Kansas town mourns Luke Schemm, the eighth high school football death this season
High school athlete Luke Schemm was memorialized on Tuesday in his hometown of Sharon Springs, Kan., a town of about 800 residents south of Goodland.
So many friends, community members, even members of opposing football teams, packed the school gym that one TV reporter said it “seemed like all of western Kansas” came to say goodbye.
October was particularly grim. Four players lost their lives last month, two on the same day.
How they all died: broken neck, lacerated spleen, aneurysm, blunt force trauma, head injury.
In his small town, Luke played three sports and played both offense and defense in eight-man football for the Wallace County High Wildcats.
At a game on Nov. 3, after scoring back-to-back touchdowns, Luke was tackled as he reached the end zone for a two-point conversion in the third quarter. After the play he ran to the sidelines and collapsed. He was airlifted to a medical center in Denver, 200 miles away.
Luke suffered a traumatic brain injury, causing his brain to swell so much it couldn’t get blood flow, his father, David Schemm, wrote on Facebook.
The next day Luke’s parents announced on Facebook that “a beautiful gift from God” had been taken from them.
Their son would have been 18 on Dec. 2. He wanted to attend Kansas State University like his brother.
“Luke led a fuller life in just under 18 years than most people do in 80,” said the Rev. Rick Dewees, one of the speakers.
In late October, Mother Jones ran a story with a headline that read: “We Had No Idea This Many Kids Have Died Playing High School Football This Year.”
At that point in the season, six players had died. The magazine wrote about Cam’ron Matthews, a player for the Alto High Yellow Jackets in east Texas who spent some of the last moments of his young life under the Friday night lights.
During a huddle right before halftime on Oct. 16, the 6-foot junior — who was a wide receiver, quarterback and safety — told his teammates he felt dizzy.
Like Luke, he collapsed on the sidelines and was airlifted to the hospital.
Like Luke, Cam’ron died the next day. Authorities concluded he suffered an aneurysm.
A picture of Cam’ron in his black-and-gold uniform and photos of the aftermath of his death — praying classmates huddled with bent heads, students holding a poster with his picture — still dominate the school’s website where administrators broke the news of his death to the community.
It’s difficult to pin down exactly how many high school football players have died this season, with media accounts ranging from eight to 14.
Eleven would equal the number of high school football players who died last year, according to statistics kept by the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research in Chapel Hill, N.C.
The center monitors catastrophic injuries and illnesses suffered by collegiate, high school and youth participants of organized sports in the United States.
If Luke Schemm’s death is determined to be football-related it would be the third in Kansas in 17 years, according to officials with the Kansas State High School Activities Association.
That includes two high school football players from the Kansas City area who collapsed on the field and died in the past four years — Spring Hill senior Nathan Stiles in 2010 and Shawnee Mission West senior Andre Maloney in 2013.
Tyrell Cameron, who played for the Franklin Parish Patriots in Louisiana, was the first reported death this season.
Sixteen-year-old Tyrell collided with another player during a punt return in the fourth quarter of a game on Sept. 4 and reportedly broke his neck. Ambulance personnel rushed onto the field to help the sophomore middle linebacker. He died later at the hospital.
After he died the school’s football program posted his picture and this message to its Facebook page: “If you only know Tyrell Cameron in death, and didn’t know him in life, then you truly missed out on what is good in our country ... he loved his family, his team, and the game of football.”
Tyrell was injured in the first game of the team’s season.
Evan Murray, the quarterback and captain of the Warren Hills Blue Streaks in New Jersey, died in September, too.
He complained of feeling “woozy” after getting hit in the backfield during a game on Sept. 25. One of the hits he took was reportedly a helmet to the stomach.
The 17-year-old died later from what the medical examiner determined to be massive internal bleeding from a lacerated spleen. The examiner found that he had an abnormally enlarged spleen that was more susceptible to injury.
The statistics do not point to an epidemic of football deaths this year. But the deaths of two players on Oct. 5 alone might have made it feel that way for family and friends of teenagers Rod Williams and Kenney Bui.
When USA Today reported Rod’s death in Georgia in early October it wrote: “The 2015 high school football season has claimed another victim.”
The 5-foot-11-inch, 300-pound junior — an offensive lineman, No. 71 for the Burke County Bears — died two weeks after he collapsed during practice on Sept. 22.
Preexisting health issues contributed to Rod’s death.
“He had hypertensive heart disease and he went into pulmonary edema,” Burke County Coroner Susan Salemi told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “His heart failed and his lungs failed.”
Kenney, a 17-year-old wide receiver and defensive back for the Evergreen Wolverines near Seattle, took a hit to the head near the end of a game during what looked like a routine play.
He kept pointing to his head after the hit, and though his friends tried to get him to sit down he wanted to keep playing.
Then he was stumbling.
Then he fainted.
He died two days later.
Like Luke Schemm in Kansas, Kenney’s brain swelled up.
“He loved football,” said Kenney’s younger brother, Kirby, who was on the sidelines getting water for the team the night his brother died. “He thought of football as his second family. He thought of Evergreen as his second family. He loved it.”
In the hospital room next door to Kenney was another high-schooler who had broken his neck during his football game that same week. He got to go home.
The overall number of direct and indirect deaths from football have remained fairly stable since 1980, according to NCCSIR statistics. About a dozen high school and college football players die every year.
“Certainly this is not going to be one of the low years,” Robert Cantu, medical director for the NCCSIR and a professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, told CNN last month.
Yet the rate of deaths from head injuries has actually decreased since 1976, Carly Day, a sports medicine physician at the Cleveland Clinic and chairwoman of the public relations subcommittee for the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine, recently told MTV.
“I think cases are getting more national attention than they used to by conventional news outlets and there is also more grassroots exposure on social media to the emotional aspects of these cases … parents posting on Facebook from the hospital, etc.,” Day said.
As The Kansas City Star reported last year, the attention given to concussions in particular has never been more intense, prompting everyone from coaches and school districts to the general public to be sensitive and aware.
That spotlight shines bright this month with the premiere of the controversial Will Smith movie “Concussion,” which focuses on the NFL’s problem with head injuries.
Unease in recent years about head injuries suffered by high-school players in particular, and lack of participation, led schools in Missouri, Maine and New Jersey this year to either dump their programs or cut their seasons short.
At least four of the eight players who died this year suffered head injuries.
Ben Hamm, a junior linebacker for the Wesleyan Christian Mustangs in Oklahoma, died on Sept. 19, eight days after the game in which he suffered a head injury during a routine tackle.
“It wasn’t an unusual hit, wasn’t a bigger hit than anything else. In fact, there wasn’t much that stood out about it,” school superintendent Rocky Clark told the Tulsa World.
On Oct. 22, 17-year-old Andre Smith of the Bogan Bengals in Illinois died of blunt force head injuries after hitting his head on the last play of a game.
He walked off the field but later collapsed. The senior died the next day of what the county medical examiner called accidental blunt force injuries.
“Out of all the things people can live and die from, I never thought it would be something as simple as that,” Andre Smith’s brother, Erick Smith, told ABC7 in Chicago.
The day after Andre died his classmates and friends gathered at the football field for a memorial. They told reporters that jokester Andre loved ordering a six-piece meal at Harold’s Chicken Shack, thus earning the nickname “six-piece Dre.”
They laughed about their friend that night until they couldn’t hold back their tears anymore.
This story was originally published November 11, 2015 at 4:26 PM with the headline "Kansas town mourns Luke Schemm, the eighth high school football death this season."