16-Year-Old HS Football Player Suddenly Collapses in Game, Dies
The sport of football has claimed lives in the summer heat before, but as 2018 goes on, players are dropping at alarming rates.
And so it goes that in Mississippi’s Coahoma County in the exterior southeastern suburbs of Memphis, 16-year-old Dennis Mitchell of Byhalia High School paid the ultimate price for love of the sport at a high school football game Friday night.
The superintendent of Marshall County Schools released a statement to the press, succinctly summarizing the events of the game.
“According to his coaches, after playing a quarter and a half, the defensive lineman came off the field during the second quarter, and was cheering the offensive on the sidelines,” the statement read. “He then collapsed.”
Mitchell was rushed to the hospital, but as it turns out, his cheers served as his last words. He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead.
And while one would instantly suspect heat stroke or something of the sort in the Deep South in late summer, the medical examiner determined that the cause-and-effect relationship was not so easily cut and dried.
“From what the coroner said last night, we do not know the cause of death,” the school statement said. ” What we do know is that is a tragedy and a tremendous loss for his family, our student body, and faculty and staff. It is heartbreaking!”
Mitchell’s friends told WHBQ-TV in Memphis that Mitchell sustained an injury early in the game that was sufficiently severe to have him throwing up on the field.
But showing his toughness and tenacity, he asked to be put back into the game.
It was after his return that he collapsed.
Meanwhile, Christa Linville, whose daughter was a friend of Mitchell’s from childhood, told WREG-TV a similar story.
“He got off the sidelines and he was sick,” Linville told WREG. “He was saying he didn’t feel good, but just the type of person that he is, he didn’t want to let his team down, so he continued to keep playing. And it just spiraled downhill from there.”
Linville said that Mitchell had dreams of someday playing in the NFL, and in the eyes of his community, it wasn’t a completely far-fetched idea.
“He would have gone far,” she said. “He was very good in school, he was very smart. No matter if he played football or didn’t play football, that boy was going places.”
There will be a celebration of Mitchell’s life at Byhalia High on Monday, where students and parents will meet on the football field to both memorialize the deceased and release balloons in his honor.
Meanwhile, county officials continue to try to pin down the exact cause of death.
And across the country, a national epidemic continues to rage, which can only leave people wondering just what it is in 2018 that’s causing so many football players to lose their lives when things were never this bad before.
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