Bad call, coach: Del Oro football player’s heat stroke the result of school’s failure

Rico Petrini, the Del Oro High School football player who had to be taken to the hospital to be treated for heat stroke after he collapsed twice while practicing on the hottest day ever recorded in Sacramento, is without any exaggeration lucky to be alive.

“He’s an ox,” the junior linebacker’s dad told The Bee. But nobody, no matter what a beast they are, should be playing in 115-degree heat.

The fact that at least 50 high school football players have died of heat stroke during the last 25 years makes this lapse on the part of school officials in Loomis particularly egregious.

College players who’ve died for the same, completely preventable, reason include Jordan McNair, who collapsed during a University of Maryland workout in June of 2018 and Tyler Heintz, of Kent State, who died after drills the year before. In 2014, Morgan State University’s Marquese Meadow died of heat stroke after a “punishment practice.” In 2008, Chad Wiley died of heat stroke, too, after what North Carolina A&T officials were careful to call a “voluntary practice.”

Other high schools in our area have moved their practices to early mornings or evenings during this record-breaking heat, which did not, by the way, sneak up on us. As the climate continues to change, it’s even more important that we respond to extreme heat.

And how could Del Oro coaches have ignored the danger they were putting students in, even after the first time the 240-pound Petrini collapsed?

After his parents rushed to the hospital where he’d been taken, they found their son unconscious. A day later, said his father, who is also named Rico Petrini, “He’s foggy, but we think he’ll be OK.”

The elder Petrini played football too, for Oregon State, and said he has no “animosity” toward his son’s head football coach, Mike Maben. But then, animosity isn’t the point. “I’m concerned with all the things that went wrong,” the player’s father said. Of course his son plays hard, he added, but “there’s a collective burden of responsibility here.”

Not really: The burden of responsibility falls squarely on coaches and administrators. It’s their responsibility, and most important job, to keep students safe.

It cannot be on kids to know when to say, “Nah, coach, it’s too hot to play. Bye, guys.”

On Wednesday, the team did practice before school, but it shouldn’t have taken a visit to the hospital to get coaches to behave like adults.

Neither Maben nor the school principal, Kim Barry, answered emails from The Bee Editorial Board looking for comment, but let’s hope that’s because they were in a meeting figuring out how to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.