By Greg Stiles

A Beaverton High suffers a spinal injury that leaves him paralyzed.

Less than a week later, three underclassmen suffer head injuries — two of them life threatening.

Roughly 1.5 million high school and junior high youngsters play football. Even though statistics show the chance of death or catastrophic injury are slim — per 100,000 0.27 participants died in 1999 and 0.4 per 100,000 failed to fully recover from spinal injuries.

Still, there’s always the chance.

When a handful of youngsters were suddenly fighting for their lives, it got people’s attention.

Will Fitzgerald can easily relate when he reads about a quarterback being paralyzed or a youngster walking off the field and collapsing with a brain stem injury.

Fitzgerald suffered neither of those fates, but his own experience during Eagle Point’s season opener at Spiegelberg Stadium was scary.

Maybe even more so for his mom, coaches and teammates.

Fitzgerald, a 5-foot-10, 160-pound senior, was blocking on a kickoff return when he was leveled by a North Medford player.

He got up and headed to his bench, not sure what hit him.

"I just got hit, fell back and got up and went whoooah, he says. "My head started hurting real bad ... I couldn’t see anything if I looked up. I sat down on the bench. I was supposed to be in on a punt, but I missed it.

"Somebody asked what I was doing. I Just forgot all about it."

Fitzgerald thought he was ready to go back in, but then he started feeling light-headed and his legs went limp.

When his mom decided to take him to the hospital in the fourth quarter, he didn’t make it far. As they tried to exit through a tunnel on the eastside stands he couldn’t

Grace Fitzgerald knew something was amiss as her son ambled to the sideline.

"He went from shaking his head to holding his head in his hands to not even being able to hold up his head," Grace Fitzgerald said. "The main thing when you are watching them deteriorate is how far are they going to go?

"He kept rolling his eyes back and trying to pass out. There’s a kind of terror watching your kid ebbing away."

Paramedics arrived, put a brace on him and took Will Fitzgerald to Rogue Valley Medical Center, where he remained until 2:30 a.m. the next morning.

Teammates and friends dropped by during the course of the evening and coach Mike Johnston drove back from Eagle Point and stayed until Fitzgerald was discharged.

A CAT scan showed no damage, but it took several days for Fitzgerald to regain his concentration.

His mom didn’t want him on the field until he saw a neurologist. He sat out the next three games and hopes to see some action tonight against Grants Pass.

"You can get a concussion doing a lot of things," Grace Fitzgerald says. "They can fall off a skateboard or get in a car wreck."

Fitzgerald’s, wobbly hours proved less enduring than the plights of three Portland-area players — two of whose lives were dramatically changed and threatened late in September:

• On Sept. 23, Beaverton High’s junior quarterback Kris Tyacke was paralyzed from the shoulders down when he fractured the fourth vertebrae down from his neck and suffered a spinal cord injury when he landed at an odd angle in a game against Glencoe.
• The following Thursday, Sept. 28, Rex Putnam freshman Justin Goe walked off the field during a junior varsity game against Sunset with a headache, became incoherent and lost consciousness. He suffered a compressed brain stem.
• The same afternoon, Milwaukie’s Joshua Carlson had a similar complaint to Goe during a freshman football game against Gladstone. He became incoherent collapsed near the end of the game. He was treated for bruised spinal cord and released.

On that same day Klamath Union freshman Curtis Owens was blocking an Ashland freshman when he was spun around by his facemask. Owens temporarily lost feeling beneath his waist, but regained feeling at Merle West Medical Center and was released

"You know there are going to be risks," Fitzgerald says. "We know something might happen, but I like to play football. I felt really bad for the kid in Beaverton. It’s pretty terrible not being able to walk or nothing."

Knowing the risks is one thing, dealing with death or permanent paralysis is another.

Ali Motamedi, a sports orthopedist at Oregon Health Sciences University, puts the matter in perspective.

"If you look at the odds, the catastrophic injuries to the head and neck from football are about as common as a traffic accident," Motamedi told the Portland Oregonian. "So I would say to parents, if you’re going to let them drive, you could also let them play football."

Ashland’s Jim Nagel has seen neither death nor serious spinal injury in his 34 years coaching.

But that’s not to say there haven’t been heart-stopping moments.

In 1987, quarterback Andy Hauck smacked into a post holding up the chord that keeps spectators off the field at Spiegelberg Stadium.

"It was a combination head and neck injury and they really wanted to be cautious," Nagel says. "It probably looked worse than it was. They checked him out and nothing was wrong. I don’t even know if he had a concussion."

Last year, receiver Ryan Goodman, who has emerged as a star for the Grizzlies, was taken off the field in a stretcher because of a possible neck injury. Tests were negative and Goodman played a week later.

Running back Mac Contreras suffered a concussion in the season opener against Roseburg and missed the following week’s game against Marshfield.

Prior to moving to Ashland, Nagel coached at Amphitheater High in Tucson.

"A kid died the year before I got there on the practice field," Nagel recalls. "I was there when the coaches had to go through special inservice. People were brought in to talk about precautions and everybody wanted to know more.

"The problem was that the paramedics didn’t get the boy to the hospital on time. The coaches and the school were later exonerated."

Nagel says off-season weight training helps reduce the risk of such injuries.

"The second thing is to make sure the equipment is properly fitted and to do helmet checks," Nagel says. "We teach proper tackle techniques and don’t encourage leading with the head.

"Sometimes, everybody does the right thing, but the angle of the collision results in a bad thing."

St. Mary’s coach Dick Maurer played 10 years, without enduring a catastrophic injury, and has coached 10 more without seeing one.

But he and his fellow coaches start every season teaching youngsters the proper way to tackle.

"We go through tackling in slow motion," Maurer says," and slowly progress from hitting on-one-one to two-on-two. The main thing is to make sure you tuck your neck into your pads and see what you’re hitting and not duck your head."

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