BRANDON, Mississippi — When Ashanta Laster arrived at the hospital, she was immediately escorted to the emergency room, where she watched doctors perform CPR on her teenage son.
Laster got a call that 17-year-old Phillip Laster Jr., a lineman for one of Mississippi’s top high schools, had collapsed on the field during practice in August 2022. The family said the heat index on the football field at the time was 102 degrees (38.9 degrees Celsius).
“They kept compressing his chest to try and bring him back. He was just not responding. There was no heartbeat,” Laster said, recalling how she dropped her purse, called her husband and began praying.
“I called all my prayer warriors and said I’m going to bring my son back. I wanted my son back,” she continued. “It was just a moment of disbelief. I couldn’t believe my son was gone. I couldn’t believe it… I was in shock… My son died at football practice.”
Laster’s death highlights the dangers facing high school football players, mostly in the Southeast, who collapsed and died in the late summer before the season begins. The players are at highest risk for heatstroke because of the scorching temperatures and high humidity — conditions that have worsened in recent decades as climate change has led to 88% of the nation analyzed by Climate Central, a nonprofit science and research organization, experiencing more frequent extreme heat events since 1970.
At least 58 athletes have died from exercise-related heat stroke between 1992 and 2024, and thousands of athletes suffer from heat stroke each year, according to the Corey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut. This summer has been particularly bad, with five high school athletes having died of suspected heat stroke since July, including 14-year-old Semaj Wilkins, who collapsed during a high school practice in Alabama last month.
“We just want to know what really happened that day. What was he doing? What was the autopsy and the doctors’ position on what was going on and how did you feel? We just want answers,” Wilkins’ mother, Regina Adams, said.
One study found that high school football players are 11 times more likely to suffer from heat stroke than all other sports combined.
Experts believe football players are at greater risk because they wear heavy equipment that traps heat and are larger, dissipating more heat because of their size — offensive and defensive linemen, in particular, can weigh more than 300 pounds — and because they are not yet fully acclimated to training in summer conditions, play on artificial turf that can increase heat and may have underlying health conditions.
“Heat stroke is the most severe form of heat illness, the only life-threatening form, and we know it’s particularly prevalent among high school and college football players,” said Rebecca Stearns, the institute’s chief operating officer, adding that studies have found that football players account for 94 percent of heat stroke cases in sports over the past 40 years.
Another cause of these deaths is a football culture in which coaches have long drilled players into the idea of playing through pain and overcoming adversity.Things are changing, but many high schools still don’t have the equipment and procedures needed to reduce what experts say are heatstroke and prevent deaths.
“A lot of athletic programs don’t prepare for trauma, they don’t prepare for sudden cardiac arrest, or heat stroke during exercise,” said Laurie Giordano, who started a foundation to raise awareness of heat stroke after her son, Zack Martin, a Florida high school football player, died in 2017. The family agreed to a roughly $1 million settlement with the school district over his death.
“These things are happening more and more frequently, so we clearly need to be prepared,” she continued. “We need to know the signs and symptoms. We need to know what to do. We need to have emergency action plans and we need to train.”
Stearns said most states aren’t doing enough to protect kids, an issue exacerbated by the lack of federal heat protection measures for high school sports, which are sometimes set by state high school athletic associations or state and local governments.
Only a quarter of states have comprehensive heat acclimation policies that regulate rest periods, equipment phase-in and the number of training sessions per day, Stearns said, and only a quarter have policies that require the use of wet bulb sunspot temperature, considered the best way to measure heat stress because it includes ambient air temperature, humidity, direct sunlight and wind, to determine if it’s too hot to practice.
Fewer than a third of states require stadiums to have cold tubs, one of the best ways to treat athletes suffering from heatstroke.
Many school districts also lack athletic trainers, the people best equipped to spot and treat heatstroke and pull ill athletes off the field. About a third of high school athletes lack access to athletic training services, according to the latest data from the Athletic Training Locations and Services Project, a collaboration between the institute and the National Athletic Trainers Association.
Stearns said some states don’t have emergency action plans outlining steps staff should take if a player gets sick, and only 32 require them. Complicating safety measures are resources, with the poorest districts often unable to afford protective equipment or athletic trainers.
The best policies, including those in Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and New Hampshire, include heat acclimatization instruction, weather-based modifications, availability of cold tubs and protocols for treating heatstroke, such as cooling players before transporting them to the hospital.
Laster’s case highlights some of the fatal mistakes his family believes ultimately led to his death. Mississippi’s heat stroke prevention program at the time was inadequate in several ways, including not requiring emergency action plans or monitoring of wet bulb temperature.
