Young Athlete’s Gridiron Death Another Sad Statistic

The Harrells Academy football team was struggling, so Bob and Luanne Johnson, parents of linebacker son Will Johnson, held a pregame dinner at their home to help boost morale.

After the meal, Luanne Johnson gave a moving speech. She spoke of the death a few years earlier of her infant son, Bailey, and told the young men to live for every moment because there’s no telling what the next will bring.

At the game that night, the players made a grand entrance through a tunnel and a cloud of vapor set off by Bob Johnson. He fired a refurbished cannon that had been used when he played for the private high school.

“It was a perfect day,” Johnson said.

But perfection disintegrated late in the first quarter, and a mother’s speech became agonizingly poignant.

Will, 17, the second of five Johnson children, made what appeared to be a normal tackle that Sept. 8 night. He went back to the huddle, then turned to ask the coach to take him out. After a few steps toward the sidelines, he collapsed.

Doctors tried to revive Will on the field, but he was pronounced dead 45 minutes later. The cause was commotio cordis--a heart concussion--in which the heart stops when it is struck precisely at the moment of firing.

“After talking to all the doctors . . . they said once this happens, there’s very little they can do,” Bob Johnson said.

An average of 52 high school athletes, mostly male, have died each year--nearly half playing football--since the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research in Chapel Hill, N.C., began keeping records in 1982.

Since 1990, 120 high school football players have died while playing, the center said--18 this year alone. An additional 99 were paralyzed in the same period. Thirty-nine of those deaths were a direct result of injuries during games or practice. The rest were blamed on heart problems or heat stroke.

Improved equipment and rule changes over the last quarter-century have helped to lower the overall rate of death to 0.27 per 100,000 players last year. But harm to any young athlete still raises tormented questions on whether coaches and schools are doing everything they can to prevent deaths and catastrophic injuries.

The death of any player “brings about a stark reality as to just how fragile our lives are, that someone can be taken from us so quickly,” said Bob Briscoe, who has coached high school football in Texas for 33 years.

Each year, the National Federation of State High School Assns. reviews its rules to see whether changes can increase the safety of the sports it governs.

In 1976, to try to reduce the alarming numbers of spinal cord and brain injuries, some of which led to paralysis, the federation made it illegal for football players to make initial contact with their helmeted heads. That cut down on fatalities directly related to headfirst tackles--from 15 in 1976 to fewer than 10 in 23 of the last 24 years.

But the tackling rule is meaningless if coaches don’t teach it, and the federation has no way to govern practice sessions, assistant director Jerry Diehl said.

“It’s something we always have to be concerned about because one catastrophic injury, let alone a death, is too many,” Diehl said. “We try to let people know that [tackling or blocking headfirst] is just not a part of high school football.”

Evaluating the level of a player’s health or the severity of his or her injury is often left up to coaches, who usually have little or no medical training. Additionally, their decisions are frequently colored by the hunt for victory.

“Coaches not only have to worry about the health of the athlete, but winning games,” said Dr. Frederick Mueller, director of the Chapel Hill research center. “That’s a tough spot to be in because winning and losing impacts how much money the school makes or even whether the coach keeps his or her job.”

Fewer than 30% of the 14,000 high schools in the United States have nationally certified athletic trainers, according to the National Athletic Trainers Assn. in Dallas. But even schools with trainers face difficulties preventing serious injuries. Many must oversee all sports played in an individual school, and some even split time among several schools.

“An athletic trainer can prevent a minor injury from becoming a major injury and can keep a serious injury from getting worse,” said Jon Almquist of Fairfax, Va., chairman of the trainer association’s secondary school committee. “With something like a potential spine injury, more damage can be done after the initial injury if the proper precautions aren’t taken.”

Regular maintenance of equipment is also vital. Coaches should check all helmets and shoulder pads weekly, said Briscoe, who now coaches in suburban Dallas.

In recent years helmets have become lighter and better padded, and shoulder pads have expanded to cover most of the chest. A company in Denver produces a pad to protect against heart concussions, although it remains in slight demand, with 50,000 sold since its introduction in 1992, because so few coaches are aware of cardiac concussions.

Too much equipment can change the way the game is played, Mueller cautioned. “They could make a helmet that would eliminate most of the head and neck injuries, but it would be so bulky that no one could lift their head,” he said.

Sometimes it just doesn’t matter what precautions are taken.

At Harrells Academy, coach Bron Thompson said his staff has always taught kids to “tackle what you see” to protect against neck injuries. Will Johnson followed those instructions to the letter, tackling the opposing running back with his head up and arms open.

Then, once he was injured, Will had more medical personnel attending to him than would be typical at most schools. Harrells has an ambulance on the field at every game, and one of the four doctors who have children at the school was on the sidelines within 10 yards of the boy when he collapsed.

“I’m not sure there was anything else we could have done,” Thompson said. “It was just a freak accident.”