At least 6 teenage football players died in August, raising questions about heat and safety

As the heat index rose into the mid-90s Aug. 5, the air-conditioning failed at Hopewell High School in Virginia, and classes would be canceled the following day. Football practice went on nonetheless, and about 40 minutes in, a 15-year-old player collapsed.

“It might be heat stroke. He’s a football player,” a coach told 911, according to a recording obtained by The Progress-Index in Petersburg, Va. “We’ve been putting water on him. … We got ice we’re trying to put on him.”

Jayvion Taylor was taken to a hospital where he later died, the first in what would prove to be a deadly month for young football players.

In the next three weeks, at least five other high school and middle school football players would die in practices or games, according to news accounts. Among them was Leslie Noble IV, 16, the Franklin High School lineman who similarly collapsed at practice Aug. 14 and was remembered at funeral services Wednesday in Randallstown, Md., as a gentle, joyous giant.

The Maryland Medical Examiner has not yet released a cause of the teenager’s death, although dispatchers that day referred to heatstroke. Of the six athletes’ deaths found in news reports, two resulted from head injuries from tackles on the same day: Caden Tellier, 16, in Selma, Ala., and Cohen Craddock, 13, in Madison, W.Va.

In addition to Noble and Taylor, news accounts referred to the possibility of heat in the deaths of Semaj Wilkins, 14, of New Brockton High School in Alabama, and Ovet Gomez Regalado, 15, of Northwest High School in Shawnee Mission, Kan.

The deaths have alarmed and saddened many who approach August with both anticipation for the coming football season and fear of the dangers that poses. Already by its high-contact nature a potentially dangerous sport, the record-breaking heat of recent years has heightened the risk for its players.

“You go through summer with your fingers crossed and hope you don’t see any heat-related injuries,” said Marty McNair, who has become an advocate for player safety in the six years since his son Jordan died of heatstroke suffered during a University of Maryland Terrapins practice. “It’s been horrific as far as student athlete deaths.”

While it’s difficult to discern trends in young athletes’ deaths because the total numbers remain thankfully low, experts say, July and August tend to present the most danger to football players.

“We don’t want to see any,” said Kristen Kucera, who directs the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Any amount of deaths in August we’re concerned about.”

The center’s data show two of the three high school football deaths reported last academic year occurred in July or August. For the two prior academic years, ending in June 2022 and June 2023, 6 of 11 and 3 of 7, respectively, occurred during those summer months.

“Everyone is increasingly concerned about heat across the board and not just in sports,” Kucera said.

And indeed, in Baltimore, a Department of Public Works employee, Ron Silver II, died of hyperthermia Aug. 2, prompting the city to pause trash and recycling collections Wednesday after temperatures climbed to 99 degrees.

With the last 10 years the warmest in nearly 175 years of recorded history, there is heightened urgency to finding a way to protect those who work or play in the heat of the summer.

One leading heat researcher predicts football will have to abandon its traditional role as a fall sport.

“In 20 years, high school [football] is going to be a spring sport,” said Douglas Casa, the CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut. “It’s going to happen. Climate change is happening so much faster than we thought it would.”

The institute, which researches and seeks to prevent heat-related deaths in sports, labor and the military, is named after the Minnesota Vikings linebacker who died after suffering heatstroke at training camp in 2001.

Football’s current calendar puts the most vulnerable kind of athlete in the most rigorous kind of training at the riskiest time of year, Casa said.

“You take 300-pound kids in the hottest time of year and you put all this gear on them,” he said. “Big people heat up faster, and they cool down slower.”

Casa has helped multiple sports organizations, from the National Association of Athletic Trainers to the International Olympics Committee, develop guidelines for keeping athletes safe while practicing or competing in the heat.

In 2009, he co-wrote a consensus statement in the Journal of Athletic Training that outlines preseason heat acclimatization for secondary school athletics, which the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association recommends in its safety guidelines.

The first two days of football practice should only include helmets, per the recommendation. Shoulder pads are added for days 3-5, while introducing contact with blocking sleds and tackling dummies. Full contact should begin no earlier than day 6. Two-a-days shouldn’t be stacked back-to-back without a rest day in between. And the two practices are recommended to be separated by at least three hours in a cool environment.

Easing into the season is important given how quickly athletes can become dehydrated in the heat, both through sweating and breathing heavily in exertion, said Dr. Sunal Makadia, director of sports cardiology for LifeBridge Health, which operates Sinai Hospital in Baltimore and other facilities.

“This time of year, a lot of these players might either be new to the sport, or de-conditioned over the course of the summer, and they’re going in full-speed,” he said.

Makadia said the heat can be dangerous for everyone, from otherwise healthy kids to highly trained athletes to those who may have underlying heart conditions that previously were undiagnosed but emerge on the practice or playing field.

As a parent and a recreation league coach himself, Makadia recommends kids be screened by physicians before participating in a sport. That way, a doctor can review any symptoms, medications or family medical history that could contribute to potential problems, he said.

Spurred by tragic deaths, Maryland legislators have passed two laws in the last three years to improve safety for young athletes.

The Jordan McNair Safe and Fair Play Act passed in 2021 after the Randallstown native, whose death exposed a bullying culture on the Terps team and led to the firing of the football coach and the resignation of the chairman of the University System of Maryland’s Board of Regents. The law addresses, in part, guidelines for preventing and treating brain injuries and heat-related illnesses in higher education.

McNair’s death also inspired the introduction of a bill in Congress, which has not passed, requiring colleges and universities to create emergency heat plans.

Reform at the middle and high school level also came in 2022, a year after a 17-year-old Mergenthaler Vocational Technical High School football player died after suffering a brain injury when he was tackled in the end zone of a fall 2021 game. The Elijah Gorham Act mandates that middle and high schools develop emergency action plans, including having defibrillators and cooling equipment available.

Casa said he was heartened that it’s increasingly common for schools to have automated external defibrillators, or AEDs, and immersion tubs that can begin life-saving measures on the field before paramedics arrive.

No one should die from heat stroke, said Casa, who himself survived an episode as a 16-year-old running a 10K race. You simply have to cool a player down within the “golden half-hour” after symptoms emerge, he said, which is why more than 80% of high schools now have immersion tubs.

“It’s 100 percent survivable,” Casa said. “You have a tub of ice and water and your kid lives.”

Parents should ask if schools have a plan and the equipment to handle a player’s crisis, as well as an athletic trainer on site.

After hearing of Noble’s death, Maryland Sen. Shelly Hettleman, who helped pass both the McNair and Gorham legislation, did her due diligence to make sure Franklin High had the recommended safety measures in place.

“There was a trainer there. There was an AED nearby. It sounds like people responded as they should have,” the Baltimore County Democrat said. “Sometimes things like this are gonna happen, tragically, even when you have the best of policies in place, which I think happened here.”

Now, Hettleman is wondering: Can further preventative measures be taken? What kind of physicals are these young athletes undergoing before taking the field? And why is it happening in football more than other sports?

“I think it behooves us to look at that too,” Hettleman said. “I’m not hearing about field hockey players dropping dead on their fields, right? Or cross country runners?”

In the 2021-22 academic year, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, there were 65 catastrophic sports injuries to high school or college athletes representing 10 sports, 36.9% being fatal. Of the 65, 52.3% were football players and 53.9% were cardiac or heat related.

Noble’s death brings the issue home again, much as did that of McNair, whose family lived in Hettleman’s district.

“This is a local tragedy,” Hettleman said, “but it’s within a context of larger issues that are happening to our younger athletes all over the country.”