From Meyers to Parkland to Penn: Exposing big risk in high school football

Start from many points in our region. A Wilkes-Barre family of die-hard Meyers gridiron Mohawks spawning Parkland High’s championship coach. A seventh-grade quarterback in an Allentown suburb trekking to Berwick for one of those fabled Curry Quarterback Camps. A local resident born into Steelers football fandom glomming onto the tragedy of a Parkland High School alum before settling in the Back Mountain, haunted by a death that reshaped her view of football among the young.

Start anywhere, but all those people come together in local author Vicki Mayk’s first book, “Growing up on the Gridiron.” They are threads woven into a somber warning of how hard-hitting high school football — cherished in this region as much as anywhere — may cause undetected yet permanent brain injury before a player earns his college degree.

The forge bonding those disparate lives: The suicide of Owen Thomas at age 21, and the discovery he suffered “chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” or CTE, at an age when football stars seem too young to have “chronic” anything.

Hitting hard

“I lived for close to 30 years in the community where Owen Thomas grew up in Lehigh Valley,” Mayk recounted of how she came to write about Thomas’ give-it-your- all style on the football field, and his suicide at the age of 21. “I occasionally attended the church where his father was minister. I never met Owen, but when he died in 2010 I was invited to join a Facebook memorial page, and in becoming a member I was really struck by the things people were writing about him.

“For someone so young, he seemed to have a profound impact on everybody who knew him: teachers, teammates, people he just met at the gym.

Mayk moved out of the Lehigh Valley to work at Wilkes University, where she retired Aug. 31. But Owen’s tragedy stayed with her despite the distance.

“This story haunted me.” So much so that a decade after Owen died, she still speaks of it as a fresh memory.

“Four or five months after his death, when they found his brain had CTE, I realized there definitely were other elements to it.”

So she started researching. She asked permission from Owen’s father, Tom — who had a compelling story of his own reluctant career in college football that included a separated shoulder one time and a hit that knocked off his helmet and caused double vision from a broken orbit in his eye socket. Tom didn’t just green light the project. He offered Mayk a list of people to contact.

Mayk opens Owen’s story with a moment that exemplifies his approach to the game, and life.

The Parkland High School stadium in Orefield is crowded with the kind of energized fans you find at many games here and across the nation every Friday night. Owen’s Parkland Trojans face Easton High School’s Red Rovers in the PIAA District II finals.

The Parkland Coach: Jim Morgans, a Wilkes-Barre native whose father worked for the Central Railroad of New Jersey (the company train station still struggles toward preservation downtown) and had played football at Meyers High School. When his father’s job took the family to the Lehigh Valley, Jim Morgans started playing football there, ultimately coaching it.

At a moment when the Red Rovers march toward a third unanswered touchdown, Owen almost single handedly changes the momentum with “a bone crunching hit that seems to come out of nowhere,” Mayk wrote.

“That hit,” Owen’s teammate Jamie Pagliaro recalled in an interview, “You could probably feel it all the way up to the top of the stands.”

Devout football fans know the feeling. A play so forceful it can evoke equal parts thrill and cringe, satisfying a zeal in many to see your team dominate the field, yet prompting in others a grim concern about the health and safety of players. Ultimately, it is risk from those kinds of hits the book is about: The unseen — and until Owen”s death undetected — impact on young gray matter.

Yet while the book begins with this moment, Mayk makes it clear this is neither gridiron tragedy nor football glory story.

Owen’s brain

In piecing Owen’s life — and death — together, Mayk’s narrative does not skimp on useful details. She writes of his parents Tom and Kathy meeting in Zambia, both on separate missions to help the poor there, when malaria puts Tom into a delirious fever forcing him to stay at Kathy’s house. Hardly a rom-com “meet cute,” yet romance blooms. Their wedding includes brightly colored clothes in the native style, warm Coca-Cola from lack of ice, and one nuptial gift of a hen.

They return to the states to initially settle in Lancaster, where academician Kathy decides to become a minister like her new husband, putting their fate partly into the hands of church leaders. They adopt two sons and have two more, Owen the second.

A physically unremarkable child, Owen came to love the tough physicality of football, developing into a teenager who rallied others around his determination and full-throttle approach to the game. One of those teammates from early on was Marc “Quill” Quilling (Owen created nicknames that stuck), a quarterback in grade seven when he attended one of legendary Berwick coach George Curry’s camps.

