SPOKANE, Wash. — Every coach will tell you that sports are a fun way to compete and get active, but safety is their number one priority.
With Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin suffering a sudden cardiac arrest in front of a national audience, one local high school athletic trainer says that it's important for athletes to listen to their bodies.
Chris Hawley, a Gonzaga Prep Athletic Trainer, says, "High school student participating in athletics should be aware of the body and how things usually feel and when something doesn't feel normal. Those things can be shortness of breath, fast heart rate."
Hawley says that Gonzaga Prep High School has an emergency action plan they put into place before every sports event.
They make emergency services aware that there's a sporting event and have two athletic trainers on site.
"At some point during the game if a catastrophic event would have occurred, we would start that emergency action plan and that would include if we would have to use an AED. Or, if we have to remove a facemask, we have those tools," says Hawley.
James Akramoff has been an EMT for over 20 years.
He says that he responds to a cardiac arrest on a sports field about twice a year and in most of those cases, the athlete was completely fine before suffering the attack.
"Especially with a bystander because through the year, we just made it less complicated and less thinking. The important thing is to just start compressions, just doing something is better than doing nothing," said Akramoff.
Akramoff says that every minute someone suffering a cardiac arrest doesn't get CPR their chance of survival goes down by 1%.
He says it's also important to stay calm when performing CPR.
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