 3: Stacy Andrews, 30, New York, offensive tackle for the New York Giants, was diagnosed with blood clots in both lungs. The pulmonary embolisms were believed to have originated in Andrews’ legs and traveled to the lungs. A teammate said Andrews had experienced rib pain then began coughing up blood, leading to his hospitalization and diagnosis. “Very serious medical condition,” coach Tom Coughlin said of Andrews. “He can’t go back to football right now.” Andrews was placed on injured reserve for remainder of the season and postseason. Sources: FoxSports.com, Sports Network, ESPN.Go.com and Giants.com.

Online Reports of Lung Collapse or Injury in American Football 2011

March, circa: Elaine Iba, 50, California, a quarterback for the Southern California Breakers women’s professional team, suffered internal injuries during a team scrimmage. “She got hit pretty hard multiple times and hurt her ribs on her right side,” reported her husband, Randy Messenger. Iba developed breathing problems within weeks, symptoms of collapsed lung, and a CAT scan revealed multiple fractured ribs along with fluid and “lumpy structures” in the lung. Iba, a masters athlete, was diagnosed with cancer and died on Aug. 20. Sources: MastersTrack.com and CaringBridge.org.

April, circa: Javares McRoy, 19, Florida, wide receiver for the University of Florida, reportedly sustained a collapsed lung during spring practice and was hospitalized for surgery. McRoy then transferred to Texas Tech University, where he was ineligible to play football for the 2011 season. Sources: Dallas Morning News and Lubbock Avalanche Journal.

Aug. 3: Taylor Hyatt, teenager, Arkansas, senior quarterback for Boonville High School, suffered a collapsed lung during a non-contact practice session. His father, the team’s head coach, described the incident in media reports: “We were almost done with practice and he (Taylor) was bending over and I thought he was just hot,” said Scott Hyatt. “He started grabbing his chest and I starting thinking, ‘Wait a minute.’ ” Taylor was hospitalized two days, and his father suggested a pre-existing condition triggered the incident. “They (doctors) said it just happens. It’s not uncommon, but when it does it’s usually (to) tall, slender kids,” Scott Hyatt said. Taylor Hyatt returned to football about two weeks post-injury and played the full season as starting quarterback. Sources: Fort Smith Times Record, Boonville Democrat and Russellville Courier.

Aug. 20: Wesley Flowers, 19, California, defensive lineman for University of California-Los Angeles, sustained a collapsed lung during a team scrimmage. Flowers was hospitalized overnight and released. He was sidelined about a month and returned to football, playing sparingly. New UCLA coach Jim Mora dismissed Flowers from the football team in January 2012. Sources: ESPN LA and Los Angeles Times.

Aug. 23: Justin Williams, 16, California, a tight end/defensive back for East Nicolaus, suffered a partially collapsed lung and concussion when tackled by multiple teammates at a practice session, according to a damages claim filed by his family against head coach Mark Varnum. The claim states Williams missed a practice and the coach ordered a punishment drill, causing the injuries. Varnum was placed on paid leave by the school a month after the incident. Sources: Maysville Appeal-Democrat, Sacramento Bee and Sacramento.CBSlocal.com.

Aug. 23: Derek Nye, teenager, Pennsylvania, senior running back/defensive back for Governor Mifflin High School, suffered a collapsed lung during a practice session. Nye missed four games then returned to football to finish the season. Sources: Reading Eagle and LLLeagueSports.com.

Aug. 26: Jacob Johnson, teenager, Oklahoma, junior wide receiver for Gore High School, suffered multiple injuries in a scrimmage with another school. “Jacob was hit by two defensive players while making a catch at Chandler,” said Gore coach Lee Blankenship, a few days after the injury. “Seven ribs were broken and he also suffered a collapsed lung. They stabilized him and he was in intensive care, but he’s in a regular room now at Muskogee Regional Hospital and he’s doing okay. It was scary. He was proud that he made the catch. Losing Jacob is a huge loss.” Source: Sequoyah County Times.

Sept. 3: Leon Mackey, 21, Texas, defensive end for Texas Tech University, suffered a collapsed lung of a hit to his chest during a game. Mackey was hospitalized for one day and returned to game action in four weeks and finished the football season. Sources: Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Dallas Morning News and CFBstats.com.

Sept. 8: Alonzo Lewis, 19, Mississippi, wide receiver for Copiah-Lincoln Community College, was injured by an opponent while running the ball during a game. “I got hit in the chest on a tackle,” Lewis said, “and his helmet caused a collapsed lung. It put me into the hospital and kept me sidelined for three games.” Lewis returned to football and played sparingly the rest of the season. Sources: LouisianaState.Scout.com and Brookhaven Daily Leader.

Sept. 10: Joe Price, 20, Pennsylvania, wide receiver for Villanova University, sustained multiple injuries from contact during a game, including collapsed lung, four broken ribs and a concussion, Brian Ewart reported. Price was hospitalized about three days and returned to game action on Oct. 22 for Villanova. Sources: VUHoops.com and Delaware County Times.

Sept. 18: Tony Romo, 31, Texas, quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, suffered a collapsed lung of an opponent’s hit during an NFL game, and a preexisting fractured rib was cited by a team spokesman, Rich Dalrymple, who said various degrees of collapsed lung “can heal in differing time frames.” Romo did not miss a game, playing for the Cowboys eight days after the injury and finishing the season. Sources: ESPNDallas.com and United Press International.

Sept. 25: Antonio Cromartie, 27, New York, cornerback for the New York Jets, sustained a reported bruised lung and bruised ribs in an NFL game. Cromartie said he was injured while tackling with a shoulder, trying to avoid striking an opponent with his helmet. Cromartie returned to Jets practice four days after the injury. “I feel good now,” he said. “After the game, I felt like a fish out of water, I couldn’t breathe. I mean right now I feel good. I feed 100 percent. I have a little soreness here and there, but that’s about it.” Cromartie played in his first game one week after the injury and finished the season in the Jets lineup. Sources: Newark Star-Ledger, ESPN.Go.com and www.rotoworld.com.

Oct. 20: Zander Anding, 17, California, running back for Burroughs High School, suffered a reported partially collapsed lung of a hit during a game. Doctors made the diagnosis about a week later. “We thought that he might have just had an injury to his ribs,” said coach Keith Knoop. “But they found out it was really his lungs.” Anding missed one game then returned to football and finished the season. Sources: Los Angeles Times and BurbankBeyond.com.

Nov. 5: Justin Clapp, adult, Hawaii, redshirt sophomore wide receiver for University of Hawaii, was struck by an opponent during a game, fracturing two ribs and puncturing a lung. Clapp was hospitalized and “underwent a procedure to repair the lung,” Stephen Tsai reported. “A tube was inserted to clear blood from the chest cavity.” Sources: Honolulu Star-Advertiser and MSN.com.

Nov. 8: Preston Luedtke, teenager, Nebraska, running back/defensive back/punter for Columbus Lakeview High School, was injured by contact on a punt play and reportedly began coughing up blood. Luedtke was diagnosed with “bruises to both lungs and a partial lung tear,” Nate Carey reported. Luedtke was hospitalized overnight. Sources: Columbus Telegram, KETV-TV and www.facebook.com.

Nov. 12: Riley Nelson, adult, Utah, junior quarterback for Brigham Young University, sustained a reported lung injury of a tackler’s contact during a game. Nelson was hospitalized two days and sidelined more than a month; he played in his team’s bowl game on Dec. 30. Sources: Salt Lake City Tribune and Salt Lake City Deseret News.

Online Reports of Kidney Laceration, Bruising or Malfunction, Football 2011

Sept. 23: Taygen Schuelke, 17, South Dakota, running back/linebacker for Newell High School, was struck on his right side while making a tackle during a game. The inadvertent contact by a teammate hurt Schuelke but he stayed in the game. Afterward, blood appeared in his urine and Schuelke was taken to hospital, where a CAT revealed both a ruptured kidney and the fact the teen was born with only the one kidney. “It became a panic when they found out I only had one,” recalled Schuelke, an all-around athlete who previously sustained a cracked C7 vertebra in rodeo. “They were going to fly me out to Sioux Falls. They were thinking I’d need surgery, and so they had to get me to a specialist.” His mother, Jean Schuelke, said: “You just don’t expect that. We went to the hospital thinking it’ll be fine, we just needed to get it looked at. Not even an hour later, you find out he has one kidney. What do you do?” Taygen was hospitalized in ICU at Sioux Falls a few days, but surgery was avoided and he was removed from critical care. Schuelke was released from hospital in about a week to begin slow recovery at home while gradually resuming school, Danny Lawhon reported. Schuelke returned to athletics in January, competing for his school wrestling team. Sources: Rapid City Journal and TSLN.com.

Sept. 23: Luke Bewley, 17, Montana, halfback/linebacker for Hellgate High School, suffered a lacerated kidney while blindsided in a “clean” hit from a blocker, Jamie Kelly reported. Bewley was hospitalized in critical condition and surgeons implanted a stint to redirect liquids away from the damaged kidney. He was discharged from hospital within a week and doctors expected a rapid recovery. Bewley returned to athletics in January 2012, playing for his school basketball team, according to The Missoula Missoulian.

Sept. 24: Kevin Hunter, adult, California, quarterback for Glendale Community College, sustained a 2-inch laceration of a kidney while making a tackle following an intercepted pass. Hunter was sidelined a month and returned to football, according to The Glendale News-Press.

Sept. 24: Zach Sheffield, 18, Kansas, cornerback for Olathe South High School, sustained a destroyed kidney from contact during a game. This case is among many of 2011 demonstrating how quickly emergency can accelerate beyond anyone’s control at the common football setting—and typically mortal danger threatens a student player. For the Sheffield catastrophic injury, Kansas City Star sportswriter Tod Palmer provides a vivid account available online… Sheffield fell on the run, pursuing a ball-carrier during a Saturday road game, and his twisting body struck the opponent’s flexed knee in impact that damaged his left kidney irreparably. Sheffield trotted off the field, short of breath he later recounted, then collapsed in apparent distress. No one could readily diagnose the problem, including trainers and coaches, and no ambulance was immediately available. The dying player was loaded into a family automobile with his father at the wheel, Bret Sheffield, who sped off for an ER five miles away through metro traffic. The father “drove like a man possessed” to make it, Palmer wrote, continuing: “He recalls weaving across a median at one point then speeding down the shoulder on I-435 west, which was backed up because of weekend construction. … Zach described the pain as excruciating, ‘probably a 9 out of 10,’ he said. Doctors could barely move him off the gurney to the CT machine, because the pain was so intolerable. … All the hospital’s medical staff could do was stop the bleeding to the burst kidney, which now felt like an inflating balloon in his abdominal cavity, and wait for his other kidney to begin working double-time.” Zach Sheffield was hospitalized at least a week and had a slow recovery, remaining sidelined the rest of football season. Sources: Kansas City Star and SunflowerFootball.Blogspot.com.

Sept. 25: Ryan Grant, 28, Wisconsin, running back for the Green Bay Packers, sustained a bruised kidney when struck by two tacklers during a game. “I feel fine,” Grant said three days post-injury. “I have been walking around. I finished the game and everything.” Grant missed one game, returned to the Packers lineup, then finished the football season. Sources: National Football Post and RotoWire.com.

Oct. 7: Austin Raphael, 22, California, fullback for Fresno State University, suffered a reported bruised kidney in a game. Raphael missed two games then returned to football. Sources: Fresno Bee and GoBulldogs.com.

Oct. 12, circa: Gage Corner, teenager, Indiana, senior wide receiver for Leo High School, sustained a reported bruised kidney during a practice session. Doctors expected Corner to miss six weeks of football, but he returned to the team in less than a month, according to IndianaNewsCenter.com.

Oct. 28: Ryan Land, 18, Oregon, running back for Henry D. Sheldon High School, suffered a reported lacerated kidney during a game. Land missed three games before returning to football, according to The Portland Oregonian.

Nov. 1, circa: Brian Schwenke, 20, California, offensive lineman for the University of California-Berkeley, “experienced severe pain through his midsection” and was hospitalized, diagnosed with malfunctioning kidneys, Joe Stiglich reported. Subsequent tests showed kidney function was restored. Schwenke missed one game and returned to the lineup, according to The San Jose Mercury News.

Nov. 4: Tyler Bishop, teenager, Arizona, senior defensive end for Cactus High School, was injured by a legal “crack” block to his side and back during a game. Bishop was chasing a ball-carrier when an opponent “cracks me in the back and I’m laying on the field,” Bishop would recall. “I’ve never felt pain like that in my life. It was excruciating.” First indications were a fractured rib for Bishop, but local hospital tests revealed a worse condition: “(The) CAT scan comes back and I have a shattered kidney and I’m bleeding internally.” Bishop was air-lifted to a hospital, placed in ICU, but doctors initially hoped for natural healing, and he was released from hospital after four days. Then intense pain developed for Bishop at home, of continued internal bleeding, and he was readmitted on Nov. 13, for surgery, when doctors inserted a stint and catheter to help flush urine from the damaged kidney for three months. Sources: Glendale Today and www.facebook.com.

Dec. 1: Landon Lozoya, teenager, California, senior quarterback/receiver for Santana High School, suffered a lacerated kidney and other internal injuries when hit while running the ball during a game. Emergency surgery stabilized internal bleeding and Lozoya remained hospitalized for four days, Kellen Brauer reported. Sources: Grossmont College Summit and North County Times.

Dec. 3: Jaz Reynolds, 20, Oklahoma, wide receiver for the University of Oklahoma, suffered a kidney injury of contact during a game. Reynolds was hospitalized for a week and sidelined for Oklahoma’s bowl game. “Even before that (injury), his kidney wasn’t functioning properly,” Bob Stoops, Oklahoma coach, said on Dec. 20. “It was a bad situation there for a full week. He (Reynolds) is still walking around gingerly and sore. … The plan from here, there’s a couple of options. I’m not going to cover them all, but they’ll (Reynolds family)… decide what they’re going to do. But he is expected to be able to play next year.” Source: ESPN.Go.com.

Online Reports of Liver Laceration, American Football 2011

Sept. 9: Dylan Asbury, teenager, Florida, senior quarterback/safety for South Walton High School, suffered a lacerated liver when hit while playing defense during a game. Asbury was hospitalized and no internal bleeding was detected. He remained sidelined the rest of the football season, according to The Walton Sun.

Sept. 23: Nick Weiman, teenager, Illinois, junior running back/linebacker for Quincy Notre Dame High School, suffered a lacerated liver and broken ribs of contact while running the football during a game. Weiman was transported by ambulance to hospital, where he remained for three days. Sources: Quincy Herald-Whig and WVVA-TV.

Oct. 21: Luke Hicks, teenager, Mississippi, sophomore wide receiver/defensive back/kicker for Greene County High School, sustained a lacerated liver during a game in which he intercepted a pass on the final play, according to The Mississippi Press.

Oct. 25, circa: Dillian Barrett, teenager, Oklahoma, sophomore player at Edmond North High School, was hospitalized for internal injuries suffered during a practice session, lacerations to liver and spleen and a fractured rib, according to KFOR-TV.

Nov. 19: Connor Halliday, adult, Washington, redshirt-freshman quarterback for Washington State University, was hit repeatedly in a game and later diagnosed with a lacerated liver. Halliday was hospitalized in ICU for three days then released, and he did not return to football in 2011. Sources: Olympia Olympian, Seattle Times and ESPN.Go.com.

Nov. 19: Levi Spencer, teenager, Ohio, junior running back/linebacker for Shadyside High School, reportedly suffered a punctured liver and fractured ribs during a game. He was hospitalized for a few days. Spencer returned to athletics ahead of expectations to compete in wrestling for his school team. Sources: WTOV-TV and OVAthletics.com.

Online Reports of Spleen Rupture or Injury, American Football 2011

March 26: Shane Blissard, 22, Tennessee, wide receiver for Middle Tennessee State University, collided with tacklers after catching a pass during a team scrimmage. One tackler’s helmet struck Blissard in his torso, causing internal injuries. “I was a normal hit, and I thought the wind was knocked out of me,” Blissard later recalled. “That’s what it probably looked like to everybody.” But MSTU athletic trainer Robbie Stewart recognized signs of spleen rupture in Blissard, who was vomiting, dizzy and most significantly experiencing drop in blood pressure. Stewart had seen a case of ruptured spleen before in college football, and Blissard was rushed to hospital, where he was diagnosed with a fractured rib, ruptured spleen and bruised kidney, among injuries. Blissard was in emergency surgery 90 minutes after the football collision. “He lost more than 3-1/2 liters of blood from internal bleeding from the spleen, and underwent a second surgery the next morning after losing more blood because of a damaged vessel,” Andy Vaughn reported. Blissard recovered and returned to football in 2011, playing in every game for MSTU. Sources: Murfreesboro Daily News and MSTU Football.

August, circa: Jaden Grill, teenager, New York, junior running back/linebacker for Immaculate Heart Central High School, sustained a reported lacerated spleen in a practice session and missed the football season. Grill returned to athletics in wrestling, competing for the school team by December. Sources: Watertown Daily Times and CNYWrestling.com.

Aug. 18: Christian Kuntz, 17, Pennsylvania, quarterback/linebacker for Chartiers Valley High School, suffered an internal injury while making a tackle in a practice session. “It was just another tackle, but I took a heel or something to my side,” Kuntz later recalled. Experiencing severe pain, Kuntz was rushed to hospital and diagnosed. “I lacerated a third of my spleen,” he said. “They had to go through my groin to surgically repair it and stop the bleeding.” Hospitalized for five days, Kuntz was finished for the football season but strove to recover for basketball season. “Six weeks after the surgery, I was able to start running and working out a little bit,” said Kuntz, whom doctors cleared to play basketball for his school team. Sources: YourCarlynton.com, ChartiersValley.Patch.com and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Aug. 26: Brock Cary, teenager, Alaska, sophomore fullback for Thunder Mountain High School, suffered a ruptured spleen of contact during a game, according to The Juneau Empire.

