Congressman Kweisi Mfume is exploring the expansion of legislation that would protect college athletes to include high school players in the wake of the death of a Maryland football player earlier this month.
Leslie Noble, a 16-year-old junior guard on Franklin Senior High’s varsity football team, died Aug. 14 after collapsing during a practice. First responders were called to the high school’s football field in Reisterstown, Maryland, for a suspected case of heatstroke.
Mfume, a Democrat representing Greater Baltimore, said this week he is considering the expansion of the Jordan McNair Student-Athlete Heat Fatality Prevention Act in light of Noble’s death. The bill, introduced in Congress in June 2023 but not yet passed, was named in honor of McNair, a University of Maryland football player who died of heat stroke following a practice in 2018.
As introduced by Mfume and U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin, also a Maryland Democrat, the legislation would require colleges and universities across the country to create emergency heat plans, detailing their planned use of automatic external defibrillators and cold-water immersion equipment. A spokesman for Mfume said the congressman is now exploring adding high school programs.
Mfume told The Baltimore Sun he grew up playing Little League baseball, an experience he said is ideally focused on respect, trust and sportsmanship.
“These early childhood memories playing sports should be some of our young people’s fondest moments, and yet, in tragic situations like these student athletes experience nothing but trauma as they mourn the loss of their teammate solely because they practiced on the field that day,” Mfume said via a spokesman. “My heart aches for Leslie Noble, his family, his friends, and his peers at schools all across Maryland.”
Maryland passed a separate law addressing college athletic safety in 2021, the Jordan McNair Safe and Fair Play Act, which went into effect in July. Athletic departments must create guidelines for preventing and treating brain injuries, heat-related illnesses and other conditions under the act. More than an hour passed between the time McNair first started exhibiting signs of heatstroke and when university officials called 911.
Other high-profile deaths in Maryland have prompted reform at the middle and high school level.
Baltimore City Public Schools agreed to hire a full-time athletic trainer at each of its high schools after the family of a 17-year-old football player sued the district. Elijah Gorham, a wide receiver for Mergenthaler Vocational Technical High School, was tackled and injured in an end zone during a fall 2021 football game against Paul Laurence Dunbar High School.
An athletic trainer was not present the day Gorham was injured. An on-site medic and city schools personnel treated Gorham for nearly 45 minutes before he was taken by ambulance to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center for surgery. He died in the hospital nearly a month later after suffering a traumatic brain injury.
As part of a settlement in the family’s lawsuit, Baltimore City must work with the fire department to ensure quick response times to athletic events and increase emergency training for coaches and student-athletes.
A law passed in 2022, the Elijah Gorham Act, requires all middle and high schools in Maryland to develop emergency action plans for their athletic venues, including for the use of defibrillators and cooling equipment for heatstroke.
A Baltimore County Public Schools spokesperson said an athletic trainer was at the football practice at Franklin High School when Noble collapsed.
Martin McNair, Jordan McNair’s father and founder of the Jordan McNair Foundation, said he thought the federal bill introduced by Mfume and Cardin had the potential to have a much greater impact if expanded to include high schools. Colleges have a lot more resources to implement safety measures than high schools, he said, and deaths among collegiate athletes have decreased as a result.
“These types of bills, the athlete fatality act, would be so much more impactful if we dropped it to the high school level as well,” he said. “Something like that in place always ensures a level of accountability and a level of safety.”
McNair said he hasn’t spoken to Mfume about the potential expansion yet, but he envisions some details would need to be worked out regarding penalties in the proposed act. As proposed, colleges and universities could lose funding if they are not compliant, he said. But McNair said he supports creating more accountability at all levels of student athletics.
“We’d really like to create that baseline standard across the nation,” he said.
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