A Team Play for Ending Athlete’s Coma : Sports: Family brings football tapes to young fullback in hospital.

Tonight, when the cheering stops, odds are Brant Theurer will still be in a coma.

But even though Brant remains confined to the antiseptic stillness of his hospital room, a world away from the adolescent frenzy of a high school football field, the 17-year-old former fullback of Lancaster’s Paraclete High School never misses a game.

As his teammates nurse their injuries after tonight’s playoff contest with La Salle High School, Brant’s parents will bring him a play-by-play account of the action--captured by a tape recorder worn by football coach Steve Hagerty, as well as on videotape.

The team’s strategy is simple: As Brant watches and listens to the life he once lived--the swearing, the shouting, the encouragement--the sounds and sights of the game may pull him back to consciousness. His family has been playing such tapes, recorded at games and practices, since shortly after his traffic accident July 29.

Doctors at Meridian Neuro Care hospital in Oxnard, where Brant is being treated, say there is reason for hope.

For one thing, he always beats the odds. Brant was not expected to live through the night following the accident in which he was flung from a friend’s car while on the way home from a football camp.

And before the crash, Brant’s hard work and single-minded love for the gridiron won him a starting fullback spot his senior year--a hard-fought promotion from center for the 5-foot-7, 200-pound youth. His family hopes that his love of the game will help bring about his recovery.

Perhaps it already has.

Brant can open his eyes, and when the tapes are played, his muscles tense up and his head and arms move slightly. While watching the team’s last regular-season game--a wrenching 28-27 loss to Rosamond High School--Brant “got all tense and agitated,” said friend and teammate Ryan Johnson. “I think he was mad.”

Brant’s anger inspired Ryan to dance around the hospital room with joy. “I still think he’s going to pull out of it,” said Ryan, who has known Brant since the two were 7 years old. “This time he seemed a lot more like him.”

Before the crash, Brant was a senior with a 3.84 grade-point average, whom friends call a dependable guy who inspired others to excel. On a hot July afternoon, Brant and three teammates were returning from a two-day football camp in Los Angeles when the driver fell asleep and crashed his Ford Bronco.

Everyone walked away from the crash except Brant, who was not wearing a seat belt. He was thrown from the vehicle and landed on the shoulder of the Antelope Valley Freeway near Acton.

Brant’s spinal cord was not damaged. But Brad Ring, Meridian’s assistant director, said the base of his brain was badly bruised and bleeding and the nerves in his brain stem had snapped. But because his spinal cord was not damaged, doctors said, Brant has a better chance of recovering his motor skills, personality and memory.

That hope has been an inspiration to the Paraclete Spirits, who treat their teammate as if he never left. Brant’s football jersey--No. 44--still hangs inside his locker, and his name remains on the Spirits’ playoff roster.

“Sometimes when I call roll, I’m just reading names and not thinking about which names,” Coach Hagerty said. “And I say his name.”

Even rivals are helping out. Members of the Mojave High football team took up a collection and donated $180. The football booster club at nearby Antelope Valley High gave $500 toward Brant’s medical expenses. Referees at one game donated their checks. And a Cal State Northridge fraternity with Paraclete alumni raised $4,000.

“It’s a close community,” Hagerty said.

The coach has gotten used to wearing the small tape recorder next to his whistle during practice. The device captures every compliment and every curse.

“Sometimes I’ll forget what I just said and I’ll apologize,” he said. “I hope I don’t get in trouble. But I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Brant’s parents, Mary and Mike Theurer, have a new routine each Thursday, driving from their home in Quartz Hill to Brant’s Oxnard hospital room and bringing cassettes of practice and a videotape of the previous week’s game. Sometimes, teammates deliver the game tapes earlier in the week.

“We turn on [the VCR] and say, ‘Brant, here’s what the team did last week,’ ” Mike Theurer said. “Every once in a while you see him tense up, move his head.”

Meridian’s Ring said the Theurers are taking the right approach. “We like what they’re doing with the tapes,” he said. “If they weren’t doing it, we’d be doing something ourselves.”

Ring said doctors cannot know what Brant is able to hear, so he is treated in some ways as though he has full faculties.

“Nobody but God knows what’s going on upstairs,” Ring said. “When we come into the room, it’s always, ‘How you doing, Brant? It’s Monday morning. . . .’ I’ll tell him what time it is. I’ll open up the window and show him what kind of day it is. We include him in the conversation and try to evoke responses from him.”

Friends believe Brant will rejoin them on the football field one day--even if just to watch from the sidelines.

Said tight end John Dagata: “You think, ‘God, he’s missing all this and he is so much a part of it.’ He loves football. He’s got to come back.”