Aug. 26: Ryan Robbins, teenager, Missouri, sophomore center for Clopton-Elsberry, a “co-op” program between high schools, suffered a ruptured spleen while blocking. Robbins underwent surgery and was hospitalized for a few days, apparently sidelined for remainder of the football season. Sources: Bowling Green People’s Tribune and Elsberry Democrat.

Sept. 2: Brandon Danowski, 17, Wisconsin, quarterback for West Allis Central High School, was tackled and reportedly sustained a ruptured spleen. Danowski was sidelined for a month then returned to football for remainder of the season, according to WestAllisNow.com.

Oct. 7: Joktan Moore, 17, North Carolina, wide receiver/defensive back for Mount Airy High School, suffered spleen rupture of a collision during a game. Moore was hospitalized for emergency surgery, the spleen was removed, and he was sidelined for remainder of football season, according to The Mount Airy News.

Oct. 14: Ross Hennekens, teenager, Wisconsin, senior fullback/linebacker for Lake Holcombe School, was hit in the abdomen while reaching up to catch a pass during a game, rupturing his spleen. At hospital doctors treated the injury without surgery, stemming internal bleeding, and Hennekens spent a couple days in critical care before his release. The teen returned to athletics in December, playing for his school basketball team, according to The Chippewa Herald.

Oct. 17: Unidentified boy, 14, New Jersey, participant of a sandlot tackle football game in Lawrence, suffered a ruptured spleen during a disagreement among players. A 12-year-old player became angry following a play and lifted the 14-year-old, “allegedly slamm(ing) him to the ground,” Michael Ratcliffe reported. The younger boy was “retaliating” and police investigated the case, while the injured boy was treated at hospital. Sources: Lawrenceville.Patch.com and The Trenton Times.

Oct. 21: Dom Iero, teenager, Ohio, junior quarterback/defensive back for North Canton Hoover High School, was injured during a game that he finished. Iero was later hospitalized in serious condition, suffering of a ruptured spleen. Iero was sidelined for remainder of the football season then returned to athletics in December, competing for his school basketball team. Sources: Canton Repository and Hoover Vikings Basketball media guide.

Oct. 21: Josh Isacco, teenager, Florida, senior linebacker for Creekside High School, was struck in a side by an opponent’s block during a punt play in a game’s final seconds. Isacco left the field of his own power but experiencing abdominal pain. Later, he collapsed at home and was rushed to hospital, “where doctors quickly discovered Isacco had lost close to three pints of blood into his stomach thanks to a ruptured spleen,” Danny Klein reported. Isacco underwent emergency surgery and was sidelined for remainder of the football season, facing up to six weeks of recovery. Creekside coach Greg Stanton rated Isacco’s injury as the worst among players he has coached, according to The St. Augustine Record.

Oct. 22: Alex Dunmire, 21, South Carolina, running back for Wofford College, was hit and launched by an opponent during a game, sending him to the sideline in pain. “He (Dunmire) came over and he just wasn’t himself,” coach Mike Ayers said after the game. “Doctors checked him… They knew he had an issue. … He’s definitely done for the season.” No surgery was required, but Dunmire was hospitalized three days in ICU. Sources: Spartanburg Herald-Journal and GoUpstate.com.

Nov. 4: John Liles, teenager, Oklahoma, sophomore player for Edmond North High School, was struck in the abdomen during a practice session, rupturing his spleen and damaging the pancreas. Surgery removed the spleen and part of the pancreas, and Liles was hospitalized in ICU for about three days. Doctors expected his recovery to be lengthy, according to KFOR-TV.

Nov. 11, circa: Joel Katz, 17, Massachusetts, offensive guard/linebacker for Marblehead High School, suffered a reported ruptured spleen and was sidelined for remainder of the football season, according to The Marblehead Reporter.

Nov. 20: Marquis Johnson, 23, Missouri, cornerback for the St. Louis Rams, sustained an abdominal injury during an NFL game. Johnson was hospitalized a day later and diagnosed with a lacerated spleen that reportedly did not require surgery. Johnson was placed on injured reserve for remainder of the football season, according to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Online Report of Various Internal Injuries, American Football 2011

Sept. 30: Derek Wall, 13, Utah, student at Pleasant Grove Junior High School, suffered severe internal injuries from an unexpected tackle in intramural flag football, during an after-school program on campus. The injured boy’s father, James Wall, said: “They had to do exploratory surgery on him—he’s got a 10-to-12 inch cut on his stomach now, perforated bowels, his pancreas is bruised, there’s some liquid in his lungs, they had to take out his gall bladder, his appendix. Everything was just kind of bruised up.” A week following the incident, Derek Wall was recovering but unable to eat or drink without help, and he would remain hospitalized for weeks longer, according to The Deseret News.

Online Reports of Facial Fracturing, Orbital Socket Injury, Football 2011

June 1: Spencer Gassett, teenager, Texas, junior wide receiver/defensive back for Cisco High School, suffered severe injuries of colliding with another player during a “7-on-7” scrimmage between schools, an activity involving no helmets or pads and designed as non-contact. “I thought I had a broken nose,” Gassett later recalled. “It didn’t dawn on me how bad I was hurt until I got to the hospital.” Bones were fractured in the teen’s nasal cavity, cheeks, jaw and a shoulder; an orbital socket was temporarily affected: “The next day my face had swelled so much, I couldn’t see out of one eye,” Gassett said. “I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t eat.” Gassett was hospitalized for two weeks and underwent five surgeries, but he recovered enough to play football again by September, for the school team. Gassett’s playing time increased as the season progressed. “It’s amazing just to see him back out there playing,” said Isaac Hamilton, a Cisco teammate of Gassett, in late November. “It was a real struggle for him to come back and he really wasn’t at 100 percent until the last three or four weeks.” Source: Abilene Reporter-News.

Oct. 2: James Harrison, 33, Pennsylvania, linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers, suffered fracture of an orbital socket from colliding with an opposing player during an NFL game; the contact caused a pad in Harrison’s helmet to slip down and strike his right eye. Harrison finished the game then underwent surgery three days later. He was sidelined a month then returned to football and finished the season. Sources: The Associated Press and ESPN.Go.com.

Online Reports, Survivors of Severe Infection, American Football, 2011

No established links to football activity or environment are reported for infection cases

Sept. 8, circa: Jordan Powell, 17, New Jersey, tight end/linebacker for Lacey Township High School, had an opened pimple on his chin turn hard and swollen. Next night, playing in a scrimmage, the spot "got huge, and it hurt whenever I hit it," Powell would say. Powell awoke the following morning with high fever and rousted his mother for heading to a hospital. Powell was diagnosed with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, MRSA, a potentially lethal bacterium stalking American football players. A Texas study "found that football players are infected by MRSA at a rate that is 16 times higher than the national average, often contracting it in locker rooms or when bacteria gets into an open abrasion," Scott Stump reported, adding, "While many players contract it on their legs and arms, the fact that is was on Powell's chin made it even more dangerous. An inch-long incision had to be made in his throat to drain the bacteria." Powell said, "I didn't realize how bad it was, and the doctors told me that if I hadn't said anything about it for another two days, I could've been dead. The infection could've gone right to my brain and killed me." Powell missed a week of football then returned to finish the season. Source: Berkeley-NJ.Patch.com.

Oct. 4, circa: Ishmael Ariza, 14, Florida, football player for Liberty High School, was hospitalized in critical condition for the bacterial infection MRSA, according to his older brother, Jose Ariza, spokesman for the family. “Seeing him in this state at the stage in his life is very difficult,” Jose said. “It’s a struggle for me and especially a struggle for him.” Ishmael was hospitalized for weeks at last report, in apparent agony. “There’s really not much he says,” Jose said. “He’s always in pain, he’s complaining about the pain. It spread down to his legs, doctors are not sure what they’re going to do next.” Parents of the Liberty school district were worried and several cited 2008 in the community, when multiple MRSA cases were reported among Liberty students. Four football cases that year included a fatality, senior player Alonzo Smith, whose brother also contracted the staph infection but survived. Sources: WFTV-TV, WOFL-TV, WESH-TV and Orlando Sentinel.

Oct. 31, circa: Trevor Sedlacek, 17, Nebraska, injured tight end/linebacker for Beatrice High School, had been sidelined in the preseason for a knee injury and surgery. Attending team practices and games, Sedlacek developed a possible streptococcus and was hospitalized in critical care; the bacterial infection hit his lungs and spread lesions throughout brain tissue, causing swelling. Sedlacek was placed in medically induced coma, undergoing multiple surgeries in a month. Released from hospital before Christmas, Sedlacek visited a school basketball game and told news media he would continue physical therapy while returning to school for half days initially, aiming to graduate with his senior class in the spring. Sedlacek said, “If you would have told me a month ago that I’d be home and in this good of condition and our family would be together, I wouldn’t have believed you. Because what we’ve been through, what my family and friends have been through, it’s been unreal.” Sources: Beatrice Daily Sun and KLKN-TV.

Nov. 26: Bryan Stork, 21, Florida, offensive center for Florida State University, sustained a finger injury during a game. Infection developed in the finger and doctors nearly had to amputate. Stork was sidelined for FSU’s bowl game a month after the injury, when the finger reportedly had begun to heal. Sources: Palm Beach Post, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette and Orlando Sentinel.

Dec. 13, circa: Jay Prosch, 19, Illiniois, fullback for the University of Illinois, was diagnosed with recurring staph infection and hospitalized for a week in critical care. Prosch had contracted staph infection a few years previously, during an outbreak at his high school. Prosch was sidelined for Illinois’ bowl game, and he transferred to Auburn University in January. Sources: Chicago Tribune, IllinoisLoyalty.com, www.facebook.com and FightingIllini.com.

Online Reports of Knee Injury and Peripheral Nerve Damage, Football 2011

Sept. 9: Josh Martsching, teenager, Iowa, touted senior quarterback for Davis County High School, sustained a severe knee injury during a game. Martsching, a baseball recruit committed to the University of Iowa, “suffered some nerve damage” in the football injury while also tearing the anterior cruciate ligament and some meniscus, or joint cartilage, Chris Faulkner reported. Martsching was sidelined for remainder of the football season and focused his rehabilitation on readiness to compete in school baseball of spring 2012. Meanwhile, the Iowa Hawkeyes baseball program honored its verbal commitment by signing Martsching to a national letter of intent. “It’s pretty comforting,” Martsching said of inking his college athletic scholarship. “The (Iowa) coaches never thought about taking back the scholarship. … My first goal was to play Division I baseball. (Iowa) offered me that chance last year (2010).” Sources: Ottumwa Courier, Bloomfield Democrat and Centerville Daily Iowegian.

Online Reports, Survivors of Cardiac Arrest, Heart Attack, American Football 2011

May 19: Teddrick Lewis, 15, Louisiana, player for Breaux Bridge High School, collapsed on the sidelines during a spring football scrimmage, his heartbeat having stopped. Coach Paul Broussard employed a portable automated external defibrillator, or AED—after having trained in a mock drill with his team and school personnel weeks earlier—to restart the heartbeat and save Lewis’ life. “Because we had a plan in place, we knew exactly what to do,” Broussard said. Lewis was hospitalized for a week and has since recovered for normal activity, but doctors advised he not return to contact sport. Sources: KATC-TV and ZOLL Medical Corporation.

Aug. 22: Unidentified teenager, Missouri, eighth-grade player for Waynesville Middle School, collapsed of cardiac arrest during an afternoon practice session. Local fire and ambulance personnel responded and restored the boy’s heartbeat with AED. “The defibrillator devices were absolutely what saved him,” said Mike McCort, of the ambulance district. Source: Pulaski County Daily News.

Aug. 30: Ross Palmer, 17, Idaho, receiver/cornerback for American Falls High School, collapsed of apparent cardiac arrest while running wind sprints at a practice. Two coaches began CPR while another fetched a portable defibrillator, and the AED helped reset heartbeat. “If (the stricken player) had not been shocked, no way would he have come out of that,” said cardiac surgeon Dr. Brian Crandall. Three days post-incident, surgeons implanted a self-activating stimulator in Palmer’s chest. Journalist Patty Henetz reported that “if Ross’ heart goes into ventricle fibrillation arrest—quivering instead of beating—the implantable cardiac defibrillator, or ICD, will shock his heart back into action.” Source: Salt Lake Tribune.

Sept. 2: David Wilganowski, 17, Texas, touted lineman for Rudder High School, collapsed of cardiac arrest during a game. Rudder High’s certified athletic trainer, Jamie Woodell, revived the heartbeat with an AED and staff performed CPR, saving the teen. Wilganowski was hospitalized 10 days and surgery placed an ICD device in his chest. An honors student, aspiring engineer, Wilganowski was formerly a prized football recruit at 6-foot-5, 240 pounds and athletic. His playing career was over, but Rice University reportedly pledged to honor its scholarship offer. Sources: KBTX-TV, KCEN-TV and Bryan-College Station Eagle.

Sept. 9: Brett Greenwood, 23, Iowa, former University of Iowa safety just released by the Pittsburgh Steelers of the NFL, suffered a reported heart attack during an individual workout at his former high school in Bettendorf. Personnel of Pleasant Valley High were present and likely kept the athlete alive until paramedics arrived, news media reported. School athletic director Randy Treymer said, “The school nurse ran a defibrillator where our athletic trainer was working on Brett. … They kept pushing with the defibrillator and CPR. If they weren’t around, who knows what could have happened?” Doctors kept Greenwood in medically induced coma and on life support for more than a month, then he was transferred to specialized care where he remained in February 2012. Sources: Quad City Times, Daily Iowan and New York Post.

Sept. 15, circa: Ther Tee Vang, 16, South Carolina, wide receiver/defensive back for South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind, was tackled during a practice session. Vang rose to his feet then collapsed, momentarily in seizure without breathing, suffering cardiac arrest. Certified athletic trainer Joni Carter directed student trainer Jasmine Elleby in procedure, administering an AED and CPR, and “shock from the defibrillator and two cyles of cardiopulmonary resuscitation got Vang’s heart beating again,” Cindy Landrum reported. “Vang said he remembers getting tackled, feeling dizzy and hurting a bit, but remembers nothing else until he woke up at Greenville Memorial Hospital.” Vang had been born with a heart defect, Landrum reported, but doctors cleared him of that condition at age 12. His football case was possibly of “commotio cordis,” when an impact halts the heartbeat. Surgery implanted an ICD and Vang was restricted from contact sport, but he resumed physical activity. Athletic and agile, Vang joined the school cheerleading squad. Sources: JournalWatchdog.com, WYFF-TV, MasonDixon.org, www.scsdaa.org and GoUpstate.com

Sept. 20: Alex Templeton, 13, Texas, a linebacker for Azle Junior High School, fell in cardiac arrest of contact during a game, or commotio cordis. Templeton had chased down an opponent near the sideline, making the tackle from behind, and the player’s cleat jabbed his chest. The seventh-grader stood up, looked at the grandstands and collapsed. A coach performed CPR while an off-duty nurse came from the bleachers to administer a portable AED owned by the school; Templeton lay still until the defibrillator restored heartbeat, rousing him. “Seeing the boy spring back to life was an emotional experience for all those involved,” Edwin Newton reported. Templeton returned to school but not football immediately; he hoped to play football again in about two years, if doctors might grant permission, but his dad, Matt Templeton, would have to consider such proposition: “I don’t want him to play (football again), but we will have to make the decision later,” the father said. Azle school officials, meanwhile, ordered 11 additional defibrillators, intending to station one for every athletic activity of the district. Sources: Azle News, WFFA-TV and DFWCBSLocal.com.

Oct. 1: Ty Egan, 8, Illinois, youth-league player in LeRoy, was sprinting open for a touchdown when he slowed and collapsed, his heart having stopped. An ambulance staff was on site and medical personnel were watching as spectators, and they scrambled in response. But only oxygen was administered before the grade-schooler revived, resuming normal pulse and heartbeat. An electro-physiologist later told the parents their son was in cardiac arrest and a miracle saved him, not oxygen, Randy Kindred reported. Doctors restricted Egan from all sports except golf in his future, according to The Bloomington Pantagraph.

Oct. 23, circa: Bryant Bohlig, teenager, Minnesota, freshman quarterback for St. Cloud Technical High School, suffered a progressive cardiac disorder during a week of football activity. Serious illness manifested during a practice session and Bohlig was hospitalized, diagnosed with “permanent junctional reciprocating tachycardia,” a problem of arrhythmia in heart function, and he underwent surgery. Bohlig returned to athletics, according to The St. Cloud Times.

Online Reports of Brain Bleeding Requiring Surgery, American Football 2011

March 19: Logan Weber, 21, Iowa, offensive guard for Coe College, experienced severe headaches while stretching for weightlifting. Weber was hospitalized within 24 hours for brain bleeding linked to “arteriovenous malformation,” or AVM, a congenital condition. Surgery was performed to insert a shunt and Weber was hospitalized for 20 days. He recovered, returned to college, but ceased playing football, serving instead as student coach for the Coe team. Source: Cedar Rapids Gazette.

May 18: Josh Mercer, teenager, Louisiana, senior-to-be linebacker for Alexandria Senior High School, was injured while tackling a teammate in spring practice. Hospitalized for brain bleeding, Mercer was initially released after a few days but his condition worsened and he was readmitted to intensive care. Surgery was performed 10 days post-injury and Mercer began recovery, quickly completing physical therapy. He was released from hospital then completed a scheduled 12 weeks of speech therapy in half the time. Mercer could not play football but served as a student coach for the school, according to TheTownTalk.com.

Aug. 5: Brennan Barber, 17, South Carolina, defensive lineman for Mid-Carolina High School, was injured by a reported “routine” helmet hit during a scrimmage and collapsed minutes later. Surgery was performed for brain bleeding. Barber began walking three days later and was released from the hospital within a week. “Barber made a full recovery,” Brittany Lane reported in January 2012. Sources: The State and GamecocksOnline.com.

