ECLO football players get a crash-course in life-saving CPR treatment

Students from Eastern Lebanon County School District's football team met in the middle school gymnasium Tuesday for a crash course in delivering life-saving CPR.

The event was sparked after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest during a Monday night football game against the Cincinnati Bengals in early January and was administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the field.

"Well, I think in today's day and age you have to teach kids everything, and that means everything," said Tommy Mealy, athletics director for the district. "When the Monday night football game occurred last year, our football coach Bob Miller came down to our office and talked about it and we talked about the impact on football and everything that the game entails.

"This was just another factor that he brought up, wanting to teach it to the team, and it was just a matter of getting it together with the great EMT staff that we have."

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Stephen Zimmerman, who teaches the emergency medical technican program at ELCO, with the help of athletic trainer Adam Zurick and Dave Kirchner, founder of the EMT program, instructed the students in sets of 12 on CPR practice dummies, each group going through the process multiple times.

After finding someone on the ground, they should first check the scene to ensure safety, then immediately check for a response by tapping the shoulders. If they don't have a response, the next step was to call for help, either calling 911 or getting someone else to do so. After calling for help, they were instructed to check the patient's pulse and breathing for 10 seconds or less.

After assessing heartbeat and breathing, they were instructed to begin compressions on the dummy.

"Young athletes, young adults, anybody, anywhere, 'cause the first in there, the sooner you start, the better chance they have of living," Zimmerman said. "If you wait a little bit, you lose that heart. You've got to get there right away."

Zimmerman, used a metronome-like sound from his phone to get students into the proper compression rhythm, also telling them that the beat of the Bee Gees song "Stayin' Alive" also works.

The instructors checked the students' form for all steps, including how to properly check for a pulse and the depth and force of compressions.

Between practicing and rotating new students in and out, the instructors would add more nuance to the instruction, describing how hard compressions need to be and the protocol for providing CPR to a patient wearing football pads.

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At the end of the lesson, students competed in a knock-out-style game to see who could last the longest giving compressions to the dummy without it showing a red or yellow light, which indicate that a person isn't given compressions at a fast enough rate.

The team gathered around two of their members in the first game, cheering them on as they gave compressions for roughly five minutes.

After the students had finished their training, a certification course was offered to the entire athletic department that also taught how to use breathing apparatus and an automatic external defibrillator to shock the heart.

Mealy said that continued certifications classes would be taught every two years.

Daniel Larlham Jr. is a reporter for the Lebanon Daily News. Reach him at DLarlham@LDNews.com or on X, formerly twitter @djlarlham

This article originally appeared on Lebanon Daily News: Lebanon PA school's football players, athletics staff get CPR lessons