Tom Cutinella is third high school football player to die in past week

The death of a 16-year-old Shoreham-Wading River football player Wednesday night was the nation's third reported death among high school football players in less than a week.

Shoreham-Wading River junior Tom Cutinella died after collapsing on the field during a game against John Glenn High School.

A 17-year-old at Charles Henderson High School in Troy, Alabama, died Sunday after collapsing following a tackle during a Friday game, the Montgomery Advertiser reported, and a 17-year-old at Rolesville High School in North Carolina died Monday after collapsing during pregame warm-ups Friday, according to the Eastern Wake News.

There were two other football-related deaths in the area within the past month.

On Sunday, a 12-year-old football player in Salem, New Jersey, died after collapsing during tackling drills five days earlier, the South Jersey Times reported. And on Staten Island, a 16-year-old at Curtis High School died Sept. 1 after collapsing at practice earlier that day, according to the Staten Island Advance newspaper.

Eight players died participating in high school football last year, the most since 2001, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, which is based at the University of North Carolina.

No high school players died while competing in any other sport last year, according to Kristen Kucera, the center's director.

The most common cause of death among high school football players is brain injury, said Dr. Robert Cantu, the center's medical director and a leading concussion expert. He said the rate of death in high school football is greater than in college or the pros.

"The necks of high school athletes are not as strong as adults' and their brains are not as developed, so it's easier for the same degree of force to injure a high school athlete," Cantu said.

Cutinella's official cause of death has not been given, but police and school officials believe it's the result of a head injury.

Cutinella, a guard/linebacker, had been on the receiving end of "a big hit" before collapsing, according to Shoreham-Wading River coach Matt Millheiser.

Dr. Jamshid Ghajar, director of the Stanford Concussion Center, said any hit that forces a player's neck to bounce back and forth has the potential to cause a concussion.

"You don't need to be hit in the head, you can be hit in the chest," he said. "What happens is the neck whips the brain around."

Ghajar, who also is the president of The Brain Trauma Foundation, said high school football would be safer if players wore equipment that kept their necks stable during hits. The whiplash-like effect of a big hit in football is similar to injuries he's seen in car accident victims.

"The helmets do not prevent concussions," he said. "Until people start focusing on protective gear that addresses this rotational brain movement, we're going to see these deaths every year."

Kucera, the director of National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, said there have been eight reported deaths in high school football this year, but she said it's too soon to know how many of these deaths were directly caused by action on the field.

A player's chance of suffering serious injury or death from a concussion increases exponentially if the player has not yet healed from a previous concussion, according to Dr. Robert David Zimmerman, a neuroimaging expert at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Because each person's recovery time from a concussion is different, he said it's important that high school athletes always err on the side of caution.

The last report of a high school football player's death on Long Island was nearly 30 years ago. In October 1986, Billy Rideout, a 17-year-old Central Islip player, was involved in a huge pileup and walked off the field on his own before collapsing on the sideline. He died after three weeks in a coma.