by Paul Teetor
Memo to parents of kids playing high school sports: before you let your teenager go out for the team, before you sign that permission slip, make sure the school has a certified athletic trainer on hand with the proper equipment to handle medical emergencies at games and practices.
Ask hard questions of the coaches and school authorities: is the school ready to handle it should some catastrophic event – heart, brain or spinal related – happen to your son or daughter?
Is there always an automated external defibrillator available, and someone who knows how and when to use it? Is there an emergency medical plan ready to go into action at a moment’s notice? Is the school athletic trainer certified, or are they just someone who started calling themselves a trainer, and talked themselves into a job they aren’t qualified for?
You may be surprised by the answers, if they’re honest answers.
The biggest sports story in Los Angeles this week – front page LA Times big – was something that didn’t happen: LeBron James’ eldest son, Bronny James, did not die.
But the 18-year-old basketball star did collapse at a USC practice and go into cardiac arrest for several minutes before being revived by on-site medical staff, and then rushed to a hospital for further treatment.
He was one of the lucky ones: on average, a teenage athlete dies once every six days in the United States. Even more shockingly, an average of three high school students suffers cardiac arrest every day in the United States. That’s according to the National Athletic Trainers Association (NATA), which is advocating for a bill to regulate certified athletic trainers in California.
Currently, California is the only state that does not regulate athletic trainers.
Gary Vitti, who served as the LA Lakers Head Athletic Trainer from 1984 to 2016, and has lived in Manhattan Beach all that time, says it is a travesty that needs to be addressed by the state legislature as soon as possible.
“This is a matter of life and death,” Vitti told All Ball. “A lot of these teenage athlete deaths could be prevented if we just regulated athletic trainers and made sure schools follow the recommended best medical practices.”
Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest mid-game last season brought renewed attention to the vital role of an athletic trainer. In Hamlin’s case, a certified athletic trainer was nearby, along with a defibrillator, and played a crucial role in his survival.
Both NATA and the California Athletic Trainers’ Association are using the Hamlin case – and now the Bronny James case — to push for a California bill that would regulate athletic trainers in the state. Assembly Bill 796 would certify athletic trainers who would be trained to recognize all injuries, including heat stroke.
The bill would also prohibit a person from practicing as an athletic trainer or from using certain titles without being certified by a state board.
“We lose a high school athlete every six days in this country from a preventable issue,” Vitti says. “Over the last five years, we’ve had over 300 sports related high school deaths – and almost all of these deaths are preventable. In California alone, from 2005 to 2020, 34 high school kids died and 92 had a catastrophic sports related injury. That translates to 2.3 high school deaths per year. I think we can do better.”
While the failure to regulate athletic trainers is a contributing factor in California, there is another factor that shows how far the Golden State is lagging behind the rest of the country in this critical area.
There is a universal metric for best medical practices. On that metric, the NATA ranks California 51st in the nation.
How can that be, you may ask, in a country with only 50 states? Because they included Washington, D.C. in the rankings. Even then, we’re still dead last in the nation in terms of working to prevent these kinds of student athlete deaths.
Bottom line: Bronny James is lucky to be alive. Whether he will ever play basketball again is a whole different question. First the doctors have to figure out what caused his sudden cardiac arrest. Then maybe they can come up with a plan to get him back on the court.
James was lucky that he went into cardiac arrest in a USC gym that was staffed by the appropriate medical people, with an appropriate medical emergency plan, and the appropriate medical equipment. After approximately four minutes, cardiac arrest patients suffer irreversible harm and victims often die on the spot they went down. James was able to beat that deadly deadline.
Last year at this time the USC freshman was playing in high school gyms across SoCal. And not every high school in California has a certified athletic trainer on hand with access to an automated external defibrillator at every practice and game.
Vitti says that, in general, some schools – usually in more affluent areas like the Beach Cities – are prepared to deal with such situations. But many schools, especially in the lower income areas, are not.
Mira Costa basketball Coach Neal Perlmutter said that he would have to agree with that analysis.
“Generally speaking, we have an athletic trainer at every game, either ours or the opposing team’s,” Perlmutter said. “It’s not a rule, but it’s what we strive for. But I have coached at other places where that’s not the case.”
He noted that coaches are required to have CPR – Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation – training.
“I have the CPR training, but it’s still difficult to think about doing that in an emergency situation versus having someone who’s a certified trainer doing it,” he said.
As for practices and other non-game situations, he said: “The bulk of the time we have athletic trainers in the building. We have a training staff every day on site, as long as we practice during regular practice hours. I think as coaches we all feel that we would be in a very tough spot if something happened at our practice without an athletic trainer being nearby.”
Vitti says the odds are 1 in 8,000 that a student athlete will suffer a catastrophic event.
“Parents think It’s not going to happen to my kid, until it does,” he said. “That’s why we need to deal with this problem.”
The parent in this case, of course, is the most famous athlete in the world: LeBron James.
Although Bronny was out of the hospital by the end of the week, there is still a long road to travel before LeBron’s oft-expressed hope of playing in the NBA with his son could ever come true.
For now, he should just be glad Bronny is alive and well. Not every student athlete who goes into cardiac arrest comes out of it alive.
“We have 780,000 high school athletes in the state of California,” Vitti says. “But less than half of them have certified athletic trainers in their schools. We have to fix that.”
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. Follow: @paulteetor. ER