Sept. 2: Tucker Montgomery, 17, Tennessee, receiver/linebacker for Tri-Cities Christian School, was injured in helmet-to-helmet contact while running the football during a 6-man game. Surgery was performed for brain bleeding and Montgomery remained comatose for more than a month. A lengthy period of inpatient rehabilitation followed, and Montgomery was home by early 2012 while still requiring special care and therapy. Funds were raised for expenses, including toward purchase of a van equipped for medical transport, Amy Lynn reported. Recovery remained “a long, difficult road for (Montgomery),” said Nathaniel Trott, an organizer of the fundraiser “Wheels for Tucker.” Trott said, “Right now, his biggest need is having to be transported by ambulance (anywhere). The biggest concern is: How long will insurance cover the transports?” The drive aimed to raise $15,000 toward purchasing the van for the family. Sources: DaytimeTriCities.com, WCYB-TV, TriCities.com, Johnson City Press.

Sept. 9: Chad Moore, teenager, Alabama, senior running back/linebacker for Horseshoe Bend High School, ruptured a cerebral blood vessel during a game, causing a blood clot, although an exact incident was unknown. Moore collided with an opposing player before halftime of the game, possibly related, then jarred his head during a pass reception in the third quarter. “He got up like he was going back to the field, and he couldn’t see,” said Sherry Fincher, the player’s mother. Moore was airlifted to a hospital and underwent surgery the next morning. “They said that we were lucky he’s alive with the impact he took to his head,” said Fincher, who expected a full recovery. Moore remained hospitalized at last report, five days post-injury, but he required no physical therapy, Fincher said. Lacking sight in one eye, Moore was eating and “up walking around,” Fincher told The Alexander City Outlook.

Sept. 10: Dominic Morris, 21, Nebraska, running back for Chadron State College, was injured by reported “glancing” contact from an opponent’s facemask during a game, causing a blood clot. Surgery was performed on brain bleeding. “Following the operation… Morris was alert and showed no signs of any ill effects from the injury,” stated a Chadron release. Morris was discharged from hospital on Sept. 12 for recovery at home in California. Sources: Chadron State College, Omaha World.

Sept. 16: Robby Mounce, 17, Texas, running back/receiver and honors student at Community Christian School, suffered brain bleeding and collapsed during a 6-man game. Surgery was performed and Mounce began therapy while in critical care. Progress was slow but Mounce was able to return home for periods by the holidays, talking and visiting with people. He came home permanently the first week of 2012. By February he was walking freely for distances and up stairs, though with watchful assistance. He had begun schoolwork in increments while continuing therapy at home and as outpatient. Mounce’s continuing problems included loss of sensitivity and motor function through his right side, but his forward vision was 20/20 and his hearing “supersonic,” Janet Mounce reported. Robby’s mother discussed an upcoming February appointment with a neurologist, who would reevaluate need for anti-seizure medications: “We hope that (Robby’s) brain will work better without (the meds) and his memory will continue to improve,” Janet posted online. “Although we continue to see daily progress with his memory, this continues to be the greatest hurdle with (his) continuing school and future plans for college. … We are constantly reminding Robby how far he’s come and that he can talk, hear, read, and walk! Robby has a wonderful sense of humor. What an incredible gift God has given him!” Sources: KDFW-TV, Mineral Wells Index, and Janet Mounce on CaringBridges.com.

Sept. 16: Zeth Shouse, 17, Nevada, tight end/defensive end for Elko High School, suffered brain bleeding during a game and collapsed. Multiple surgeries were performed. The honors student remained hospitalized for months but had begun making progress by the new year, when he began talking. Fundraising helped defray expenses, including for specialized care in California. Shouse’s “physical strength is getting really strong,” his father, Todd Shouse, posted online in January 2012. “He can now sit at the edge of his workout mat with limited assistance, (and) when he does therapy you can see in his eyes a determination which he had on the football field and anything he has ever done. Neurologically, he is improving slowly. This is typical of his type of injury.” Sources: Facebook.com, Elko Daily Free Press, Reno Gazette-Journal and KENV-TV.

Sept. 16: Adrian Padilla, 17, California, safety for Oxnard High School, collapsed following head contact during a game. Surgery was performed for brain swelling of a reported severe concussion. Padilla was released from hospital on Oct. 4 and attended the Oxnard football game days later; he walked onto the field for the opening coin flip wearing street clothes and protective helmet. Padilla told media he suffered a concussion in football two weeks prior to the Sept. 16 injury. During a television interview, Padilla spoke and laughed with ease, appearing fully cognizant with outstanding recovery; he continued schoolwork at home for remainder of the semester. Sources: Ventura County Star, YouTube.com, Concussion Inc.net and ESPN.com.

Sept. 16: Adam Ingle, 17, Kansas, quarterback/linebacker for Valley Center High School, was injured in helmet-to-helmet contact during a game. Surgery was performed for brain bleeding. Family members say Ingle likely was concussed three days before game injury, during football practice, but the player did not inform anyone of his headaches, Irvin Muchnick reported. By early October Ingle was home and attending school events, with recovery work remaining. Sources: Concussion Inc. blog, Wichita Eagle, and KSN.com.

Sept. 23: Ikenasio “Junior” Nuku, teenager, Washington, senior tight end/linebacker back for Mt. Ranier-Tyee, a “co-op” program of two small high schools, suffered a severe head injury during a game and was transported to hospital by ambulance. News of the incident was limited initially, then information emerged through Dirk Knudsen, who posted a report for BrainChampions.org: “Junior (Nuku) was hurt twice this season with concussions,” Knudsen wrote. “The first one sidelined him for three weeks and the second one happened the night he returned. He was in pretty bad shape for a few days and had a stroke and other complications. He has been in rehabilitation at Seattle Children’s Hospital, doing better after being treated there for several weeks.” Sources: BrainChampions.org, WashingtonPreps.com and Seattle Times.

Sept. 30: Bobby Clark, 17, Idaho, lineman/linebacker for Priest River Lamanna High School, collapsed while leaving the field during a game. Surgery was performed for brain bleeding. District superintendent Mike McGuire said Clark might have mentioned headaches in the week leading to his injury, unbeknownst to coaches and school officials. At least 9 players on the team were diagnosed with concussion last season, about 20 percent of football players in the small high school, officials said. A local TV station reported Clark was among 3 diagnosed concussion cases on the team the night he was airlifted for emergency surgery. Clark was hospitalized about six weeks then transferred to a rehabilitation facility for speech and physical therapies that continued until the new year, as he progressed in walking, talking, eating, socializing and re-acclimating to school subjects such as math. In early January surgery closed the cranial opening and Bobby returned home with his mother, Julie Clark, according to her detailed journal online. In early February 2012, Julie wrote: “Bobby gets a little better every day. His therapy is going very well, and we are still working like crazy at home too (for rehabilitation). His right arm is showing some gains in strength and movement. His right leg is still coming around as well. His speech-cognitive therapy is going extremely well. His short-term memory is improving. He started doing schoolwork at home finally. He has a tutor come every morning. He took his first Government quiz… and scored pretty high, in the 90 percentile. It’ s going to be a lot of work, to catch up last semester (classes) and finish this semester in time to graduate, but he is going to do it.” Sources: Julie Clark on CaringBridge.org, WASWX-TV, Spokane Spokesman-Review, and Bonner County Daily Bee.

Sept. 30: Shelton Dvorak, 17, Nebraska, fullback/linebacker for Pierce High School, collided with multiple opponents while running the football during a game. Moments later he collapsed, suffering a brain bleed. A week after surgery, Dvorak was released from ICU and hospital to a rehabilitation center, where he progressed markedly in a few weeks, solo walking, exercising, eating and conversing with visitors. Dvorak returned home on Oct. 27 in strong recovery mode, resuming activities such as attending football games and going hunting with family members. Follow-up surgery replaced the skullcap piece and Dvorak continued his comeback, returning to school in mid-November. “Shelton is a living miracle,” a family member posted online. “He is doing things that everyone prayed he would do.” Sources: Dvorak Family on CaringBridges.org, KETV.com, Lincoln Journal Star and Norfork Daily News.

Sept. 30: Dillon Lackhan, 18, Arizona, lineman/linebacker for Valley Christian High School, suffered brain bleeding of head contact during a game. Surgery was performed and Lackhan was conscious within a few days, eating and conversing. “Dillon shows positive signs for recovery, but a long-term prognosis is not clear,” school athletic director Marlin Broek stated in an Oct. 6 email, reported sportswriter Richard Obert. Sources: AZCentral.com, MyFoxPhoenix.com and East Valley Tribune.

Oct. 1: Drew Iida, 5, Hawaii, a player for the Kalani Falcons, of the “Tiny-Mite” division of Oahu Pop Warner football for ages 5, 6 and 7, suffered a catastrophic brain injury during a practice session. “They were doing these warm-up drills with very low contact,” said Sheri Iida, the boy’s mother. “No one saw him hit his head. He walked to the back of the line, stumbled and fell and had a seizure.” The incident was “a freak accident,” stated Jeannie Melemai, an official of the Kalani team. “In spite of the best intentions, careful planning and taking all the precautions, things don’t always go as planned.” Oahu doctor Josh Green said, “Five might be a little young. I’m concerned about it.” Brain bleeding was detected at hospital, Drew underwent surgery, and he was comatose for 20 days, Jim Mendoza reported. Additional surgeries followed and Drew turned 6, regaining little control on his left side because of “a lot of trauma to his brain,” Sheri Iida said. Drew was transported to Arizona for inpatient therapy at a children’s hospital, where he was “making progress a lot faster” by late January 2012, his mother said. Sources: KGMB-TV, KHON-TV, Honolulu Star-Advertiser and Jeannie Melemai.

Oct. 1: Unidentified teenager, Massachusetts, a wide receiver for Sandwich High School, complained of wooziness following contact during a game and a trainer called for medical attention. “The player later underwent emergency surgery to remove a blood clot in his brain,” reported Michael J. Rausch, on Oct. 14. “The boy is now home and recovering well from his injury.” Source: Sandwich Enterprise.

Oct. 13: Dennis Pena, teenager, California, sophomore player for Los Angeles High School, suffered a head injury and collapsed during a junior varsity game. Surgery was performed for a brain hemorrhage, and David Craft, LAHS athletic director, said Pena’s prognosis was “supposed to be good.” Source: Los Angeles Times.

Online Reports of Vessel Rupture and Stroke, Surgery in American Football 2011

Sept. 6: Connor Laudenslager, teenager, Pennsylvania, senior offensive/defensive tackle for Line Mountain High School, was stricken of a blood clot at beginning of indoor practice, causing stroke. Laundenslager, 6-foot, 270 pounds, was hospitalized for emergency brain surgery then made “remarkable progress,” said coach Mike Carson, moving quickly through therapies and returning to school. By mid-October Laudenslager was working out with teammates and hoping to be cleared to resume football, although that did not occur in 2011. Laudenslager wants to play football in college. Sources: NewsItem.com, TNonline.com and Pottsville Republican Herald.

Sept. 23: Dylan Mercadante, 16, Vermont, receiver/defensive back for Montpelier High School, suffered a ruptured blood vessel in his neck during the second half of a game, causing strokes. The injury possibly stemmed from an opponent’s hit on his team’s first kickoff of the game. Dr. Roger Knakal later said: “So, my understanding of what happened to him is during his football game there was helmet-to-helmet contact and his head subsequently hyper-extended and likely twisted some and that caused some damage to one of the main arteries in his neck, going right through… his carotid artery.” Following surgery, Mercadante was hospitalized for month then continued therapies as an outpatient. “His recovery has been faster than expected, but he faces a lengthy rehab,” reported Tom Herzig, on Nov. 3. Mercadante planned to graduate with his class and attend college. Sources: Montpelier Bridge and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.

Online Reports of Brain Bleeding or Swelling, No Surgery, American Football 2011

Feb. 14: Neiron Ball, 19, linebacker for the University of Florida, experienced headaches following a workout and was hospitalized the following day for a burst blood vessel of the brain linked to a congenital malformation of arteries known as AVM. Ball was released from ICU after five days and in March began “radial” treatment described as a non-intrusive procedure, similar to radiation for cancer. Ball did not play football in 2011 and a relative said his future in the game was uncertain. Sources: Orlando Sentinel and YardBarker.com.

Aug. 19: Alan Mohika, 17, Hawaii, quarterback for Damien Memorial High School, was injured by contact during a game, rose and walked off, then fell in seizure. Brain bleeding was detected but no surgery necessary, and Mohika was hospitalized in ICU for a reported severe concussion. Mohika was discharged from hospital after five days and returned to school a few weeks later. He did not play more football in 2011 but hoped to return to sports. Sources: Honolulu Star-Advertiser, HawaiiNewsNow.com and KITV.com.

Sept. 9: Matt Ringer, 15, California, running back for Central Catholic High School, suffered an apparent concussion during a tackle. Later he was hospitalized for a detected brain bleed, although fully conscious. No surgery was necessary and Ringer was released from hospital within 48 hours. He returned to school but not football. Source: Modesto Bee.

Oct. 7: Jadon Adams, 16, Kansas, running back for Beloit High School, collapsed during a game and was hospitalized for brain swelling. Doctors sedated Adams as treatment and discontinued the drugs as swelling subsided within 24 hours, and no surgery was necessary. The teen entered a rehabilitation hospital on Oct. 21 and made steady progress, according to updates by family friend Steph Barrett. Adams was released on Dec. 2 and continued therapies at home and as outpatient into January 2012, when he hoped to return to school, Stephanie Barrett reported. Sources: Salina Journal, KAKE-TV, and Barrett on CarePages.com.

Online Reports of Brain Seizure, ‘AVM’ and Surgery, Football 2011

Aug. 10: Mike Patterson, 28, Pennsylvania, defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles, collapsed in seizure during a practice session, while walking between drill stations, and convulsed for about four minutes. At hospital, doctors diagnosed Patterson with AVM, malformation of cranial arteries outside the brain, and Eagles trainer Rick Burkholder suggested the player’s condition was not affected by football. “We’re pretty sure that what caused the seizure wasn’t football related,” Burkholder said. “It just so happened to be at football practice. It could have happened at home, in the dorms, anywhere.” Nevertheless, doctors recommended Patterson should avoid football until corrective head surgery and rehabilitation, and the player favored that advice until consulting another specialist. Then Patterson decided to forego surgery until football season’s end, and he started every game for the Eagles. In December, Eagles center Jason Kelce wondered if Patterson had returned to football under added risk, for AVM: “I can’t say I’d play through it,” Kelce said. “I saw the way everything went down for him that day (of the seizure). Putting myself in his shoes, football might be over. … I was so crazy, it was frightening, it really was, to see one of your teammates go through that.” Patterson had surgery on Jan. 27, 2012, to correct the AVM tangle, and Eagles coach Andy Reid said afterward: “They had him (Patterson) sedated pretty well. He’s doing well. It was a very long surgery; they (doctors) had to dig in there. By training camp (in July) I think he’ll be pretty good.” Sources: CSNPhilly.com, Allentown Morning Call, ThirdAge.com, Philadelphia Inquirer, PhillyBurbs.com and ESPN.Go.com.

Online Report of Head and Neck Injury With Nerve Damage, Football 2011

Sept. 12: Spencer Eller, 14, Missouri, wide receiver/cornerback at Lee’s Summit North High School, was struck in back of his neck by a teammate’s helmet during a practice drill. Eller was hospitalized with paralysis through his right side and legs. “The doctors diagnosed Spencer with a brain injury, a spinal cord injury, vertigo and muscle and nerve damage,” reported Miranda Wycoff. Imaging tests were negative for cranial swelling, and Eller was released to go home with outpatient therapy. Six weeks after injury, the teen was walking but with a cane while still experiencing numbness through his right side; pain radiated everywhere, including migraine headaches preventing his sleep. At October’s end, Eller’s family hoped for his condition to improve enough for a return to school, but doctors remained cautious of his complex injury. “When he went in for the CAT scan and the MRI nothing was broken and there was no bleeding in the brain,” said Cheryl Eller, the teen’s mother, in a report of Oct. 26. “It makes it harder to understand because you can’t even see it.” Source: Lee’s Summit Journal.

Dec. 3: Tausean Holmes, 21, Arkansas, defensive back for Arkansas State University, sustained a reported neck injury during a game. Public details were limited on condition and roster status of Holmes, a two-year starter and tackles leader for ASU, as the team approached a bowl game. Then, five weeks after the injury, coach David Gunn said “nerve damage” prevented Holmes from playing in the game. Meanwhile, blogger James Bryant reported Holmes’ playing career at ASU had ended because of the injury. Sources: AStateNation.com and Arkansas State University Herald.

Online Reports of Skull Fracture, American Football 2011

April 2: Lamont Baldwin, 17, Washington, D.C., touted receiver for Carroll High School, suffered a fractured skull and other injuries in a four-player collision during a private camp without pads and helmets in Virginia. Baldwin was hospitalized in ICU for two days and could not return to school for the remaining semester, facing months of recovery. When injured, Baldwin was a top college prospect reportedly being recruited by several major programs; he did not play football in 2011. Sources: Washington Post and NBCWashington.com.

Additional Cases of Severe Head Injury or Condition, American Football 2011

July 16: Regina Pickel, adult, Tennessee, a teacher in the Bradley County School District, suffered a severe head injury during her son’s football scrimmage at Bradley Central High School. Pickel was sitting along the sideline when struck by the helmet of a diving player, causing profuse bleeding of a head laceration. “She was immediately tended to by a physician on the scene and walked off the field with her head bandaged to be taken to Erlanger Hospital by private vehicle,” Richard Roberts reported. Pickel was hospitalized in ICU in stable condition, according to The Cleveland Daily Banner.

Oct. 13: Josh Inhof, 15, Wisconsin, a center/defensive end for West Bend East High School, likely sustained an undiagnosed concussion of a collision during a practice session. A few days later, during a junior-varsity game, Inhof sustained one or more hits that rendered him unresponsive on a sideline. The unconscious teen was airlifted to hospital, where he remained two days and was released, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Oct. 13: Grant Taylor, 17, Oregon, fullback/linebacker for Lake Oswego High School, was struck after catching a pass then had a seizure on the field. Taylor had squatted to catch the pass when a tackler “came over the top and hit him with his thighs, just crushed the back of his head,” said coach Steve Coury. “It was kind of an ugly scene there for a while because we couldn’t get him calmed down and we didn’t know the extent of things.” Taylor was transported to hospital, where he was placed in a medically induced coma and released the following day. “All the scans were great. No (brain) bleeding, no swelling,” Coury said. “Everything is just fine. It’s just a real bad concussion.” Taylor returned to football five weeks post-injury and finished the season, according to The Portland Oregonian.

