SC high school football player dies

HARTSVILLE, SC (AP)

A South Carolina high school football player died Friday night after having to be helped off the field following a tackle and then collapsing on the sideline.


Ronald Rouse, an 18-year-old senior lineman for the Hartsville Red Foxes, collapsed during the second quarter of Hartsville's homecoming game against Crestwood at Kelleytown Stadium, the Morning News of Florence reported.


The the 6-foot-3, 320-pound Rouse was involved in a tackle and stayed on the ground afterward, Hartsville Mayor Mel Pennington wrote in an email. Team officials helped Rouse to his feet and he walked to the sideline, where he collapsed.


EMS crews worked to revive Rouse and transported him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Pennington said. The teams played the remaining 3:39 of the first half, and with Hartsville up 27-7, the school conducted its homecoming celebration and crowned a king and queen.


The players didn't return to the field for the second half, and Hartsville Principal Charles Burry announced over the public address system that the game was suspended due to the seriousness of Rouse's condition.


Some fans wept as the stands quietly emptied, the Morning News reported.
A large crowd, including team members still in uniform, gathered later outside the emergency room at Carolina Pines Regional Medical Center consoled one another as they waited to express their grief to Rouse's family.


The mayor, who ordered flags be flown at half-mast, urged residents "to take a moment and ask God to be with this family, to help them find peace in this chaos, and to help this team deal with the grief and shock of losing a brother."


Darlington County Coroner J. Todd Hardee said in a statement late Friday that an autopsy will be conducted Saturday to determine the cause of death.

I'm a primary care physician in South Carolina. I do hundreds of pre-participation sports physicals every year and have for the past 25 years. You take their blood pressure. You review the health history questions that ask about family history for sudden/early cardiac deaths/diabetes/hypertension. You listen for heart murmurs. You counsel patients/parents about the risk associated with an elvated BMI. But that's about the extent of what gets done on your basic garden-variety sports physical in terms of screening for being at risk for sudden cardiac death.

The reality is pre-participation sports physicals, as they are presently constituted, are, for the most part, not designed to find the kids who are at risk for sudden death. In order to adquately screen for those kids, the pre-participation sports physical would have to include an EKG and an echocardiogram with referrals to a pediatric cardiologist to futher work up any abnormalities found on those two screening tests. Now, your $50 pre-participation sports physical is $300 which is prohibitively exensive for a lot of kids/families.

If even one kid dies, it's one too many. But like with many other health care issues facing our country today, how much money are we willing to spend to find the very few who are effected?

What happened last night in Hartsville is a horrible tragedy. But many more kids died in car wrecks yesterday than died playing high school football. And I don't see legislation prohibiting 17 year olds from driving passing any time soon.

I'm sorry for the kid. I'm sorry for his family. I'm glad I didn't do his pre-participation sports physical. And I worry that one Friday night a kid I did his pre-participation sports physical will suffer the same fate.