Wes Leonard

On Friday while watching the news I heard a story about a high school basketball team from Fennville, Mi that seemed too horrific to be true.  They reported that Wes Leonard a junior at Fennville High School had collapsed and died just a few minutes after scoring the game winning lay up in overtime.  He went to shake his opponents hands and was about to take a picture with his team when he fell to the ground. He was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead a couple hours later.  This win gave them a 20-0 record for the first time ever in Fennville history.  He wasn't just an amazing basketball player, he also was a terrific quarterback.

I was shocked when I heard this and extremely curious to find out what caused this 16 year old to die unexpectedly and so quickly without warning.  The next day an autopsy report came back stating that he had gone into cardiac arrest from an undiagnosed enlarged heart.  I began to do research and found that there are rarely any symptoms at first, but you may begin to feel tired or out of breathe which is typical for anyone who just got done playing a two hour basketball game.  This makes it very hard to detect.  Only 1 in every 1000 high school athletes die from this each year. 

My next question was is there anything that we can do to prevent this from happening again?  I found that you can use something called an electrocardiograms that is used to pick up irregular heart rhythms.  The only problem is that they are very costly and not always the most accurate.  They don't always pick up all the defects within the heart.  Also, do we really want to be scaring our kids about a condition that is so uncommon? 

His visitation was held today and over 1,400 people attended.  Even 12 teams from within their conference showed up to pay their respects.  After a long weekend of mourning, the Flennville basketball team decided that they would still participate in the start of the playoffs on Monday in honor of Wes.  The game is going to be held at Hope College, because of the large expected attendance.