Oct. 23: Kris Dielman, 30, California, offensive guard for the San Diego Chargers, suffered a head injury while blocking during an NFL game in New Jersey. Dielman staggered momentarily on the field but finished the game. Dielman was diagnosed with concussion then, on the plane flight home, he had a grand mal seizure that was “violent” and “scary,” reported Kevin Acee and Chris Jenkins. Dielman was transported by ambulance from airport to hospital, where he stayed overnight. Doctors reportedly would not conclude the head injury and seizure were connected. Dielman was sidelined the remainder of the football season and said he remained willing to gamble his health for pro football. “That’s the scary part, too,” Dielman said. “I’ll play through just about anything, and I’ve played through this (injury) and it got me. I’ve made my whole career doing dumb shit like that. … That’s how I got here, doing stupid shit on the football field. It got me 10 years in (the NFL), so I’m all right with that.” Sources: San Diego Union-Tribune and The Associated Press.

Dec. 10: Jamel Dobbs, adult, Maryland, junior defensive end for the United States Naval Academy, had a seizure at the team hotel prior to a bowl game. Dobbs was hospitalized in ICU and underwent tests for determining cause of the seizure, according to The Baltimore Sun.

Online Reports of Spinal Injury Requiring Surgery, American Football 2011

May 7: Rob Marrero, 31, Pennsylvania, semi-pro player for the Mountain Top Reapers, suffered a broken neck and severed spinal cord during a game. Friends reported after surgery that Marrero was paralyzed permanently from chest down. Marrero, married and a father of two, continued treatment and therapy. Source: Lehighton Times News.

May 27: Jeremy Bingham, 34, Arizona, fractured cervical and thoracic vertebrae during a game in pads and helmets between football alumni of two local high schools. He was injured colliding with another player. Doctors diagnosed no paralysis and surgery stabilized the C7 and T1 vertebrae in Bingham, married and a father of four. Sources: Eastern Arizona Courier and the Bingham Family on Blogspot.com.

June 29: Thomas Vanderlaan, 21, California, a corporal corrections specialist for the U.S. Marine Corps, defensive end for the Miramar Falcons of the Camp Pendleton Football League, suffered fractures of cervical vertebrae while striking a reported “weighted” tackling dummy at a practice session on base. Paralysis occurred below the neck, surgery followed, and Vanderlaan performed intensive, promising rehabilitation to regain movement in his arms and hands and touch sensory in his chest, Erin Tracy reported. Vanderlaan’s mother, Susan Wares, said: “When I first saw him (post-injury), he was connected to tubes and wires and IVs; it was just horrible. The doctors told me to expect him to end up like Christopher Reeve because he will never have any movement below his neck.” Vanderlaan, progressing beyond initial prognosis, continued rehabilitation at a Naval hospital as member of the Wounded Warrior Battalion. “I’ve done enough research and realized that there’s a chance to make a full recovery,” he said. “I’m not looking for a miracle to make it back to walking. I’m looking at a lot of strength, determination and pushing every single day. Once my feet hit the ground, I’m running and not stopping.” Sources: Modesto Bee and U.S. Marine Corps.

Aug. 20: Scott Kooistra, 30, Minnesota, offensive guard for the Minnesota Vikings, was struck in the chest by a linebacker he was attempting to block during an NFL preseason game. Kooistra played three more downs then left the field on his own power, having sustained apparent fracture of the C2 vertebra. Vikings coach Leslie Frazier said Kooistra reached the sideline “in pain, really couldn’t move left or right, and in the process of evaluation postgame, they just told us it was a very significant neck injury (and) we’re going to probably lose him for quite a while.” No paralysis was reported and surgery stabilized the injury; Kooistra was placed on injured reserve for the season, according to 1500ESPN.com.

Sept. 1: Torell Troup, 24, New York, defensive lineman for the Buffalo Bills, sustained a reported “minor fracture” in his spine during an NFL preseason game. Troup missed several games but played in about six before being placed on injured reserve for the season. Troup had surgery on Dec. 16 for the fracture and a disc ailment. “The doctor said (surgery) went really well,” Troup said. “I’ve had the disc problem since college, and the other little freak thing (fracture) happened to my back this year.” Sources: NFLDraftScout.com and ESPN.Go.com.

Sept. 18: Nick Collins, 28, Wisconsin, free safety for the Green Bay Packers, ruptured a lumbar disc during a collision in an NFL game. Cervical-fusion surgery was performed and Collins faces lengthy rehabilitation. Doctors expected full recovery for normal lifestyle, but Collins hoped to resume pro football. Sources: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Channel3000.com.

Sept. 23: Corpio Dennard, 16, Alabama, receiver/running back for Saks High School, suffered a broken neck during a game when a tackler struck from behind, pinning his arms and sending him into ground headfirst. Dennard experienced no paralysis and walked to the sidelines, but coaches did not return him to the game. The next day his mother sent him for a doctor’s exam and Dennard was hospitalized, with X-rays showing fractures in his 5th and 6th cervical vertebrae. Surgery was performed on Sept. 25, for stabilizing the spine with plate and screws. “The doctors that saw him were just amazed that he got up and walked off the field,” Saks coach Clint Smith told reporter Joe Medley. Dennard said, “If I had gone back in the game, I don’t know where I’d be right now. I’d probably be paralyzed or even dead.” Dennard was prescribed 6-to-12 months rehabilitation and doctors expected he could return to sports, although probably not football. Source: Anniston Star.

Sept. 29: Luis Morales, 16, Texas, player for Vega High School, suffered fracture of the C6 vertebra while colliding with bleachers during a junior-varsity game. Paralysis occurred, surgery was performed in Texas, and Morales was flown to California for specialized rehabilitation. In December Morales returned to Amarillo and his school, paralyzed from waist down with restricted movement in his arms. The teen’s mother, Liliana Morales, said he was ready to resume classes: “He thought that maybe people would laugh at him because he is in a wheelchair, but we made sure that he knew that there is nothing wrong with that. He’s always been loved by a lot of his friends and everyone at school. They have been helping him in everything.” Vega coach Phillip Wiggins said, “I don’t think the game of football is the enemy here. Football teaches kids so many things. Accidents happen in every facet of our lives, not just in football, and unfortunately it happened to Luis.” Local fundraising helped offset expenses for the Morales family, and the school district purchased a special bus for Luis “that could accommodate his needs,” Brittany Nunn reported. Sources: Amarillo Globe-News, High Plains Observer and ConnectAmarillo.com.

Oct. 1: Shontrelle Johnson, 19, Iowa, running back for Iowa State University, suffered a reported “neck injury” in a game and was sidelined for the season, with no paralysis occurring. Surgery was performed in Texas on Nov. 22 and Johnson faced lengthy recovery, according to ISU coach Paul Rhoads, who said the player’s possible return to football was uncertain. “Shontrelle Johnson is back in Ames recovering from surgery, has a soft collar around his neck but doing very well,” Rhoads after the procedure. Sources: CycloneFanatic.com and Marshalltown Times-Republican.

Oct. 7: Porter Hancock, 16, Utah, running back/linebacker for South Summit High School, suffered a broken neck and paralysis while making a tackle in a game. “Porter finished off the tackle. It was nothing big,” said South Summit coach Jerry Parker. “He turned his head the wrong way.” During surgery on Oct. 8, doctors removed two cervical discs and inserted a stabilizing plate. Hancock was released from hospital on Dec. 16 and remained paralyzed from chest down. Sources: Deseret News, Salt Lake Tribune, Park City Record, KSL.com.

Oct. 20: Hunter Casebolt, 13, Arkansas, defensive player for Elkins Junior High School, fractured two cervical vertebrae in a helmet-to-helmet collision during a game. No paralysis occurred and surgery was performed to stabilize the fractures. Casebolt was released from hospital after one week, wearing a collar brace. Sources: WriteForArkansas.org, 4029TV.com and KFSM-TV.

Oct. 21: Anthony Conner, 23, Kentucky, cornerback for the University of Louisville, fractured a cervical vertebra when his helmet struck the knee of an opponent during a game. No paralysis occurred and surgery stabilized the fracture. Conner was released from hospital within days, wearing a collar brace. Sources: Louisville Courier-Journal, Syracuse Post-Standard and WDRB-TV.

Oct. 22: Aaron Smith, 35, Pennsylvania, defensive end for the Pittsburgh Steelers, was diagnosed with damage to cervical discs and placed on NFL injured reserve for the season. Surgery was performed around Nov. 15, fusing the damaged discs, and Smith’s future in football is unknown. Sources: ESPN.Go.com, Steelers.com and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Oct. 26: Joe Aulisio, adult, Ohio, a sports reporter for WKBN-TV, suffered fractures of two cervical vertebrae of football players’ colliding with him along the sideline during practice at Liberty High School. No paralysis occurred and surgery stabilized the neck column, according to The Warren Tribune Chronicle.

Oct. 29: Carlton Downs, adult, West Virginia, senior safety for Concord University, fractured his C5 vertebra during a game. No paralysis occurred and surgery stabilized the cervical break. Downs was released from hospital within days and wore a neck brace to begin therapy, according to The Bluefield Daily Telegraph.

Nov. 4: Christian Hurt, teenager, North Carolina, quarterback/defensive back for Starmount High School, suffered a CV fracture while being tackled in a game. No paralysis occurred and surgery stabilized the fracture. Hurt was released from hospital within days and wore a halo brace, according to The Yadkin Ripple.

Nov. 5: Tyler Vitiello, 17, New Jersey, running back/defensive end for Saddle Brook High School, suffered a fractured CV while returning a kickoff during a game. Initially paralyzed in his lower body, Vitiello underwent surgery and was standing with assistance after a week, then walking two weeks post-injury. He was released from a rehabilitation hospital in December and wore a collar brace, according to The Bergen Record.

Nov. 6: Donnovan Hill, 13, California, running back/linebacker for the Lakewood Lancers of the Lakewood Pacific Junior Football and Cheer program, fractured his C4 vertebra while trying to make a tackle. Surgery stabilized the injury but paralysis remained in Hill’s extremities. Doctors predicted incomplete recovery. Sources: KTLA-TV, KCAL-TV, KNBC-TV and LakewoodFootball.com.

Dec. 8: Chris Hoke, 35, Pennsylvania, nose tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers, was diagnosed with a reported “neck injury” and placed on NFL injured reserve for the season. Surgery was performed on Dec. 14, and Hoke’s football future was uncertain. Sources: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Associated Press.

Dec. 18: Johnny Knox, 25, Illinois, wide receiver for the Chicago Bears, suffered fracture of a reported vertebral “facet joint” in his back during contact in an NFL game. Surgery stabilized the injury and Knox faced at least four months of rehabilitation, according to The Chicago Tribune.

Online Reports of Spinal Injury or Condition Without Surgery, Football 2011

Note: Football cases of spinal fracture often involve no displacement of vertebrae or puncture of spinal cord, resulting in no paralysis or other acute alert, and in fact unknowing victims can function normally for long periods after injury, including playing tackle football. For such injury that is diagnosed and treated, recovery is often strong to complete. Among severe or catastrophic injuries in tackle football, diagnosed spinal fracture without displacement qualifies among least serious types, and undoubtedly a large number each year will never be reported nor associated with the sport. Some spinal-injured football players return to full contact in the same season, even quickly, as did several in 2011, youths and adults. For this section, available details are fewer and less precise, and no case involves mention of surgery. No paralysis was reported in a case unless otherwise noted. Additional cases of spinal fracture for the football in 2011, yet unpublicized, will be publicly disclosed in the future.

Jan. 1: Ronnell Lewis, 20, Oklahoma, defensive end/linebacker for the University of Oklahoma, sustained a reported neck injury while hitting an opponent during a game. An ambulanced transported Lewis to hospital, where he remained for two days, and no paralysis was reported. Coach Bob Stoops said, without being specific, that Lewis’ injury was similar to the CV stress fracture suffered by former OU tight end Brody Eldridge in 2009. Lewis underwent unspecified outpatient therapy and returned to football in the spring. He played the 2011 season at OU then declared his eligibility for the 2012 NFL draft. Sources: Tulsa World, Oklahoma City Oklahoman, OUDaily.com and StampedeBlue.com.

March, circa: Kendric Cook, 20, Mississippi, tight end for Mississippi State University, was diagnosed with stenosis of the cervical spine, narrowing of the neck column encasing the spinal cord, subject to severe injury by football contact. Cook ceased playing football and became a student coach in the program, according to The Clarion Ledger.

April, circa: John Goode, 22, Illinois, fullback for Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, was injured while blocking a teammate in a drill during spring practice. Doctors diagnosed bulging discs in the lumbar spine, along with damage to a pelvis joint, and Goode could not return to football. In mid-September he began a 14-week rehabilitation program that effectively ended his playing career, according to The Carbondale Southern.

June 25: Evan Gray, teenager, California, senior running back for Poway High School, suffered three fractured vertebrae during a fall in pass-league competition. Following rest and rehab, Gray returned for Poway’s football season but was sidelined for a reported fractured kneecap. Sources: Damian Gonzalez on MaxPreps.com and Poway News Chieftan.

August, circa: Brandon Smith, teenager, Pennsylvania, junior wide receiver/linebacker for Lewisburg High School, was diagnosed with a fractured L5 vertebra and surgery was recommended. Instead, Smith played the entire football season. “God has blessed me for sure this year,” Smith said in December, after he was named an all-state linebacker. “Coming into the year it (the injury) got pretty bad… and everybody kept telling me to get surgery, but some people from my church and my mom and some other people just kept reminding me to stay strong and trust in what God can do.” Source: Williamsport Sun Gazette.

August, circa: Tyler Rossi, 17, Michigan, tight end/defensive back for Erie Mason High School, was injured while playing defense in a practice session. “I was going to tackle the guy with the ball,” Rossi later recalled. “I just slipped. My head went down and I went right into his leg. I felt (the vertebra) crack, but I didn’t think it was broken at all.” No paralysis occurred and Rossi was diagnosed with a C5 fracture, Jeff Meade reported. Rossi wore a halo brace for 10 weeks and returned to athletics in about four months, competing for the school swim team, according to The Monroe Evening News.

Aug. 9: Jeff Wozniak, teenager, Indiana, sophomore quarterback for Morton High School, suffered fractured vertebrae and bruised spinal cord in practice when “hit under his chin during a drill and driven backward,” initially leaving him paralyzed, Steve Hanlon reported. Doctors fitted Wozniak with a steel halo head brace, requiring drilling of screws but not open surgery. In ICU he progressively regained feeling and motor function and in two weeks left the hospital for a rehabilitation facility, where he was also released after two weeks. He continued outpatient therapy and hoped to play football again. Source: NWTimes.com.

Aug. 9: Travis Bradshaw, 22, Texas, free safety for Rice University, suffered a vertebral fracture in his neck during a practice session, of colliding with a teammate playing wide receiver. As Bradshaw was diagnosed a few days post-injury, specialists compared neck X-rays of his from two years previous, and they identified a likely precursor factor in “structural differences” over the period, Bradshaw said. “Some of my (cervical) vertebrae had fused together, which I guess was probably one of the reasons for the crack. That fusion put pressure above and below where there wasn’t that much flexibility.” Bradshaw followed doctors’ recommendation that he cease playing tackle football. Sources: FoxSportsHouston.com and DailyTexanOnline.com.

Aug. 10, circa: Mario Crawford, 21, Virginia, running back for Old Dominion University, sustained fracture of the C1 vertebrae in a preseason practice, striking his helmet on a medicine ball in a drill. A CT scan revealed the break two weeks post-injury, and Crawford was sidelined for the season, wearing a collar brace, according to The Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot.

Aug. 20, circa: Devin Mahina, adult, Utah, redshirt sophomore tight end for Brigham Young University, sustained a fractured vertebrae in a preseason scrimmage. Initially the injury was not diagnosed and Mahina practiced football for about 10 days, until doctors found it by CT scan on Aug. 30, sidelining him for the year. Mahina wore a collar brace. Sources: Deseret Sun and Salt Lake Tribune.

Aug. 23, circa: Casey Coyle, 17, New Jersey, quarterback/kicker for Cherokee High School, was diagnosed with a vertebral stress fracture in his back and sidelined for the football season. “I honestly don’t know how it happened,” Coyle said, “and the doctor said trying to pinpoint what caused it would make me go nuts. A bunch of things at one time probably caused it.” Coyle played baseball in the summer along with training for football, lifting weights and kicking. “I felt it (the injury) for a little while but it got to the point where it had to be checked out,” Coyle told The Cherry Hills Courier-Post.

Aug. 25: Will Rishell, teenager, Connecticut, junior quarterback/safety/kicker for RHAM High School, suffered fractures of lumbar vertebrae in a preseason scrimmage. Rishell was sidelined until Oct. 22, when he played in a game and re-injured his lower back. “I was hoping I might just be sore because I was using muscles I hadn’t used (in a while),” Rishell said, “but it hurt for a couple of days after, so (the doctor) thinks I re-fractured it.” Rishell was sidelined for remainder of the football season, according to The Norwich Bulletin.

Aug. 26: Dustin Newman, teenager, Alabama, junior player for Pike Liberal Arts Academy, sustained a fractured thoracic or T5 vertebrae during a kickoff play in a game. He reportedly was sidelined for three months, wearing a collar brace. Sources: Troy Messenger and WAKA.com.

Aug. 26: Nate Stein, teenager, Kentucky, senior wide receiver and special-teams player for Trinity High School, struck an opponent with his helmet during a kickoff play in a game. Stein suffered fractures of the C7 and T1 vertebrae but continued playing before he was transported to hospital and diagnosed. No insult to spinal cord occurred, or no paralysis. “It was a miracle,” said Matt Stein, the player’s brother. “An inch either way and who knows what the result would have been?” Nate Stein wore a collar brace for three months and ceased playing football, according to The Louisville Courier-Journal.