They grew so close, Mayk wrote, that months before Owen’s suicide, “Quill” had recorded video of his buddy — then a football player at the University of Pennsylvania, partying in State College for the annual (Penn) State Patty’s Day celebration. (Owen had friends in Happy Valley).

“A very drunk Owen had landed in the emergency room — one of 103 State Patty’s Day revelers who would end up there that day,” Mayk wrote, “after falling and hitting his head on the edge of a table.”

A routine weekend binge by a hard-working, hard-hitting, high-achieving football star who went from Parkland to the prestigious Wharton School of Business at Penn? Easy to buy, though not for all. Mayk notes longtime friends who saw the saga on Facebook expressed disbelief.

“That’s not Owen,” one reacted.

A more accurate observation probably would have been “that’s not the Owen of old.” But there was already evidence inside his cranium that could explain the new Owen. The problem: He had to die before anyone would know.

When he did kill himself months later, the secret still would have been buried with him had his parents not received likely the most unusual phone call grieving parents could ever expect.

Mayk wrote:

There would be an autopsy. It would be a few days before Owen’s body would be brought home for burial. Tom and Kathy headed back to the Lehigh Valley. In the years that followed, the exact sequence of events on one of the worst days of their life would blur a bit. Kathy no longer remembers whether she received the call in the car en route to Allentown or back home on Jonagold Road. But she remembers what the caller—a young man named Chris Nowinski—would ask her within hours of learning her youngest child had killed himself.

“Mrs. Thomas,” he would say. “Can we have Owen’s brain?”

They said yes.

Birth of a diagnosis

Nowinski and other key people in the fate of Owen’s brain are introduced in Mayk’s prologue before the description of the big Parkland district title game.

Nowinski worked at Boston University’s CTE Center, where Dr. Ann McKee did the initial analysis of Owen’s brain. She was also the leading authority on CTE. Mayk describes the condition:

CTE is… a progressive degenerative brain disease caused by repeated brain trauma. The trauma can be in the form of powerful blows to the head that cause concussions. It also can come from other jarring blows that cause the brain to rattle within the skull like an amusement park bumper car. Such blows are sustained by soldiers exposed to bomb blasts in combat and by football players, soccer players, hockey players, boxers. Researchers assessing traumatic brain injury in sports call this second category of trauma subconcussive hits. While such hits are not powerful enough to cause a full-blown concussion, in 2010 researchers began to realize that they were enough to do the damage that can lead to CTE.

The condition is characterized by a buildup in the brain of tau protein resulting from tiny parts of the brain coming apart from repeated jarring of the head. In other words, the connections that make the brain work slowly break down. Until McKee examined Owen’s brain, CTE had been found only in people much older, who usually had spent many years in professional sports such as football or boxing.

“That case, I’ll never forget it.” McKee told Mayk. “That was life changing.”

Mayk’s research showed there had been a lot written about CTE, “but the physical condition had deteriorated much more dramatically in Owen’s case.”

The book outlines the sluggish change in attitudes of professional and scholastic sports leaders regarding the risk of brain injury, despite decades of evidence that the risk is real. The specific danger of CTE, first identified and publicly named in a 2005 article, has faced a similar struggle in being taken seriously.

That, Mayk said, was one reason she felt a need to write the book.

Changing minds

While CTE did not kill Owen Thomas, it likely contributed to his change from fearless, outgoing Parkland Trojan who saw no limits to Penn junior athlete struggling with loneliness, depression and impulsivity his second year.

The suicide alone made the story worth telling, Mayk said, and she hopes the story helps raise awareness of how important it is to take action when you suspect someone struggles with life itself. But CTE is clearly the topic the book seeks to highlight.

Yet Mayk found people familiar with Owen’s fate, who know the risks youngsters subject their brains to in high school football, pushing CTE concerns aside. Even when she interviewed Owen’s friends, who dealt directly with his loss, “I thought it would have changed the way they felt about football, but I learned it didn’t.”

“When you have a subject this big — and it is big — and the research is evolving all the time, I just hope I’m adding to the conversation.”

A fitting coda

Mayk ends the book with the death of Owen’s father Tom, from lung cancer. She visited in the hospital to read the finished manuscript to him. She went to a viewing of his remains to pay condolences.

Kathy stood in a dark dress near her husband’s ashes, her long hair pulled back. Her son Morgan was nearby with his wife, Brittany. Kathy gestured toward Tom’s remains. “‘Whoever thought it would end like this?” she said. “What an epilogue.” She turned to me, her deep blue eyes steady.

“You know, we harvested Tom’s brain to send to Boston.”