Three Young Lives, a Hidden Killer, and Heartache It Caused

These are stories about three high school football players who died on the field recently of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

Steven ‘Scotty’ Lang

These are some of the things that helped the Langs heal: letters from friends, family and even outsiders. Flower arrangements. More than two dozen trees planted in their son’s honor. A sports film room dedicated in his name. Stickers on cars displaying his number. His image on the senior mug. Dedication pages in the yearbook. Players wearing socks in his favorite color: orange.

The 2000 football season was dedicated to their son, 16-year-old Steven “Scotty” Lang, who was a budding 6-foot-5, 250 pounds, a cog in the main gears of Fountain Valley High’s offensive line.

He collapsed on Nov. 15, 1999, on the field where the team was preparing to play powerhouse Long Beach Poly in the first round of the Southern Section Division I playoffs. His death was attributed to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a thickening of the heart muscle. It affects one in 500 people.

It’s the same disease that killed basketball players Hank Gathers and Reggie Lewis; a disease considered the most common hidden killer of young athletes.

The warning signs? There were none.

“People feel comfort knowing that they don’t have a family history involving heart conditions,” Lang’s mother, Cindy, said. “Our son never complained once about any of the symptoms.”

Cindy Lang is a spokeswoman for A Heart for Sports, a nonprofit organization that was started shortly after her son’s death to promote heart screenings, such as echocardiograms, at schools.

“Once Scotty died, we said, ‘We have to do something,’ ” she said.

Nick Allen

What can a father say? Nothing that would do the life of his son justice.

“Oh--we were real close,” Tim Allen says softly from his Stevenson, Ala., home. “He was just such a good friend of mine.”

It’s been nearly two months since Nick, a 14-year-old football player at North Jackson High in Stevenson, collapsed and died June 20 while at summer football practice. The cause was hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

Nick had played ball since he was 6, and nothing, Allen said, was ever wrong. No one had even the vaguest idea that he could have had a heart condition. Tim Allen said he found out too late about tests that could have detected the abnormality.

The death struck Stevenson especially hard because it was the second in a month to rock the football program. In May, 16-year-old Drew Privett came home after an evening practice and complained of a headache. He was taken to the hospital where he died.

Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman will study making changes to high school team workouts in light of the deaths of Allen and Privett.

Nick had recently made the high school golf team, and had aspirations of getting a college degree in sports therapy.

Allen said his family has relied on its religion to get through the last two months.

“This is a tragedy in our community,” Allen said. “We’re just turning to the Lord right now.”

Ken Derminer

We had no idea he was at risk. There were no warning signs.

This is what Linette Derminer echoes a year after her 17-year-old son, Ken, died on a football practice field.

On a sweltering June day in Ohio last year, the Geneva High football team was holding a preseason practice. Derminer was doing calisthenics along with his teammates, and when he passed out, paramedics couldn’t revive him.

Derminer died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Amid the grief that followed, there has also been disbelief.

When he was younger, Ken had been diagnosed with a heart murmur, but was told he outgrew it and had been cleared to play.

Linette Derminer later created Kids Endangered Now, a foundation whose mission is to “raise awareness of the warning signs of a possible cardiac defect.”

Given that simple goal, Derminer said she’s often surprised at the resistance she meets. Many school officials and athletic directors are uncooperative, she said, unwilling to do anything to make heart screenings a routine part of physicals.

“The only reason I can keep going is to help other people,” Derminer said.