September, circa: Casey Huegen, 18, Illinois, offensive guard/defensive tackle for Mater Dei Catholic High School, sustained a broken neck and was sidelined for the football season, according to The Belleville News-Democrat.

Sept. 1: Kellen Bernard, 15, Texas, running back/linebacker for Palmer High School, sustained a fractured lumbar vertebra on a hit while returning a punt. He reportedly had temporary paralysis and was expected to recover. Sources: Ennis Daily News and WFAA-TV.

Sept. 2: Jerram Rojo, 17, Texas, quarterback/linebacker for Marfa High School, was injured running the ball in a game, with his heading striking the ground. He walked off the field then was hospitalized, where a CT scan revealed fracture of the C6 vertebrae. Rojo wore a collar brace and did not resume football in 2011. Sources: Jerram Rojo on Facebook.com and The Big Bend Sentinel.

Sept. 2, circa: Sam Scholting, teenager, Missouri, junior offensive tackle for Mexico High School, suffered a broken vertebrae and was sidelined, coach Nick Hoth told The Mexico Ledger.

Sept. 9, circa: Kwadra Griggs, teenager, Mississippi, sophomore quarterback for Greenwood High School, sustained a reported vertebral fracture in the neck. Griggs was sidelined two weeks then returned to football for remainder of the season, according to The Greenwood Commonwealth.

Sept. 9: Frank de Braga, teenager, Nevada, senior running back/safety for Fallon High School, suffered a fractured T3 vertebrae and brain concussion while making a tackle. Initially unconscious, the teen awoke and had movement before transport to hospital, where he spent the overnight under observation. De Braga was cleared to return to play two weeks later and finished the season in the Fallon lineup, according to The Lahontan Valley News.

Sept. 9: Tyler Russell, teenager, New York, senior offensive lineman/linebacker for Skaneateles High School, sustained a reported fractured vertebra during a game. Russell missed five games then returned to football to finish the season. Sources: Auburn Citizen and Syracuse Post-Standard.

Sept. 10: Brian Tyms, 22, Florida, receiver for Florida A&M University, sustained a fractured vertebra during a game. He returned to playing football on Oct. 1 and finished the season. Sources: Tallahassee Democrat and The Associated Press.

Sept. 11: Ron Bartell, 29, Missouri, cornerback for the St. Louis Rams, sustained fractures of the C7 vertebrae in an NFL game. Bartell wore neck braces for three months and was declared healed by doctors. He expected to return to football. Sources: 101Sports.com and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Sept. 16: Scott Thibeault, teenager, Maine, senior running back/linebacker for Mountain Valley High School, suffered two fractured vertebrae and was sidelined. He returned to playing football on Oct. 14 and finished the season. Sources: Portland Press Herald and Scarborough Leader.

Sept. 16: Spencer Radke, 18, Nebraska, fullback/linebacker for Nebraska City High School, struck his head against a teammate’s knee while being tackled during a game. Radke was unconscious a few minutes, came to, then could not feel or move his extremities. An ambulance transported Radke to hospital, where doctors determined no spinal fracture had occurred and paralysis began to subside. “I could move my right side and then 10 minutes later I could move my left side, and I was like, ‘Thank God, I can move,’ ” Radke said. The teen was hospitalized overnight and released, fully functional. He missed two games then returned to football for remainder of the season. Sources: KETV-TV, KMTV-TV and Lincoln Journal Star.

Sept. 17, circa: Matt Lindamood, 21, West Virginia, fullback for Western Virginia University, had a recurring neck injury of “stingers” and numbness checked out by MRI, and doctors found severe stenosis of the cervical vertebrae, narrowing of the spinal. One doctor determined Lindamood should cease playing football and consider surgery, but another examining specialist concluded the athlete could still compete, finding no degeneration in his motor and sensory function. Lindamood returned to the team and finished the season, according to The Charleston Daily Mail.

Sept. 23: Jimmy Creecy, teenager, Arkansas, senior quarterback for Trumann High School, suffered a reported fractured C6 vertebra in a game. No paralysis occurred and Creecy was fitted with a neck brace, expecting to be sidelined from athletics at least three months. Sources: FearlessFriday.com and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Sept. 24: Devin Dance, teenager, Colorado, senior running back for Fruita Monument, caught a pass and was struck helmet-to-helmet by an opponent during a game. Dance reportedly suffered a fractured cervical vertebra and was sidelined for the football season. Sources: KREX-TV and Denver Post.

Sept. 24: Derek Hayden, 22, Georgia, safety for Georgia Southern University, fractured his C1 vertebra during helmet-to-helmet contact in a game. Hayden was fitted with a halo brace and released from hospital within days. He did not return to football in 2011, according to The Savannah Morning News.

Sept. 24: John Timu, adult, Washington, freshman linebacker for the University of Washington, collided inadvertently with a teammate during a game, rendering him unable to feel or move his extremities for about a half hour, lying on the field. “It was scary,” Timu later recalled. “It was something I’d never felt before. It was a deep stinger. It’s been a long time since I’ve had one, at least, but I don’t remember ever having one. So it was pretty serious to me—at that time, until I was able to move around.” When Timu was strapped to a straight board and loaded for transport to hospital, the temporary paralysis began to subside. “I was able to move a little bit when I was in the ambulance,” he said. “I was never really in a panic mode.” Timu was hospitalized briefly and sidelined for one game; he resumed his starting position three weeks after the injury, according to The Everett Herald.

Sept. 23, circa: Kason Kennedy, 17, California, running back/linebacker for Temecula Valley High School, sustained reported bruising of a lumbar vertebra. Kennedy was sidelined for a month then returned to football. Sources: North County Times and Riverside Press-Enterprise.

Sept. 30: Deangelo Peete, 17, Michigan, linebacker for Livonia Franklin High School, fractured his C1 vertebrae in three places during a helmet-to-helmet collision in a game. A halo brace was fitted to stabilize the injuries and Peete was released from hospital within days, according to WJBK-TV.

Sept. 30: Cody Ashcraft, teenager, Missouri, senior receiver for Scott City High School, sustained a fractured cervical vertebra in a game, according to The Southeast Missourian.

October, circa: Jesse Winn, teenager, Utah, senior running back for Emery High School, sustained a reported neck injury that sidelined him for the season, according to The Emery County Progress.

October, circa: Mark Luebe, teenager, Colorado, senior offensive guard for Pine Creek High School, suffered a “stress fracture” in a cervical vertebra and was sidelined for the football season, The Colorado Springs Gazette reported.

Oct. 7: Trevor Flores, teenager, Oklahoma, junior quarterback/defensive back for Frederick High School, sustained a reported bruised vertebra during a game. Flores missed one game then returned to football for remainder of the season. Sources: Lawton Constitution and MaxPreps.com.

Oct. 7: Bailey Ross, teenager, Georgia, junior offensive center for Morgan County High School, sustained a vertebral bruise or fracture during a game. Ross was sidelined for the football season but later returned to athletics, competing for the school wrestling team. Sources: Morgan County Citizen and Eatonton Messenger.

Oct. 8: Chris Thompson, 20, Florida, running back for Florida State University, suffered fractures of the T5 and T6 vertebrae while being tackled in a game and was hospitalized overnight. Thompson wore a collar brace as he began rehab, sidelined for the season. He hoped to play football again, according to The Orlando Sentinel.

Oct. 14: Sam Casinelli, teenager, California, junior wide receiver/defensive back for La Costa Canyon High School, sustained a neck injury during a game and was hospitalized with no paralysis, according to CHS-TV.

Oct. 14: William Schultz, 16, California, sophomore cornerback for San Joaquin Memorial High School, collided heads with an opponent while tackling during a junior-varsity game. Schultz reportedly suffered a broken back on the hit and lay on the field, motionless. Coach Allen Ray later recalled: “I didn’t think he was injured as he was. … I think everyone (among players) was shocked about one of their teammates being carried away in an ambulance.” No lasting paralysis occurred and doctors reportedly diagnosed Schultz with fractures of his T3 and T5 vertebrae, along with a “compression” break of the T4. Schultz was hospitalized four days and resumed school a week after the injury; he wore a back brace for three months before doctors reassessed his injury for possible surgery, according to The Pride, school newspaper.

Oct. 14: Keegan Speas, teenager, Oklahoma, sophomore wide receiver for McGuinness High School, sustained a reported neck injury during a game that left him prone on the field for about 30 minutes. Speas was transported to a hospital. Sources: IrishOnDeck.com and Oklahoma City Oklahoman.

Oct. 14: Cody Ratermann, teenager, Illinois, senior running back/linebacker for Mater Dei Catholic High School, was injured when hit while running the football. Doctors diagnosed two fractures in Ratermann’s back, and he missed one game then returned to football. “I went to a specialist… and he said as long as I could take the pain I was cleared to play,” Ratermann said. “I don’t think (the injury) is as bad as people think it is. … (T)he fractures are minute and they’re away from the spine, so I was lucky.” Sources: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Belleville News-Democrat and Springfield State Journal-Register.

Oct. 14: Sean Walsh, teenager, California, senior offensive guard/defensive tackle for Saratoga High School, suffered a reported broken back in a game. Walsh was sidelined for remainder of the football season. Sources: Saratoga Falcon and Saratoga News.

Oct. 20, circa: Unidentified teenager, Oklahoma, defensive end for Wagoner High School, sustained a “broken back” during a game, Kevin Swanson reported in a discussion forum at CoachesAid.com.

Oct. 24: Alton Brunson, 13, Florida, player on a youth-league team in Miami, suffered temporary paralysis of a helmet-to-helmet hit during a game. Brunson regained complete mobility while hospitalized for about a week, according to WSVN-TV.

Oct. 28, circa: Ronald Tolbert, teenager, Georgia, sophomore defensive tackle for Mt. Zion High School, suffered a reported cracked vertebrae playing football and was sidelined, according to The Times-Georgian.

Nov. 4: Andrew Barr, teenager, Michigan, senior running back for Portland High School, suffered fracture of his C1 vertebra and a concussion during a hit in a game. Barr was fitted with a neck brace and released from the hospital within days, sidelined for the football season, according to The Lansing State Journal.

Nov. 4: Hunter Harden, teenager, Tennessee, junior running back for Munford High School, suffered a fractured CV during a game, reportedly while “dumped onto his head and shoulders” while trying to catch a pass, reported The Paris Post-Intelligencer.

Nov. 27: Cullen Loeffler, 30, Minnesota, long-snapper for the Minnesota Vikings, was struck in the neck and head by a blocker on a punt play during an NFL game. Loeffler reportedly suffered a fractured vertebra in his back and was sidelined for the football season. Sources: St. Paul Pioneer Press and ESPN.Go.com.

Online Report of Staph Infection in Spinal Column, No Paralysis, Football 2011

Sept. 10: Aaron Thibodeaux, 19, Louisiana, defensive lineman for University of Louisiana-Lafayette, sustained a concussion in helmet-to-helmet contact during a game. Moreover, the collision injured Thibodeaux’s back and reportedly “reawakened” dormant methicillin-resistant staphylococcus, or MRSA, which had infected the player’s elbow in the preseason, and it formed a cyst in his spinal canal. Hospitalized a week in intensive care, Thibodeaux survived the infection and did not suffer paralysis. Doctors determined he should cease playing football, according to The Shreveport Times.

Online Reports of Fatalities Surrounding American Football During 2011

April 27: Marcellis Williamson, 23, a former college defensive lineman preparing for pro football, suffered fatal pulmonary thrombosis, a blood clot in lung. Williamson died while training as hopeful for the upcoming NFL draft and as CFL teams scheduled tryouts for the 6-1, 327-pound prospect. Williamson had excelled at nose tackle for Ohio University, where he graduated in recreation management and former football teammates remembered his commitment and personality. “Everything he did, he tried to be the best,” said linebacker Noah Keller. Cornerback Julian Posey was crestfallen during video comments but took solace in recalling his close friend Williamson, including for dance moves: “Watching Marcellis dance… (wasn’t) a rare occasion ’cause he loved to dance, but it was something special ’cause he could move just like any small person would,” Posey said. Williamson’s older brother Denayne Dixon, a linebacker in the Arena Football League, said he was coping with the tragedy. “It’s tough,” Dixon said. “We were real close… I’m not the same. I feel like a part of me went with him. I’m just trying to get through it. I’ll never get over it, it’s always going to hurt, but I’m just trying to do my best. … (Marcellis) was a big guy and that could be a little intimidating at first, but once he opened his mouth, you knew he was a real good guy. He never threw his weight around.” Sources: OhioBobcats.com, Rivals.Yahoo.com, Des Moines Register, AthensMidDay.com and Ohio University Post.

May 12: Luke Killian, age 16, North Carolina, lineman for the Morganton Mountaineers, collapsed during warm-up for a conditioning session with teammates at a city park. Killian, an overweight youth, was pronounced dead at a local hospital, possibly of heat exhaustion, according to reports. Team coach and organizer Doug Deitz had not attended the unofficial workout, which he said was staged by the players. No athletic trainer was present. The Morganton Mountaineers compete in the non-profit Pioneer Football League, which is “founded on Christian principles with an emphasis on helping young men and women develop biblical character traits,” the team website states. “The league provides an opportunity for home-school and private-schooled students ages 12-18 to play regulation football or participate in cheerleading. These student-athletes would normally not have the opportunity to play football through the public school system or if their private school does not offer football as a choice of athletics.” Sources: Morganton News Herald,Athletic Business magazine, WSOC-TV and MorgantonMountaineers.teampages.com.

July 22: Samuel Gitt, 17, Pennsylvania, lineman for Boiling Springs High School, collapsed in a dormitory at Albright College, where his team was attending a football camp, and later died at a hospital. Gitt, listed at 6-foot-3 and 325 pounds on a team roster, was stricken following an evening football practice in extreme heat. Gitt was housed in a dormitory with window units for air-conditioning and some were not operated properly, said Albright spokeswoman Barbara Marshall. Coroner Charles Sweitzer determined Gitt died of an enlarged heart, or “natural causes,” and heat may have contributed. Sources: Carlisle Sentinel and Reading Eagle.

July 27: Isaiah Laurencin, 17, Florida, offensive guard for Miramar High School, collapsed and fell comatose during team conditioning drills on the evening of July 26. Laurencin, listed at 6-3 and 286 pounds, died the next morning at a local hospital. The autopsy report stated Laurencin died “of cardiac arrest during physical exertion due to multiple factors superimposed upon sickle cell trait and alpha thalassemia (a genetic blood disorder).” No single cause was cited, with “co-morbid natural factors” also including hypertension, bronchitis, obesity and temperature of 92 degrees when Laurencin was stricken about 5 p.m. Matt Eagan, sports columnist for Mansfield.Patch.com, took exception with the football deaths of Laurencin and Samuel Gitt in the South, within a summer week, for a post titled “Don’t Try to Beat the Heat”: “There is absolutely no way two-a-day conditioning practices for a high school sport should be sanctioned in July, especially when the heat index rises over 90,” Eagan commented. “Student-athletes, perhaps more so than other students, are raised to trust the adults in authority. … (We) need adults to behave like adults and stop sending our kids out to get in shape when it’s 95 degrees. So many things in life are out of our control. This is one that isn’t.” Other sources: South Florida Sun Sentinel, WSVN-TV andMiami Herald.

July 30: Tyquan Brantley, 14, South Carolina, linebacker for Lamar High School, collapsed after a morning practice session in 100-degree. Brantley, somewhat overweight, died in a local hospital. The Darlington County Coroner’s Office concluded death occurred for complications of sickle cell trait, with various factors possible and exact cause unknown. In months following the tragedy, family and friends regularly visited a Facebook page dedicated to Brantley, a popular and beloved teen who had looked forward to high school. A young relative named Commiesha posted faithfully on Tyquan’s page, especially as the holidays approached and passed. A college student, Commiesha identified herself in tribute to Tyquan as “Your Big First Cousin.” The morning of Oct. 25, she wrote: “I was thinking about you. Just sitting here doing my work in my dorm then I look to my left (And there was your picture). All I could do is smile and think about the times we all had together. We miss and love you. Mesha.” She wrote on Dec. 23: “Words can’t explain how much you’re missed… Even though we all know you are in a better place, there are just some things that we cannot replace. Love and miss you Ty. -Your cousin Commiesha.” And in January 2012, having returned to college, Commiesha posted for Tyquan: “Just stopped by your page because you have been on my mind lately (A lot). We love you and miss you.” Sources: Florence Morning News, The Associated Press, www.facebook.com, Rivals.Yahoo.com and Legacy.com.

Aug. 1: Andy Collins, 27, Florida, pro quarterback and linebacker, collapsed while running on a hotel treadmill and later died at a hospital. Preliminary autopsy determined heart attack to be the cause and arterial malformation might have contributed. Collins had played in the Arena Football League and the Indoor Football League but was a free agent at his death. Robust and handsome, Collins appeared in television commercials, and his wife, CBS Sports reporter Brooke Collins, said her husband was “the healthiest person I knew.” Andy Collins reportedly considered the Catholic priesthood before meeting the former Brooke Olzendam in California; both were natives of Washington, where he played IFL football for the Tri-Cities Fever in 2010. “This is tragic,” said Teri Carr, Fever co-owner. “You think about these young men and they could be your kids.” Kevin Anderson, athletic trainer, said, “It’s kind of cliché when something like this happens to say he was a great guy. Andy was actually one of the great guys you could know.” Collins was “an incredible human being,” friend Josh Wallwork posted online. “It’s crazy how you see bad things happen to good people.” Sources: Tri-City Herald, Stockton Record, Yakima Herald Republicand Spokane Spokesman-Review.

Aug. 1: Wade McLain, 55, Texas, assistant football coach for Prestonwood Christian Academy, was stricken at a morning practice session in extreme heat, as temperatures would climb to 107 degrees that afternoon. McLain died at a local hospital, and a witness to the incident, Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, recalled in a prepared statement that the team “had been stopping regularly for water and air-conditioning breaks, and during one break (McLain) became ill and collapsed.” The Collin County medical examiner ruled McLain died of heart problems “associated with heat exposure,” according to KDAF-TV.

