Athlete May Have Died From Head Trauma

The father of a Frostburg State University football player said doctors had told him that his son died from “severe head trauma,” The New York Times reported Tuesday. While the NCAA and Ivy League have recently ramped up safety precautions to treat concussions properly or avoid them altogether, death by head trauma is extremely rare in college sports; it is most common among youth and high school football players. According to the University of North Carolina’s Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, from 1982 through 2010, 113 high school football players died from injuries that resulted in a brain or spinal cord injury or skull or spinal fracture -- while at the college level, nine died. The most recent death was in 2002-3. The Times report noted that “a different cause of death could be identified as facts of his case emerge.”