As the track coach at Winston Churchill High in Potomac and a professor with the Discover the World of Communication program at American University, I’ve worked with thousands of promising high school students over the last decade. It’s not often I’ve had to say goodbye to one.
B.J. Giannone died Monday. He spent all day in class at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City, N.J., before going to a swim meet. After his second event, B.J. complained of dizziness or chest pain upon leaving the pool, according to reports. He collapsed and was pronounced dead at the hospital. B.J. was 18.
B.J.’s connection to the D.C. area, as far as I know, wasn’t more than tangential. He spent two weeks here last summer, more often than not in sunglasses and a polo, as part of the National Student Leadership Conference at AU and took a sportswriting and broadcasting class there. B.J. wasn’t in my section, but I took him on field trips to ESPN 980, Comcast SportsNet and Nationals Park. He met with local journalists such as Andy Pollin, Russ Thaler and Mark Zuckerman. B.J. wanted to go into sports broadcasting, and the standup we shot before the torrential rain at the Nationals-Royals game that day in June made it clear he had a talent for it. He was effervescent and quick with humor. He was someone you couldn’t help but listen to no matter what he had to say.
B.J. even seemed set on returning to the area for college. Once he learned he got in several months ago, he listed his current school as Virginia Tech, and many recent pictures show him in Hokies gear.
Other than his posts on Facebook, I hadn’t had contact with B.J. since June, but little else has been on my mind since the “R.I.P.” messages started popping up Monday evening.
In the running community in Montgomery County, we’ve suffered losses the past few years. Two years ago at my school, a freshman named Michael Yuen, a young man I barely had a chance to meet, died when an infection attacked his heart. Just last month, my friend Dan Reeks over at Sherwood said goodbye to one of his top athletes, Alex Popeck, after a car wreck.
I can tell you that as a coach, there’s no worse fear than one of my athletes collapsing at practice or in a competition. We are certified every two years in CPR and an automated external defibrillator, and I hope I never have to use either. Neither saved B.J.’s life, and I am going to guess we’ll learn he had the kind of heart defect that only gets noticed when a doctor is looking for it.
In an ideal world, we would require our student-athletes to have an electrocardiogram (EKG) and echocardiogram as part of their yearly physicals. It would save lives. A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last year said adding EKGs to physicals would cost each student-athlete $89 and would save two years of life per every 1,000 athletes. That simply supported an earlier study done in Italy, which showed the addition of an EKG reduced sudden cardiovascular death in athletes by 89 percent. Instead, we rely simply on family histories and a doctor taking blood pressure and a pulse, tests only 25 percent as effective. That’s not good enough.
So if you see me the next few weeks in a polo and sunglasses, you’ll understand why.
Scott Silverstein is a contributing writer for The Examiner. Reach him at [email protected].