Aug. 2: Don’terio J. “D.J.” Searcy, 16, Georgia, defensive lineman for Fitzgerald High School, was found unresponsive in a cabin at team football camp in rural northern Florida, about 90 minutes after a morning practice in extreme heat gripping the Southeast. Searcy, 6-1 and 330 pounds, was pronounced dead at a hospital distant from his Georgia home. The player’s parents and WTEV reporter Ashley Coleman investigated, hearing from Searcy’s teammates that he collapsed twice at Florida Bible Camp, located 135 miles from Fitzgerald and site of four days of summer drills for the public school team. Players said Don’terio was initially found unconscious in a bathroom the night before his death, a Monday, by two assistant coaches following a team “devotional,” but no emergency call was made. The parents, Carlton and Michelle Searcy, weren’t notified of such an incident: “My question to the coaches is why didn’t you call 911 on (that) night and notify me when (Don’terio) first went down unconscious and unresponsive,” Michelle said. Fitzgerald High football coaches referred questions to district superintendent Nancy Whidden, who said coaches whom she queried were unaware of a bathroom collapse. Players also said that Don’terio had struggled in the heat for the camp practices in full pads, including suffering vomiting and headaches and lying down, but coaches did not sideline him. “It was intense,” said player Deion Bivens. “It was real hot and we were running and they were just pushing us real hard.” The Searcy family requested an investigation by Georgia school officials, but nothing had transpired by November, when a coroner’s report in Florida stated Don’terio died of a heart condition exacerbated by hypertension. Heat was not cited as factor. Whidden, the superintendent, issued a statement after the autopsy: “(A)ll indications were that D.J. was physically able to participate in football,” Whidden wrote. “Unfortunately, this long-standing heart condition caused his death. According to the information we have received, there was nothing our coaches or other staff members did or did not do that in any way contributed to this tragedy.” However, U.S. Army Capt. Carlton Searcy was not satisfied, and he contacted the medical examiner in Jacksonville regarding his son’s death; according to Capt. Searcy, the coroner said he was not fully apprised of circumstances like the teen’s alleged first collapse and the team’s practice conditions in oppressive heat. The parents then consulted an unidentified Army medical expert, according to a statement released by their attorney that stated: “After reviewing D.J.’s medical records, autopsy report, and considering the circumstances surrounding D.J.’s death, the medical expert formed the initial opinion that D.J. died from a heat-related event and that his tragic death was preventable.” Inquiries continued. Sources: WTEV-TV,Atlanta Journal-Constitution and WJXT-TV.

Aug. 2: Forest Jones, 16, Georgia, offensive center for Locust Grove High School, collapsed, comatose, as a voluntary conditioning session concluded at the school on July 25. “After practice, he got a drink of water and dumped it over his head and started walking up a grassy hill, and when he did he fell backwards and hit his head. Then he stood back up for a second and passed back out,” said Glenn Jones, the player’s father. Doctors said heat may have contributed, and Jones never regained consciousness, succumbing on his eighth day hospitalized, brain-dead with complete organ failure. Family members said Jones, at 5-8, 240 pounds, had driven himself too hard in the heat, and his death occurred only a few hours after that of another Georgia prep player, Don’terio Searcy. The same-day tragedies in Georgia were America football’s 5^th and 6^th field fatalities within 11 days of withering heat—repeating closely the sport’s calamitous 8-day stretch of 10 years before, July-August 2001, when 5 players died such as Korey Stringer, mammoth tackle for the Minnesota Vikings. Now public discussion reignited nationally, and at Locust Grove, Georgia, one of the 2011 death locales, Gina Hughes was among citizens groping for answers. The deceased Forest Jones had been a teammate of her son, and Hughes noted the players drilled outside on hotter days locally than July 25, when Jones collapsed. “I’m a football mom, I believe in those boys getting out there and working their butts off,” Hughes said, “but everyone has to stop and think.” News writer Paul Newberry lambasted football for outside activities in summer and called for delaying the sport’s start on the calendar to offset heat stress on players, coaches and others. “Enough’s enough,” Newberry declared. “There’s just no need to be practicing football in 100-degree temperatures.” Meanwhile, the Jones family did not carry medical coverage or life insurance for Forest, nor had money for a funeral; local fundraising efforts helped defray mounting expenses. Sources: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, WSB-TV and WXIA-TV.

Aug. 9: Montel Williams, 15, Arkansas, defensive end for Gurdon High School, collapsed while running sprints about 8:30 at night practice, as local temperature registered about 90 degrees. Williams, conscious when he went down, was later pronounced dead at a hospital. Findings of a state preliminary autopsy “indicated” a pre-existing heart condition was involved, not the excessive heat, but Williams’ parents were skeptical. “I still think they were practicing too hard,” said Sandra Walker, the boy’s mother. Walker said she was not aware of pre-existing health conditions for Montel, an honors student who was solidly built and athletic, and she regretted having allowed him to play football. Montel’s father, Charles Williams, questioned the autopsy report but said: “I have no medical experience, so I don’t know.” Sources: KLRT-TV, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Associated Press.

Aug. 28: Derek Sheely, 22, Maryland, fullback for Frostburg State University, suffered brain trauma on Aug. 22, apparently amid collisions at a practice session. “They were preparing for the next round of drills, and it was then that Derek started to mention to the coaches that he wasn’t feeling well,” said Kenneth Sheely, the player’s father. Derek collapsed as athletic trainers escorted him from the field. The comatose athlete was air-lifted to a regional hospital then a Baltimore trauma center by Maryland State Police, for immediate surgery. Sheely died on his sixth day hospitalized, and his father said pathology results revealed the cause as severe brain injury resulting of head impact. Sheely was apparently the year’s first publicized collision death in football, and his father hoped the American institution took heed—the sport itself and advocates, not merely the Frostburg University community. “I’m not a medical expert. I’m not a football expert.” Kenneth Sheely said hours after his son’s death. “But I would hope that any time, in any sport, whether it be during a game or during practice, that if an athlete passes away from something that wasn’t of natural causes, that was clearly seemed to be induced by the activity, that the NCAA or somebody should try and look into that and see what lessons could be learned. I don’t know if it’s education, equipment, training, a combination of everything—but it seems like there has to be some subtle thing that could be learned that might help protect somebody else.” On the Frostburg campus, student videographer Madison Martin reported Sheely was “known for his determined demeanor and coy sense of humor.” Several teachers remembered him as a top student majoring in history and political science. A visibly subdued Tim Magrath, professor of political science, said of Sheely: “It’s hard for us to understand someone so strong and so capable is gone. He seemed such an unstoppable force. He’s someone I thought would never slow down.” Football quarterback Josh Volpe remembered Sheely, a good friend, as “always in pursuit of excellence,” never missing a practice, workout nor class assignment. Volpe recalled on camera that his first touchdown pass in college, in his first game, went to Sheely on a route out of the backfield. Excited for both of them, Sheely celebrated: “He scored the touchdown then he spiked (the ball) and he got a flag, got kicked out of the game,” Volpe said, smiling. Martin reported that Sheely was scheduled to graduate with honors in May 2012. “Sheely had intentions of serving our country after graduation,” she said. Sources: Prince George Gazette, WTTG-TV, New York Times, Madison Martin on Vimeo.com, and Cumberland Times-News.

Sept. 1: Al Smith Jr., 15, Texas, lineman for Eisenhower High School, became ill then fainted during a practice session on Aug. 30. Smith regained consciousness briefly, but his condition worsened: “(Doctors) were saying his system was shutting down a lot,” Al Smith Sr. later recounted. The teen died after two days hospitalized, and no cause was known immediately. “He was just a good kid, that’s all I can say. A good kid. Whatever happened, I’m lost for words,” said his father. “He wanted to play professional ball, and he always wanted to be a real estate broker.” At Eisenhower High, schoolmates remembered Al Smith Jr. as a kid in good physical condition. “He was real healthy,” said sophomore classmate Tralynn Robinson. “This don’t make no sense,” said sophomore Antanisha Richardson. “I don’t know. It’s sad.” National discussion continued over football fatalities occurring from July until autumn. “For the sixth time this summer, a high school football player has collapsed and died after practicing in scorching heat,” Joel Siegel reported, also noting the death of coach Wade McLain. “The dangers of student-athletes training in extreme heat creates tragedies every year.” A Dallas newspaper’s inquiry into prep football’s practice procedures in summer drew a response from Texas school athletics officials, of the University Interscholastic League. A UIL medical panel wanted changes on time and frequency for “two-a-day” practices, and it recommended an extra hour of recovery between same-day sessions. However, no doctor mentioned revising start date for preseason drills. Meanwhile, final autopsy results were not publicized in Google news banks by year’s end. Sources: KRIV-TV, ABC News,Dallas Morning News.

Sept. 5: Kishon Cooper, 8, Florida, a youth-league wide receiver and defensive back, collapsed outside his home during activity with his father on Labor Day, as they ran and tossed a football. Cooper was later pronounced dead at a hospital. His father, Kerash Cooper, recalled the incident for blogger Eric Ikpe: “I had water in one hand with Kool-Aid in my other hand, and (Kishon) had one more lap to go, and he said, ‘I don’t feel good.’ ” Ikpe reported that heat complications caused the death. Kishon apparently took up football largely with peers, as a strong, athletic youth player for the Washington Park Buccaneers program in Hollywood, Fla. “His desire for the game was so strong that he would come home and run drills around the house,” Ikpe reported. Kerash, a musician, would be drawn outside, leaving the home studio to indulge football with his son. “It got to the point where I would start watching football just because of Kishon,” the father said. “I was proud of him, and what he was doing on the field.” Two days before he died, Kishon scored a touchdown for Washington Park. “It was a good touchdown. It was a good game,” said Matayo Gray, a 13-year-old cousin. Sources: GenNexxt.WordPress.com, Miami Herald and South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Sept. 9: Frederick Latrell Dunbar Jr., 16, Mississippi, fullback for D’Iberville High School, collapsed while blocking on a play during a game, suffering cardiac arrest. The incident occurred about 9 p.m., and trainers and medics attended to Dunbar for 15 minutes, employing an automated external defibrillator, or AED. An ambulance transported the teen to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. “Everything was done on the field to (try saving) him,” said Arlton Hudson, coach of Gautier High School, which hosted the game. “The trainers worked on him when they realized he was not breathing. CPR was administered to him. I know they ‘defibbed’ him three or four times. They did everything they could do… and it just didn’t work.” A coroner was unsure what triggered the cardiac arrest while finding that heart abnormalities may have contributed. Dunbar was solidly built at 5-7, 185 pounds, and video of his last football play did not confirm whether an impact caused his heart to stop beating. D’Iberville coach Buddy Singleton said Dunbar was struck near a shoulder, from the side. “You could see him kind of stumble and he fell. I don’t think he ever regained consciousness after that,” Singleton said. Meanwhile, friends and family remembered Dunbar, who had gone by his middle name, for fine qualities founded in his unwavering positive attitude. “He was such a good dude, such a happy dude,” said Orin Cole, friend and teammate. “Cherish everything you have, because you never know when you are going to lose it.” Singleton, with more than 30 years coaching experience, said: “He was a great kid, real clean-cut, a good student. He was one of those guys you love to have on the team. … It was real tough (at the tragic game). I’ve been in this business a long time, and you don’t get prepared for something like this. I’d never lost a player like this, and I just thanked the Lord it hadn’t happened before now.” Sources: MSGulf.com, Mississippi Press, WLOX-TV and Biloxi Sun Herald.

Sept. 10: Brian Rushing, 17, Virginia, defensive tackle for Southhampton High School, died in his sleep during the overnight following a football game. A preliminary autopsy found Rushing died of stress linked to an undiagnosed heart condition and football collision was not a factor, according to Rev. Charles Worth, spokesman for the Rushing family. The player, somewhat overweight, “suffered no life-threatening injuries from football,” Worth said. “Any exertion would have brought on this condition.” Worth, pastor of the True Word Christian Church that Rushing attended, remembered the young man as upbeat and humorous: “He was a good kid. I can’t say enough platitudes about him.” Former schoolmates posted tributes online. “You will be missed Brian,” wrote Harvey Holt. “You could never be forgotten,” Amber Jefferson wrote, adding, “I shed one last tear for you as I read through that beautiful but goofy poem you wrote me. I miss you. And you will always be in my heart.” Sources: Franklin Tidewater News, Recruit757.com andwww.facebook.com.

Sept. 16: Jerry Green, 66, Tennessee, referee of football and basketball, complained about feeling sick during halftime of a football game he was officiating at Signal Mountain High School. Green went to a bathroom where he was discovered later, collapsed of a brain aneurysm, and he died that night at a hospital. Green, a realty specialist who was diabetic and overweight, had officiated school sports for 35 years in western Tennessee. He was known as a rules stickler who insisted players were fully padded, including hip and butt pads, David Whitley reported. “He was known to be very stern on the field,” said Billy Fairbanks, officiating crewmate and friend of Green. “That’s just how he was.” Sources: WRCB-TV, AOL.SporttingNews.com and Chattanoogan.com.

Sept. 18: Kainen Boring, 17, Tennessee, kicker/linebacker for Bledsoe County High School, suffered head trauma of a helmet-to-helmet collision during a practice session, while making a “perfect form tackle,” said a friend. Boring rose to his feet, walked to a huddle and said, “Something ain’t right.” The 6-foot, 195-pound teen collapsed, remaining conscious long enough to speak with a coach, then fell into seizure. Boring was airlifted to a hospital for emergency brain surgery. His mother, Paula Boring, later said a constricted-arteries tangle found at base of Kainen’s skull apparently contributed to the injury—“venous malformation” or AVM—which she described as “like a birthmark, a cluster of blood vessels that ruptured… during practice.” In hospital Kainen would not regain consciousness, sustained on ventilator with nary vital signs until the removal of life support, and his organs were donated to transplant patients. Weeks afterward, his father discussed the tragedy with news reporter Stephen Hargis: “The first thing I want to make clear is that football didn’t kill Kainen,” said Robby Boring. “We never knew he had AVM until after his accident, but it could have happened by him doing just about anything. Kainen loved football. He loved being part of that team, and this wasn’t anybody’s fault. We don’t even question God as to why this happened. It’s not for us to understand right now.” Nevertheless, the death qualified as the year’s second known collision fatality in American football, according to definition of the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research (NCCSIR), University of North Carolina. Kainen Boring was a dedicated athlete, faithfully attending football practice and other workouts; the day he was injured, Kainen rose early before school, leaving home at dawn to lift weights with an uncle. “That was the last time we spoke to each other, and I wish now I had held onto him longer,” Paula Boring said. The mother told Hargis she took comfort knowing Kainen’s organs lived on through transplants, like for the young woman in Georgia who received his heart. “I want to meet her so badly,” Paula said. “I want to put my hand on her chest and feel Kainen’s heart beat one more time.” Sources: Chattanooga Times Free Press, WRCB-TV, WTVC-TV, Chattanoogan.com and New York Times.

Sept. 22: Jurelle Davis, 15, California, defensive back for Cosumnes Oaks High School, suffered a severe asthma attack followed by cardiac arrest at his home on Monday, Sept. 19, according to school officials. Davis died that Thursday in a hospital, and football activity was not reported to have contributed. His football coaches said Davis had chronic health conditions, including Crohn’s disease, but the teen was determined to participate and received medical clearance. Davis carried an inhaler everywhere and was remembered as quiet, respectful and intelligent. “He was an undersized guy who had health issues his whole life,” said coach Ryan Gomes. “But he loved the game so much, he never wanted to give it up. I talked to his mom and dad, and they said the one thing he absolutely loved was being out on the football field with his brothers and teammates. He was absolutely aggressive on the field. He played hard and let it all out on the field.” Davis was “one of the hardest hitters we had,” said Vinny Herrera, friend and teammate, “and he pushed himself harder than anyone else. He’s an inspiration to me. … He was a quiet person but funny.” Sources: ElkGrove.Patch.com, Elk Grove Citizen, KOVR-TV and KXTV-TV.

Sept. 30: Angela Gettis, 16, California, cheerleader for George Washington Preparatory High School, collapsed amidst a leg-kick routine during a school football game, suffering cardiac arrest. The incident occurred about 9 p.m., as Washington High tied the game score on a touchdown, and bystanders performed CPR on Gettis until emergency personnel arrived, reviving her only briefly. Gettis was pronounced dead around midnight at a hospital, and family members said she formerly had been diagnosed with an enlarged heart, which may have contributed. “It is a catastrophic loss for the school and community,” said John Deasy, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Todd Ullah, principal at Gettis’ school, said: “Washington High, like every other high school, has its share of unfortunate incidents regarding youth… but you can never really prepare. It’s devastating, it’s tragic.” Friends described Gettis as popular, cheerful and studious, aspiring to major in forensic science at college. “We thought she’d do something special,” said friend Chizo Iberosi. Sources: The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, KABC-TV and NBCLosAngeles.com.

Oct. 1: Nicholas Gulow, 15, Georgia, center for Rome High School, was stricken at home then pronounced dead at a local hospital. Coroner Ernie Studard said he believed Gulow died of natural causes. Gulow, an overweight youth, apparently played a junior-varsity football game on Sept. 29, but the sport was not reported to have contributed to his death. “He was a respectful kid and he loved Rome High football,” said coach Franco Perkins. Gulow was a “humble and spirited” player, wrote student reporter Chelsea Crumley, and senior football player Cameron Richardson referred to him as “my brother.” The team dedicated a victory to Gulow. “I played my hardest just for him,” Richardson said. Senior player Joe Claytor said, “The whole team was not thinking about losing or winning, but rather to play every play like Gulow would have, 110 percent.” Besides football and track at school, Gulow participated in Junior ROTC, FCA and yearbook. Sources: Rome News-Tribune, Rome High Harbinger and Talley’s Parkview Chapel Funeral Home.