According to a federal lawsuit filed in January against the Rankin County School District, the first practice was held during the hottest part of the day, giving the players no time to acclimate. They immediately plunged into an intense workout. When Laster began showing symptoms of heatstroke — dizziness, disorientation and nausea — coaches urged him to keep practicing until he vomited and passed out.
The school allegedly had no equipment or emergency response plan on the field to treat Luster’s symptoms and opted to place Luster in the back of a hot pickup truck that was “likely hotter than the surrounding area.” The lawsuit alleges that the school’s “grossly inadequate heat management” contributed to Luster’s death.
“When this kid collapsed on the field, everybody should have paid attention to him. Everybody should have gotten him hydrated and gotten him somewhere that could help,” said Luster’s father, Philip Luster Sr., who was on his way home from his job as an interstate truck driver when he got the news that his son had been hospitalized.
“But would putting him in the back of a pickup truck really help or hurt the process?” the boy’s father continued. “It just seemed like a couple of passive events to him, especially one that could and did take his life.”
The family is being represented by the law firm of prominent civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump.
District officials did not respond to questions about Laster’s death. In court filings, the district denied the allegations and said Laster’s “injuries were not the result of any of the defendants’ policies or practices,” without providing further details.
An autopsy determined that Luster collapsed from heatstroke but said the cause of death was irregular heartbeat caused by a genetic mutation — findings disputed by Luster’s family, who said their son had previously been healthy.
The story of another high school player who died, Remy Hidalgo, shows how bad things can get even when it’s not the hottest time of the year. In a lawsuit against multiple parties, including the Louisiana school board, lawyers for Hidalgo’s mother, Ashley Roberson, are accusing the board of responsibility for Hidalgo’s death from heat stroke on September 18, 2020. Hidalgo collapsed during practice and died a few days later at a New Orleans hospital from multiple organ failure caused by heat stroke.
The lawsuit says the district provided coaches and athletic trainers for practices but did not provide “all necessary medical equipment and gear” to conduct safe football practices and did not follow “rules and regulations regarding exposing students to unsafe environments.”
Roberson’s attorney, Jerome Morrow, said the district failed to identify potential risks to larger players like Hildago and failed to properly acclimate them because practices had been delayed for weeks because of the pandemic. Hildago collapsed the day after the team began practicing in full pads.
“Four years later, there’s still healing and dealing with the loss,” said Roberson, who has started a fund to donate cold tubs and other safety equipment to football programs. This year, she had no plans for how she would mark the anniversary of her son’s death.
A school district spokesman declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Hildago’s death followed a familiar pattern.
His death was followed immediately by an outpouring of support from the community, vigils at his high school and, ultimately, the passage of a new law aimed at improving school safety. The law, called the Remy Hidalgo Act, requires all high school sports to have emergency action plans. Georgia and Florida also enacted heat safety protocols in response to the deaths of celebrities, and a federal bill was enacted in the wake of the death of a college athlete in Maryland.
The Louisiana Heat policy was on display recently at practice for the Baton Rouge Catholic High School football team.
As temperatures reached the 90s, players crowded around hydration stations to sip water and cool down while athletic trainer Armand Daigle kept an eye on wet-bulb thermometers. Players could also stick their elbows in boxes of ice, and Daigle swabbed their necks with cold towels.
“As we get into July, August and September, the hottest months of the year, we have to make it as safe as possible for our players and set practice times and, if we’re going to practice, rest times to make sure they’re getting the amount of recovery they need,” Daigle said. “If it’s too hot, we have to say, let’s cut practice short that day. And all of our coaches are on board with that.”
About 12 miles (19 kilometers) away, at Baker High School in Baker City, coach James Dartes has fewer resources but the same approach to safety.
The district doesn’t have the money to hire an athletic trainer, so Mr. Dartes relies on a table full of water coolers to keep players cool. Since taking over as coach last year, Mr. Dartes said he has used wet-bulb thermometers, scheduled regular hydration breaks and, if a player “says they’re feeling sick or dizzy, we can just take them inside.”
“I love football and I know what football has done for me, but I love my kids more than this game,” Dartes said on a day when practice was postponed because of the lights. “I would never sacrifice the health and safety of my players.”
Baker’s players have taken the rising temperatures and the deaths of several football players seriously, with some saying they experienced symptoms of heatstroke during practice or saw others get dizzy or vomit.
Among them was defensive end Deantree Singleton, a junior who quit the team two years ago because “I couldn’t stand the heat,” returned last year after some teammates urged him to reconsider, but acknowledged the heat still stresses him out.
“I’m scared because if I don’t take care of my health, it could happen to me one day,” he said.
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