[Kartje] It was just last July that Vince Iwuchukwu, then a five-star freshman, suffered cardiac arrest on the court and was saved by USC trainers. Horrifying to think this happened to one basketball team twice in the span of one year.
by sewsgup
@National Basketball Association
26 Comments
Was it ever determined what caused his?
Dear goodness….. I just hope Bronny is ok along with Vince. Sports asides all that matters is that they can live productive and functional lives
What kind of cursed site did they build Galen Center over?
Then, midway through that July workout, Iwuchukwu came down with a rebound and something didn’t look right to Eric Mobley. The assistant coach watched closely as Iwuchukwu ran down the court in transition. He saw something in the freshman’s eyes that worried him. When the team broke for water, Mobley shared his concerns with Enfield, who went to check on Iwuchukwu.
As he sat down, Iwuchukwu grew progressively dizzier. Soon, his head was spinning. “Is everything OK?” Enfield recalled asking. But there wasn’t enough time for either to understand what was happening.
A few seconds later, everything went dark.
Mobley was one of the first to reach Iwuchukwu as he faded from consciousness. When Iwuchukwu first started to shake, Mobley and Enfield wondered if he was just kidding around. But as the convulsions continued, the 7-footer slumped in his chair, spilling his water. He lost all motor function. Mobley ran across the court as fast as he could.
“Just looking at his eyes, they were rolling back in his head,” Mobley said. “And I was like, ‘Oh shoot, this is something serious.’”
Mobley had witnessed an unsettlingly similar incident decades before as a senior captain at Portland. He was matched up against Hank Gathers in March 1990 when the Loyola Marymount star suffered cardiac arrest during a West Coast Conference tournament game. Gathers was rushed to the hospital but didn’t survive. An autopsy later revealed he suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
As Mobley laid Iwuchukwu down on the Galen Center sideline more than 30 years later, he couldn’t help but think of that moment and of Gathers.
“Things were happening so fast,” Mobley said. “I was just yelling at him and shaking him and slapping him in the face, like, ‘Stay with the light!’ You could tell he was fighting. You could tell he could hear me, but it was like he couldn’t do anything.”
The rest of USC’s staff flew into action. Enfield and a graduate manager ran to retrieve the automated external defibrillator (AED) from the tunnel outside the locker room. Kurt Karis, USC’s director of scouting, rushed to find Jon Yonamine, the team’s lead athletic trainer, who had walked out during the water break. Strength and conditioning coach Kurtis Shultz called 911.
The rest of USC’s players were sent to the locker room, where a few worrying minutes of waiting felt like an eternity. They tried to keep calm, stay positive. Some prayed. Later, Robby Rhodes, a sports psychologist with USC athletics, spoke with the team to help process emotional trauma from the incident.
“It was just a lot of suspense, like something horrible might happen,” forward Josh Morgan said. “We were all just hoping and praying.”
Three USC trainers — Yonamine, Erin Tillman and Lauren Crawford — all converged around Iwuchukwu within 45 seconds of his collapse, Enfield estimates. Time, in that moment, was precious. Yonamine unwrapped the AED, while Tillman, the women’s basketball trainer, and Crawford, the women’s volleyball trainer, administered CPR. They attached the pads from the AED to Iwuchukwu’s chest. The device measured his heart‘s rhythm and determined a shock was needed.
As the trainers worked to save Iwuchukwu’s life, Mobley tried desperately to wake him. His message somehow got through to Iwuchukwu, who describes feeling like he was in “a deep slumber, like in the void.”
“I just kept following that voice,” Iwuchukwu said. “He was saying, ‘Vince, come back! Come back! Come back!’ Then I heard, ‘Vince, don’t die on me!’ And I was like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’”
The thought of being in grave danger hadn’t dawned on him until that moment: “I was like, ‘I gotta wake up now,’” Iwuchukwu recalled.
Vincent was 7’1 though. Bronny is only 6’3
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I have a very dumb question but does the environment/heat/air quality of LA maybe have a role in this?
What are they giving their students?
is there something USC is doing wrong, maybe need better temperature control or something
probably not, could be worth investigating though
Safe and effective
Happened to my buddy Jarvis Johnson in MN. 4x state champion guard set to start at the U and didn’t end up playing a single game
I wonder what could possibly be the correlation between these two incidents? Was it something they ate?
Whats crazy is that Eric Mobley has now seen this happen 3 times. Hank Gathers, Vince last year, and now Bronny. Scary stuff
Is stuff like this happening a lot more now or is that just conjecture?
WTF is in the water?
USC pumping their players full of roids and giving them heart failure or something?
Maybe it’s karma for Bronny
Maybe it’s something they are doing?
Covid shot running wild
probably that usc cocaine
My heart dropped.
A parents worst nightmare.
Thankful for their recoveries
If you can’t do it in a hospital, an athletic event is the best place to have cardiac arrest. If Bronny has this happen to him in a shopping mall we might be reading worse news. Great job by the staff.
Elon came out on twitter saying it might have something to do with covid vaccine causing myocarditis
But apparently twitter has since removed his comment due to fact-check
Does this seem to be happening more often? Is it to do with the workload these young kids are putting themselves through to make it or something?
I’m in Australia, and we have basketball teams here, but it’s a case of training 2-3x a week and one game at the high school level. And that’s a busy school team. If you want to succeed, you have to go to a WABL team that’s got nothing to do with the school. Kids are training 4 times a week and playing one game a weekend there.
It seems that from 12/13, American kids are put into school teams where they train every single day. On top of that, they’re usually doing their own work in the mornings before school, etc. Then, when the season is done, they find other tournaments to try to continue improving. You hardly ever hear about anyone stopping or slowing down until their nba career is done.
Does this play a part in all of these cardiac arrests? Because it seems like it’s becoming a more commen occurrence and it seems to be hitting the high level high school/college athletes a lot more.
Anybody have any other thoughts on it?
Makes you wonder if its a coincidence.
Something is definitely wrong. Many cases like this happening, maybe they are over training them. Pushing them too far