Oct. 12: Ryan Smith, 16, Oklahoma, defensive lineman for Edmond North High School, suffered bone fractures in his right leg, of the tibia and fibula, when struck from behind during a practice session on Oct. 11. Smith, 6-3, 220 pounds, was treated at a hospital and released, with upcoming surgery scheduled for the leg injuries, but at home in the overnight his condition deteriorated. Lethargic, unable to rise from bed the next morning, Smith was taken to a different hospital and admitted to critical care; he died that night and blood clots possibly contributed, resulting from the leg fractures, said one expert. In January 2012, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma medical examiner’s official said Smith died of an abnormal condition or “sequela” originating of the leg injuries, pending a final autopsy report. “Unbelievable,” said Michael Lively, the teen’s uncle. “It’s hard to believe something like that would happen. … It’s just something you can’t understand.” Smith had attended two high schools in the Edmond area, and students at each remembered him as fun and engaging, a teen enjoying football and wrestling, and dreaming of playing in the NFL. Taevyon Warren was a sophomore classmate and teammate of Smith; each had transferred to Edmond North High for the fall, and they met in summer football practice. “With both of us being new, we just bonded,” Warren said. “Just his presence, just him being around, would make your day.” Warren and friends produced a rap rhyme in Smith’s honor. “We did a remix of a song, talking about how life is short and how you never expect to end. We just talked about Ryan and how good a person he was.” Sources: Oklahoma City Oklahoman, Edmond Sun, KFOR-TV, KWTV-TV, ABC News and MaxPreps.com.

Oct. 14: Ridge Barden, 16, New York, defensive tackle for Phoenix High School, suffered brain trauma of contact during a game; he lay on his belly momentarily after a play, until coaches and trainers arrived at his side. Barden rolled over of his power and sat up, complaining of headache. “Coach, I think I got hit head-to-head,” he told head coach Jeff Charles. Then Barden tried to stand and collapsed, comatose; he died later at a hospital of a brain bleed resulting from impact to the head, according to police. A school athletics official in New York, John Rathbun, said: “I don’t think anyone could have ever, ever, ever seen this coming. Accidents do happen.” Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher, an authority on sport-related head trauma, said of Barden’s case: “Those kind of injuries are very rare, they’re catastrophic, they will happen and there’s no real way of preventing them through equipment. That’s going to happen any time there are impacts to the head of significant force.” The coaches reviewed game video of Barden but could not determine a causal instance between two possible collisions that were routine for football, Jorge Castillo reported. Charles told journalist Castillo he was so shaken by the tragedy with Barden that he considered leaving coaching. “I will never bad-mouth the sport of football,” Charles said. “I played it and I loved it and I’ve coached for years, but it does make me take a second look at it.” Jody Barden, father of the deceased athlete, said he blamed no one and did not want “negative spin” on football. “I don’t want to scare kids from playing the game,” the parent said. “Ridge loved playing the game, and I know he wouldn’t want it to get a bad name.” The death of Ridge Barden qualified as the third known collision fatality in American football of 2011, per criteria of the NCCSIR at UNC. “It’s still shocking,” said his mother, Jacqueline Barden. “He was with us and now he’s gone.” She did not want other players to feel guilty, and she said neither would her son. “He just would not want those people to think that it was their fault,” Jacqueline said. “Everything that Ridge did, he did with full gust. I’d say just take that attitude with you.” Sources: New York Times, Syracuse Post-Standard, WSYR-TV and ABC World News.

Oct. 27: Alec Mounkes, 13, Kansas, offensive lineman/linebacker for Lyndon Middle School, sustained an ankle injury during a game on Oct. 6, initially diagnosed by doctors as a mere sprain. Mounkes, in good physical shape, was prescribed rest, to stay off the injured ankle, but his condition grew catastrophic with development of blood clots in the legs; he twice suffered cardiac arrest, said a school official. The boy was hospitalized for weeks, kept alive on a heart-and-lung machine and undergoing amputations on both legs. Mounkes died following lung surgery as a “great kid from a great family,” said Brian Spencer, superintendent of Lyndon Unified School District. “We are sorry for your loss,” stated an online post to the Mounkes family, from friends in their community, the Scott Jordan family, who added. “Alec was so special and loving like his family.” Sources: Topeka Capital-Journal, KansasFirstNews.com and Legacy.com.

Nov. 1: Aaron “Tootie” Harris, 18, Alabama, a large offensive tackle for Walter Wellborn High School, died of reported kidney failure in a hospital. An overweight young man, Harris first had kidney problems at 4 years old, his mother said, and he was ill the week he played a football game on Thursday night then missed school the following day, experiencing headaches, back pain and lethargy. The family thought Aaron was negotiating usual ailments of football season. “I didn’t think nothing worse until they had to put him in intensive care (at a hospital on Saturday), when he was having shortness of breath,” said Sharon Moore, Aaron’s mother. Harris succumbed on his third day hospitalized, shocking football teammates and coaches on the small roster at Wellborn High, where “Tootie” was a senior-class leader beloved by students and staff. “We tried to keep it together, the coaches tried to keep it together, for the younger guys,” said senior Dalton Screws, Harris’ friend and teammate, “but if you knew Tootie, you would know why it was hard. It was losing one of the best people we knew.” Schoolmates covered Harris’ locker with tribute notes and a Facebook memorial page was loaded with posts from friends of all ages. “Very upsetting,” said football coach Jeff Smith. “We love him (Harris) so much. He was a Panther in the truest sense. He represented our school and our community the best way he could.” Sources: Anniston Star, WVTM-TV and MaxPreps.com.

Nov. 8: Jerson Tizol, 15, Texas, nose tackle for West Brook High School, told family members of suffering a head injury in a freshman game on Oct. 26, and medical examination revealed both hemorrhaging of his brain and leukemia. “He was sent to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he died,” Scott Lawrence reported. “The cause of death was bleeding and swelling of the brain.” The case may qualify as football collision death through follow-up by NCCSIR researchers. Tizol, undersized but intense for line action in football, was an honors student and newcomer to high school who attained sophomore rank for advanced credits earned while in middle school. At Tizol’s former school, Odom Academy, he was remembered as a good athlete, outstanding student and popular personality. “He made friends with everybody,” said Tillie Hickman, Odom principal. “He was a real leader for the children and had an incredible future.” Students and teachers at both schools raised thousands of dollars for the Tizol family, to defray medical and funeral expenses. Giovanni Romero led fundraising at Odom, as friend and former schoolmate of Tizol. “We cared about him,” Romero said. “And, you know, we all miss him. We love him, so we are just trying to help out the family. … You’re never going to know what happens to a person, so just treat them nicely, and get along with everybody.” Sources: KFDM-TV,Beaumont Enterprise and West Brook Times.

Nov. 20: Garrett Uekman, 19, Arkansas, tight end for the University of Arkansas, became stricken on Sunday morning in Fayetteville, alone in his campus dormitory room. Uekman was found unresponsive at 11:15 a.m., about an hour after a roommate had seen him playing a videogame, and medical personnel arrived to find the athlete in cardiac arrest. Uekman, listed at 6-4, 254 pounds, was pronounced dead in a local hospital at 12:10 p.m., less than 24 hours after his last football action, playing in a Razorbacks game on Saturday in Little Rock. Coroner Roger Morris concluded that Uekman had a previously undetected heart condition, enlarged heart syndrome, which caused the death. Toxicology scans came back negative and Morris said manner of death was natural, with no sign of foul play. As No.3-ranked Arkansas prepared to face No.1 LSU on Nov. 25, Razorbacks coach Bobby Petrino issued a prepared statement, saying in part: “Garrett Uekman was a special member of our family, and we are all saddened by his passing. His loss is a terrible shock, and it makes you realize how precious life is.” The deceased athlete was a former prized recruit, an in-state product, and his parents, Danny and Michelle Uekman of Arkansas, issued a release through the university, stating: “Our son was living his dream of going to the U of A and playing football for the Razorbacks. He loved his school, his coaches, and his teammates and classmates, and was an influence and inspiration to so many people. We ask your love and prayers for Garrett, our family and his friends as we all cope with this heavy and painful loss.” Sources: The Associated Press and University of Arkansas.

26 Football Fatality Cases of America 2011

Matt Chaney — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:00:21 GMT

Football Repeats Heat-Illness Disaster of Decade Before

About 20 Player Deaths Will Qualify as Game-Related

Death Statistics Appear Sound Despite Faulty Studies

By Matt Chaney

ChaneysBlog.com

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Ten years ago last summer, in 2001, five American football players died within 12 scorching days of July and August, including Minnesota Vikings tackle Korey Stringer and Rashidi Wheeler, defensive back at Northwestern University.

Football officials vowed the calamity would never reoccur, swearing they finally recognized heat illness and its influence on further deadly conditions. They said an “awareness” sweeping football aimed to eliminate heatstroke, which was wholly preventable by expert consensus longstanding.

The promise was broken in subsequent years, naturally, like every alleged safety reform of incorrigible football, as heatstroke and related conditions continued to plague players.

But that forsaken pledge reflected eerily on football in 2011, with an 11-day stretch of extreme heat and outcomes for unfortunate players, their families, schools and communities.

From July 22 through Aug. 2, at least five prep football players mortally collapsed amid the game’s stubborn push through record heat in the country. A middle-aged football coach also died, of a heart ailment, after withering at a morning practice in Texas with temperature nearing 100 degrees.

The deadly 2011 timespan marked a dark anniversary for brutal football—while accentuating perpetual folly over health risks—occurring almost precisely 10 years after the heat slaughter of July-August 2001.

All told for football in the United States during 2011, dozens of people died in or around the sport, as usual for a given year, with about 20 player fatalities that are provably game-related, including 4 apparent collision deaths, likewise typical of recent decades.

This blog post is the first comprehensive collection of reported deaths surrounding American football in 2011, presenting 26 select cases from fatalities located through my Boolean searches of Google information banks.

The case narratives below contain available information, distilled primarily from news reports, on the deaths of 23 American football players, 1 coach, 1 referee and 1 cheerleader in 2011. None qualifies as medical study and each case requires expert follow-up for verification as game-related or not.

Beyond this list there are more reports of fatalities occurring close to football last year, such as 2 players in offseason training who died of cardiac problems while playing pickup basketball; 3 players dead of painkiller overdosing; player suicides that invited question of brain trauma’s involvement; and additional cases of coaches who died on the job.

But football fatalities merely introduce the large, costly scope of catastrophic or severe casualties every year in religious blood sport of the culture.

This weekend I will post an unprecedented number of casualty reports on American football in a given year, on ChaneysBlog.com: 220 annotated cases for 2011 culled from hundreds of game emergencies publicized in Google.

My pending report will contain fatalities but spotlight the survivors of football terrors, nearly 200 individuals who suffered severe injury or condition.

My categories of survivor conditions include brain bleeding (23 cases located of 2011), spinal paralysis (minimally 6 cases), vertebral fracture (about 60 cases), cardiac arrest, heatstroke, non-cerebral blood clots, organ rupture or damage (51 cases), “compartment syndrome” with amputation, facial fractures, peripheral nerve paralysis and staph infection of spinal column.

About 110 of the survivor cases—severe injuries of brain, skull, spinal cord, vertebral column and heart—are candidates for designation as catastrophic in the pending report for 2011 by the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, University of North Carolina, which has yet to address its serious errors in data collecting and recording of the past.

The UNC researchers, led by Frederick Mueller, a PhD in education, and Dr. Robert Cantu, the Boston-based sport neurosurgeon, face major revision of faulty data for 2010 and 2009, their football underreporting documented by my Google retrievals of cases they missed, doubling to tripling numbers they’ve published.

For more information, see ChaneysBlog posts since October on catastrophic injury in American football during 2011, featuring scores of survivor cases and analysis of reporting limitations.

Mueller and Cantu have declined my interview requests and my offers to forward them more than 100 total survivor leads missed for their catastrophic-injury reports of 2010 and 2009.

The Mueller-Cantu reports are accepted at face value and repeated as authoritative epidemiology on American football, for decades running, by parties such as medical journals and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At least the Mueller-Cantu fatality numbers appear fairly sound for two primary reasons regarding news media, their primary source of case leads:

News media learn of and report the vast majority of deaths in America, primarily through public records and human sources such as police.

And football death has been a news priority since American mass media exploded as the Golden Press, print news, the daily papers and periodic magazines following the Civil War.

Today, electronic search has increased prospects for gathering football deaths reported in news media, likely helping strengthen research on deaths in vast American football, although cases are still missed for studies.

Mueller and Cantu, for example, omitted at least 2 football fatalities from their 2010 report, cases that I nevertheless located in Google: a youth player killed in Pennsylvania by football collision and a college player in Minnesota, dead of a brain aneurysm suffered during winter conditioning.

My 26 select cases of football fatalities in 2011 follow here.

Some will not qualify as football-related under Mueller-Cantu definitions and classification, either for medically verifiable fact or because no linking evidence exists.

Online Reports of Deaths Surrounding American Football, 2011

Cases require expert follow-up for affirmation as football-related

By Matt Chaney, mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com

May 12: Luke Killian, age 16, North Carolina, lineman for the Morganton Mountaineers, collapsed during warm-up for a conditioning session with teammates at a city park. Killian, an overweight youth, was pronounced dead at a local hospital, possibly of heat exhaustion, according to reports. Team coach and organizer Doug Deitz had not attended the unofficial workout, which he said was staged by the players. No athletic trainer was present. The Morganton Mountaineers compete in the non-profit Pioneer Football League, which is “founded on Christian principles with an emphasis on helping young men and women develop biblical character traits,” the team website states. “The league provides an opportunity for home-school and private-schooled students ages 12-18 to play regulation football or participate in cheerleading. These student-athletes would normally not have the opportunity to play football through the public school system or if their private school does not offer football as a choice of athletics.” Sources: Morganton News Herald, Athletic Business magazine, WSOC-TV and MorgantonMountaineers.teampages.com.

Sept. 16: Jerry Green, 66, Tennessee, referee of football and basketball, complained about feeling sick during halftime of a football game he was officiating at Signal Mountain High School. Green went to a bathroom where he was discovered later, collapsed of a brain aneurysm, and he died that night at a hospital. Green, a realty specialist who was diabetic and overweight, had officiated school sports for 35 years in western Tennessee. He was known as a rules stickler who insisted players were fully padded, including hip and butt pads, David Whitley reported. “He was known to be very stern on the field,” said Billy Fairbanks, officiating crewmate and friend of Green. “That’s just how he was.” Sources: WRCB-TV, AOL.SporttingNews.com and Chattanoogan.com.

Sept. 18: Kainen Boring, 17, Tennessee, kicker/linebacker for Bledsoe County High School, suffered head trauma of a helmet-to-helmet collision during a practice session, while making a “perfect form tackle,” said a friend. Boring rose to his feet, walked to a huddle and said, “Something ain’t right.” The 6-foot, 195-pound teen collapsed, remaining conscious long enough to speak with a coach, then fell into seizure. Boring was airlifted to a hospital for emergency brain surgery. His mother, Paula Boring, later said a constricted-arteries tangle found at base of Kainen’s skull apparently contributed to the injury—“venous malformation” or AVM—which she described as “like a birthmark, a cluster of blood vessels that ruptured… during practice.” In hospital Kainen would not regain consciousness, sustained on ventilator with nary vital signs until the removal of life support, and his organs were donated to transplant patients. Weeks afterward, his father discussed the tragedy with news reporter Stephen Hargis: “The first thing I want to make clear is that football didn’t kill Kainen,” said Robby Boring. “We never knew he had AVM until after his accident, but it could have happened by him doing just about anything. Kainen loved football. He loved being part of that team, and this wasn’t anybody’s fault. We don’t even question God as to why this happened. It’s not for us to understand right now.” Nevertheless, the death qualified as the year’s second known collision fatality in American football, according to definition of the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research (NCCSIR), University of North Carolina. Kainen Boring was a dedicated athlete, faithfully attending football practice and other workouts; the day he was injured, Kainen rose early before school, leaving home at dawn to lift weights with an uncle. “That was the last time we spoke to each other, and I wish now I had held onto him longer,” Paula Boring said. The mother told Hargis she took comfort knowing Kainen’s organs lived on through transplants, like for the young woman in Georgia who received his heart. “I want to meet her so badly,” Paula said. “I want to put my hand on her chest and feel Kainen’s heart beat one more time.” Sources: Chattanooga Times Free Press, WRCB-TV, WTVC-TV, Chattanoogan.com and New York Times.

Football Researchers Mum on Faulty Injury Statistics

Matt Chaney — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:22:01 GMT

Glaring Shortfall of Catastrophic Casualties Grows in Ongoing Review

Spinal Cases Might Reach Hundreds Annually in American Football

Mueller and Cantu Gathered Mere 24 Catastrophic Cases for Year 2010

News commentary by Matt Chaney

ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Football-funded researchers Frederick Mueller and Dr. Robert Cantu are ignoring interview requests concerning their under-reporting of catastrophic casualties in the American sport, injuries they classify as severe trauma involving brain, skull, vertebral column and/or spinal cord.

Or Mueller and Cantu aren’t talking to me, at least, perhaps understandably from their perspective, facing now their likely decades of bad data in cases shortfall, erroneous rates, and even baseless claims about trending “safer” football in the United States.

And all because my electronic searches through Google banks continue to produce cases and rates of catastrophic football injury that bury Mueller-Cantu numbers, which are widely accepted and republished at face value, including by medical journals and the CDC.

Mueller and Cantu work under auspices of the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, University of North Carolina. The NCAA provides major funding.

Most importantly, America faces prospect the large majority of catastrophic football injuries go unreported in public, besides a minor portion emerging in news information, the stream fished heavily by Mueller and Cantu for cases they catch.

In the class of vertebral fractures involving no paralysis, for example, there’s probability at least hundreds such “walking” cases go unreported or missed every year in American football, based on sound estimates and etiology outside UNC, along with expert and witness opinion on injuries.

For survivors of all catastrophic categories, I’ve now collected almost a hundred candidate cases for 2011 and should find more. For 80 annotated cases and further discussion, see my Dec. 21 post.

My final qualified number for 2011 should far exceed any on record by Mueller and Cantu, whose 2008 tally of 63 cases is apparently their high mark.

