Who We Play For: The Movement to Screen Every Student Athlete for Cardiac Risk

Rafe had passed every sports physical. He showed no symptoms, no warning signs. Then, on a high school soccer field in Cocoa Beach, Florida, he collapsed and died of sudden cardiac arrest. For 80 percent of young people, cardiac arrest is the first symptom of an underlying heart condition—and without a defibrillator or CPR response within four minutes, survival is nearly impossible. That day, an AED wasn't accessible. EMS was delayed behind a locked gate. Only one teammate knew CPR.

The kids who grew up with Rafe didn't forget. When some of them arrived at Florida State University, they founded Who We Play For—an organization built on the belief that what happened to Rafe didn't have to keep happening. What followed was nearly 15 years of coalition-building alongside children's hospitals, parent advocacy groups, and state legislators to make ECG heart screenings a standard of care for student athletes in Florida.

Among those who felt the stakes most personally was a medical provider and father who had performed thousands of sports physicals over the course of his career. In 2016, he received a call that his daughter had collapsed at a gym. He arrived to find her on the ground. She survived—one of the rare cases where the right response came at the right moment. Standing in that hospital, he made a commitment to do something with that outcome.

His daughter later received the kind of heart screening that is now required under Florida's Second Chance Act, legislation that mandates ECG screenings for first-time student athletes in the state. The law also requires coaches to know CPR, mandates AEDs on athletic fields, and establishes emergency action plans for cardiac events at schools. It is the result of a collaboration that, by his account, stands on the shoulders of parents who spent decades pushing for these protections before Who We Play For ever existed.

For the teammates who watched Rafe die, the work has never felt optional. Thousands of families across the United States lose a child each year to heart conditions that are, in most cases, detectable. The hope driving this effort—the thing that keeps people in it—is the possibility of a generation of kids who get the chance to grow up.