For 2010, the current Mueller-Cantu report lists mere 24 survivors of catastrophic football injury nationwide, including 13 in “complete” recovery.

By stark contrast, my ongoing searches have located some 70 survivors for 2010 football, including over 20 in the past week, and I expect to hit more cases through Google.

About 50 cases I’ve gathered for 2010 remain omitted from the current UNC data.

I have at least 7 detected brain bleeds missed by Mueller and Cantu, of 2010, along with about 35 reported spinal fractures, some cases involving lasting paralysis.

Epidemiologist Charles Yesalis empathizes with Mueller and Cantu. Yesalis, ScD, a professor emeritus of health policy and administration at Penn State University, says challenges are immense for producing representative or accurate accounting on bodily catastrophes in vast American football, a high-risk population of upwards five million active participants.

“I think the key thing is this notion that they (Mueller and Cantu) are only picking up a small percent of cases,” Yesalis said in a phone interview. “And given my experience as an epidemiologist, that just doesn’t surprise me at all.”

“When you go farming for these data—and that’s a good a term as any—boy, it’s a lot of hit and miss.”

The Mueller-Cantu approach for gathering catastrophic cases is characterized in annual UNC reports, depicting a patchwork of football sources and other spotters, coaches, trainers, organizers, doctors and media like me, who forward candidate finds such as online news stories.

Granted, the Mueller-Cantu method picks up some information, but little else is certain beyond invalidity as epidemiological study, pending revisions.

For briefing on the research team, Mueller is director and a former football coach who’s compiled injury cases since the 1970s. “Dr. Mueller,” as Cantu addresses him, holds a PhD in education and works as a UNC professor of sport administration and science. Cantu, the well-known neural sport surgeon and researcher based in Boston, is medical director of the studies.

Yesalis has not performed scholarly critique of the Mueller-Cantu reports at UNC, but he says the inexact approach for gathering football’s worst injuries is nothing new in aspiring research.

“When you’re dealing with (data) as what might get reported in the news, versus trying to identify accurately what’s reported in emergency rooms, or hospital records, that’s problematic,” says Yesalis, co-author of acclaimed national surveys on steroid use by teenagers, among his scientific credits on sport doping and more epidemic disease.

“You’re trying to glue all this together, which is what it appears they’re doing (at UNC),” Yesalis says. “And they’re not the first people to do this on a variety of disease states, and emergency-room conditions, injuries and all that.”

Heavy limitations virtually quash the Mueller-Cantu approach at outset, for bearing solid data and rates, and the absolute numbers they typically present or imply are impossible. Their documents always contain a pair of obscured same sentences, disclaimers for inadequate data, but there’s no formal statement of study limitations. Scant literature review doesn’t mention pertinent research, including studies outside UNC on spinal injuries in general population that rank the sport of football among causes.

An informed schoolteacher would revise the Mueller-Cantu study at first draft, proposal stage, and apparently the UNC readers of graduate and doctoral theses never have the opportunity, given shoddy final data and presumptions that are published and disseminated worldwide, thanks to witless journal editors, government officials and news media.

Obstacles for Mueller and Cantu begin on likelihood that most catastrophic football cases remain unreported in any fashion, for factors such as injured players’ ignorance or resistance of seeking treatment. Cases are also withheld for patient privacy, doctor misdiagnoses and faulty medical coding.

“And if you rely on the fact that it might be in the news?” Yesalis poses. “Well, you know…”

Attritional effects on information don’t end with a case’s publicity by news reporters. Much daily print and broadcast content is culled out before reaching online posting, and cyber pages are routinely taken down in as soon as weeks. Subscription-only access blocks readers from many online news publications, particularly of rural areas.

Indeed, I cannot declare that my vigilant Google review, based on revolving Boolean word searches over hundreds of hours, produces a representative sampling of catastrophic football casualties for a given year. No known reference can affirm, and I find that even news of football fatalities slips by, a few cases, through cross-checking my own lists and those of Mueller-Cantu.

Meanwhile, Yesalis confirms medical databases are no catchall method, no resolution for limitations, and the human variable can skew electronic data in translation.

“If you’re using in any way of automated medical records, then (the question becomes): How is a condition diagnosed?” Yesalis says. “You may have a condition that should be included that is not… That would be a false-negative (case).”

“You could have a false-positive. You might count something as an athletic injury, having to do with (brain injury) or the like, that isn’t. Again, (problems) because of miscoding, or you have diagnosis that’s in gray area.”

“That can be affected by what the physician writes,” Yesalis adds. “Somebody might be (hospitalized) and it may not even be in the report that it had to do with football. What you’re picking up, in an electronic medical-records search, is the primary diagnosis and the cause. If it’s a trauma, it wouldn’t surprise me if often football, or the cause, is left off the chart.”

“Trying to harvest (epidemiological data), looking at medical records and diagnoses, it’s not a walk in the park to be sure.”

Football Spinal Cases Become Black Hole for Disclosure, Research

Based on my intuition of e-searching and -sifting countless thousands of news texts involving football health issues, conducted since graduate study in 1996—along with my experience in football as player, coach and journalist since 1976—I believe Google currently accesses the large majority in actual game cases of death, survivor brain bleeds requiring surgery, and spinal-cord traumas causing permanent paralysis. Those represent the sensational or “newsworthy” casualties of American football.

Bets are off for other categories, though, particularly football cases of severe injury to vertebral column without paralysis, like bone fracture. If anything, I’d wager that hundreds of these casualties are missed every year, if not more, given various insurmountable factors, correlating studies outside North Carolina, and the fact I’ve found 50 and counting for year 2011.

After the untold amount of football spinal injuries undisclosed, the cases involving treatment often require CT or MRI radiology and subjective judgment for rendering diagnosis—“What is one specialist’s picture of a cervical vein is the next one’s image of stress fracture,” a technician tells me—then the variable of prominence influences public revelation or silence.

Starting football players on school teams comprise the majority of publicized spinal cases through all levels, especially prep standouts at the offensive “skill” positions of quarterback, running back and receiver. The story of a juvenile backup player with mere vertebral fracture rarely reaches public airing, from youth levels encompassing about 98 percent of football population. Sportswriters and editors don’t qualify such non-paralysis cases as newsworthy, if even alerted.

Thus news quantity is no vetted indicator of spinal injury’s scope in athletics, but credible estimates suggest how big the problem might manifest for tackle football in the United States.

Data sets of the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center at University of Alabama-Birmingham suggest American football could annually produce 36 to 72 paralyzing injuries, defined for database criteria as “temporary or permanent sensory and/or motor deficit.”

I base that range on the UAB system’s intake of about 13 percent of the estimated 12,000 cervical-cord traumas each year in the United States, and football’s ranking as 15^th in etiology for 27,526 patients in the database, having caused 0.5 percent of the injuries to lead all sports.

By contrast, Mueller and Cantu list 8 total spinal-cord traumas for football 2010, along with 12 for 2009 and 17 for 2008.

For all vertebral fractures, an estimated 700,000 occur in the general population, with as many as two-thirds undiagnosed. The field is dominated by people with degenerative bone conditions, but football’s ranking in etiology of spinal-cord trauma signals it could produce thousands of cases with vertebral fracture.

In comparison, the Mueller-Cantu 2010 report lists 13 cases of vertebral fracture in football, cases ranging from quadriplegia to no paralysis and strong recovery.

Juvenile players comprise 9 of the cases, for an injury rate of about 1-in-500,000 athletes by UNC data, despite other literature indicating rate closer to 1-in-1,000.

Meanwhile, among NFL players in 2011, known catastrophic spinal casualties occurred at rate of about 1-in-200 players or less. And that accounts for only the cases in news media.

Sportswriters certainly miss severe neck and back injuries of the high-profile NFL, for communication blocks ranging from no diagnosis to privacy. Unreported catastrophic spinal injury likely occurred in 2011 among NFL players, beyond at least 6 known candidate cases requiring operations and 1 of non-surgical neck immobilization lasting three months for the athlete.

Browns linebacker Scott Fujita, a 10-year NFL veteran, wonders of true epidemiological scope for his notorious work environment. “A lot of us (players) are walking around with so much damage to our necks, and our spines, and you never know what might turn up,” he said, speaking in a phone interview.

Much of the damage to NFL players is likely residual, dating back to college and prep football. Fujita had neck surgery as a college player at Cal, for his severe case of stenosis or narrowing of the spinal canal that crimped the nerve-bundle cord. Not only was surgery imperative for continuing his playing career, but for resuming normal lifestyle as well.

“I was getting (nerve) stingers pretty much every time I hit somebody “ in football, Fujita recalls. “Then I’d be typing a term paper and turn my head too fast, and give myself a stinger. I was starting to have significant (muscle) atrophy on my left side, over my trap and delts and down my arm. It was noticeable in pictures.”

For a year of football news online, I’ll find a few cases like the collegiate Fujita’s, severe spinal stenosis leading doctors to recommend corrective surgery. Some players take the option, others don’t.

Mueller-Cantu annuals list a single case in recent years, a “complete” recovery of 2009, but Fujita and I believe there are undisclosed severe cases. And symptoms of minor spinal stenosis affect a football multitude, as many as 50 percent of players, studies find.

Myself, nearing 52 years old and 28 removed from battering collisions in college football, I experience symptoms of neck stenosis, the shooting numbness, radiating pain and trademark interior “coldness” overtaking my C5 to C7 vertebrae range. The episodic inflammation strikes regularly, often weekly, especially while driving or at a computer, and I gobble ibuprofen for the discomfort, or agony.

“(Spinal) stenosis is extremely common,” Fujita says of pro players. “Most guys get a stinger here and there. I imagine once you get a few, then it becomes worse and worse, then it becomes chronic.”

At least 8 NFL players had neck surgeries in 2011, including the aforementioned 6 solid cases for catastrophic designation. Sometimes a surgery is driven by the player’s desire to continue his career, but I find most are necessary for stabilizing spinal damage that acutely threatens nerves and normal function.

“Throughout my playing career, college and pros, I occasionally hear about a guy with a broken neck that requires surgery,” Fujita says. “I’d say more often than not, if it is a pretty serious break or operation, I don’t seem to recall those guys coming back and playing. But that’s just me shooting from the hip.”

“Yeah, I would kind of put the neck and spine in same (regard) as head injury,” Fujita continues, focusing on the NFL. “There’s a lot of gray area involved, and no one knows exactly how to diagnose it, how to describe it, how to talk about it. They know it’s serious, they just almost don’t want to touch the issue.”

Fujita, 32, is an intelligent and thoughtful athlete, husband and father. He holds a master’s degree in education from UC-Berkeley and serves on the NFL players union executive committee.

But Fujita currently wears a cast on his right hand, after shattering bones of two knuckles and fingers while hitting ground in a game last month. Complicated surgery pieced together the bone fragments in Fujita’s fingers, hopefully, lashing everything back in place with steel screws, 22 tiny bolts. This season Fujita also spent two weeks on the Cleveland disabled list for diagnosed concussion. That’s his brutal job however lucrative, until further notice.

Fujita treks the jungle of pro football in America, long has, and he always runs. Physical threat and unspoken boundary are everywhere, like stiff resistance to report bodily damages of the NFL. The stillness stands pragmatically for every insider concerned, all parties, league, management, union, players, families, agents, with fortunes riding the line over health risk, outcome, and especially liability, who ends up paying.

“A lot of times when guys are having neck stingers, or even some back issues, in many cases the clubs won’t even want to take a good look at it, especially on the MRI,” Fujita says. “And I know a lot of times the player doesn’t want to take a good look, either, because you don’t want to know what’s going on.”

“Maybe that’s stupid and irresponsible, but I think that’s the reality that a lot guys are living with right now.”

So-called safer football is wholly unrealistic, meanwhile, a national joke that nevertheless occupies national dialogue for the game’s epic health crisis at hand, blowing up over brain-injury revelations and lawsuits compounding for all levels.

Thus the data of catastrophic injury enter play, and inadequate numbers serve to nurture a popular, resilient myth, the one how an individual player faces just “rare” chance for sustaining “freak” violent mishap resulting in death or permanent dysfunction.

Parents and novice players buy that falsehood by the millions. I did as a boy.

Actually, catastrophic football injury—which by definition must be expanded to include lethal categories such as heatstroke, blood clotting, organ destruction, artery rupture, staph infection and peripheral paralysis that comprise scores of survivor cases I’ve located for 2011—is quite predictable and possibly occurring daily on average, somewhere.

The American gridiron’s goriest, most risky stretches are the regular season from late summer into winter and “spring practice,” when many states allow full-contact drills and scrimmaging at schools, along with collegiate programs nationwide. Conditioning and weightlifting sessions of January and February also kill and severely wound players, particularly at colleges.

Yet some American opinion leaders say it isn’t really so, this picture of brutal football, not any longer. People like NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who promotes neo-fandom terms like “culture change” and “concussion awareness.”

Today, football advocates insist they’re seeing a safer brand of tackle football, and Mueller and Cantu join Goodell at campaign front, citing their decades of catastrophic-injury numbers as evidence.

Mueller and Cantu claim their data have been instrumental in a game trend since the 1970s, steering players away from head contact.

Ridiculous, retorts Fujita, the NFL linebacker who’s flabbergasted the foolishness is mentioned in straight face. “Absolutely not, if anything I would say there’s more head contact in football today.”

“There’s increased emphasis on trying to clean up the game,” Fujita acknowledges. “You know, coaching guys up in ‘proper technique’ and all these catch phrases, and paying lip-service to everything. So when it comes down to it, this remains a violent game.”

Pro players certainly grasp their risks, and the genetic violence of football for all ages. And helmet or head-to-head colliding is the rule rather than exception for modern football, particularly with skull-preserving helmet technology among forces that channel combatants into zero contact, every player, from “Tiny Mite” to NFL linebacker.

Fujita has to laugh when I ask whether he feels safer playing football these days, definitely a stupid question.

“Um, no, I don’t feel any safer,” he replies. “I think in some respects you see the game changing. Some ways. Like a guy (of the NFL) coming across the middle, catching a pass for a 15-yard dig, and the safety will pull off (for the cameras), whereas before, more likely, the safety would blow the guy up.”

“It’s just a brutal game, and I don’t think you can technique—using ‘technique’ as a verb here—you can’t technique the game into becoming safer. You can’t even (player) fine the game into becoming safer. And that’s just the reality.”

Human Toll, Medical Damages, ‘Public’ Football and Vital Statistics

Independent journalist Irvin Muchnick laughs, too, when I broach the theory of safer football, the central talking point of football advocates for their increasing problems over injury epidemic and monetary damages.

“Anyone with two eyes on a Sunday afternoon can see that’s not so,” he says, dismissing assertions a fundamental reduction is possible for football risk and casualty.

Muchnick, the author, alternative columnist and indie blogger with cunning for banging on sport-entertainment conglomerates, bristles at the idea of faulty research, funded by football, as a catalyst for safer sport over 34 years of publication.

“If Cantu and the North Carolina people are claiming some credit here, about what their data have wrought, that’s so patently a false claim,” says Muchnick, a leading voice of our growing faction against “public” football financed by government, schools and colleges and largely carried for damages by general insurance consumers of health and liability coverage.

Muchnick said, speaking with me by phone, that UNC’s glaring under-reporting of football injury makes news on two levels.

“One is the statistics themselves, knowledge is power, and the information is important,” he says. “For a sport system out of control, I don’t know exactly at what point the (germane) statistics move people, to take our master points seriously, but clearly it’s part of it.”

“Which brings us to the second point, the process,” Muchnick continues, “and the idea that these kind of data are being collected by people who aren’t doing the job right. Not so much that they’re doing it in bad faith, but that it’s not a priority and it’s supporting some agenda other than getting everything out there.”

Muchnick sees football advocates in stall tactic amid dread crisis, recalcitrant to accept looming reform of their blood sport, if not abolishment. He scoffs at supporters’ rhetoric overall but does detect a shift in public conscience, related to their talk.

“One good thing about ‘concussion awareness’ is that it is pointing the markers in only one direction,” Muchnick says. “Even if people are not buying into this football problem as speedily and as conscientiously as we would hope, there’s only one place this story is going. And it’s not going toward reduced deaths, reduced disability, reduced public-health costs for our country.”

“Even if the NFL threads the PR needle in all this stuff, and they do a pretty good damn job on that, it still doesn’t add up to answering for the feeder levels of this activity, amateurs in public high schools, colleges and so forth. The economic numbers just can’t sustain themselves.”

“Football,” Muchnick says, “still doesn’t get its arms around the fact that seven- and eight-figure lawsuits, and imbalanced budgets, are going to be inevitable as our public awareness increases.”

Finally, of the data mess at UNC on catastrophic football injuries, Muchnick wants real response from the researchers, besides their short email replies to me, thanking me for my "interest" and noting they're busy evaluating their data for 2011.

Right. Mueller and Cantu are presently bombarded by about 95 cases I’ve dropped on them, including over a dozen since my Dec. 21 post.

Mueller and Cantu also cannot yet address their second overdue task, revising their bad data and assumptions of 2010, while also gauging the infestation back through decades of their reports.

For 2010, I’m still awaiting Mueller’s green light for loading them with the 70-some survivor cases I’ve pulled from Google, surely to obliterate their paltry year data currently posted at www.unc.edu/depts/nccsi.

Muchnick is bored already, seeking open discussion on the matter, quickly.

“It’s very important for Cantu and Mueller to talk about why their methodology failed to catch these cases that you did catch, as a lone, independent, unfunded researcher and journalist,” he told me.

“I’m not qualified to say everything you’ve written is perfect, but I’ve seen enough of your work to know that it’s conscientious and it’s based on a coherent method. And it’s found things that are at odds with what the public’s being told, so we need to resolve those contradictions.”

Matt Chaney is a writer, editor, teacher and restaurant worker living in Missouri, USA. His 2001 graduate thesis for an MA degree at the University of Central Missouri is qualitative media analysis of 466 football reports, historical print coverage of anabolic steroids and HGH in American football, largely based on electronic search among thousands of news texts from the 1970s through 1999. Email him at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information, including about his 2009 book,Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the homepage at www.fourwallspublishing.com.