For the NJ football community, Damar Hamlin's collapse is 'worst nightmare'

EAST RUTHERFORD — Damar Hamlin’s on-field collapse during the Buffalo Bills' game Monday night dropped the New Jersey football world to its knees.

The Bills' second-year safety crumpled after making a tackle on Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins. After rising to his feet, Hamlin then collapsed to the turf. Trainers performed CPR and administered a defibrillator, and Hamlin was taken to an area hospital.

The Bills released a statement Tuesday morning saying Hamlin had gone into cardiac arrest.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Hamlin was listed in critical condition at University of Cincinnati Medical Center. The game between the two teams was halted, and the NFL said it would not be resumed this week.

Tuesday morning at MetLife Stadium, the Super Football Conference, a high school football league spanning the northern part of the state, was giving out its Young Man of the Year award. The crowd was large and chatty, but Hamlin was the main topic of conversation.

“I watched and I was scared to death,” Nutley High School athletic director Joe Piro said. “It was very, very scary. If you’re a player, coach, parent or athletic administrator, it’s your worst nightmare.”

New York Jets defensive tackle Solomon Thomas, who was on hand to present the Young Man of the Year award, said he wasn’t watching the game Monday night, but his phone lit up with notifications and he started to see what happened.

“You hear all these terms you never want to hear during a football game, like CPR and AED, and your heart just drops,” Thomas said. “Whenever you buckle that helmet, you never think it’s going to be your last play. You play like it, but you don’t think it’s going to happen. Your heart goes out to Damar and his family and the Bills organization, to every NFL brother out there. We’re all hurting for him.”

Reminders of a scary past

North Jersey has seen its share of similar scary moments on its playing fields.

In 2006, Wayne teenager Steve Domalewski was left with brain damage after getting hit with a line drive during a baseball game. In 2010, Garfield High School baseball catcher Thomas Adams died after taking a pitch in the chest. In 2014, an AED, or defibrillator, was used to revive Anthony Cortazzo, who was running track at Pascack Hills.

Janet’s Law, named for Janet Zilinski, a Warren 11-year-old who died in 2006 from an unknown heart defect while jogging, mandates that all New Jersey schools have defibrillators near the student population at all times.

“You have to have a certain number depending on the size of your school and the enrollment,” River Dell athletic director Denis Nelson explained. “We have them in the field house, in the gym, and in our golf carts, just to be on the safe side.”

School nurses and trainers are charged with making sure the equipment is in working order. Other building personnel is trained every two years in CPR and AED techniques in case of an emergency.

“This is one of those scenarios that keeps an athletic trainer up at night,” said Kevin Briles, the athletic trainer at Delsea High School in Franklinville and a past president of the Athletic Trainers Society of New Jersey. “There’s a graphic that has been circulating around that lists how many medical professionals are on site for an NFL game, and there’s 27 people on the field. At a secondary school, it’s a little different. You have five or six games going on at the same time and there’s usually only one athletic trainer.”

Did the NFL make the right decision?

Much of the focus Tuesday was on the decision made first to suspend the Bills-Bengals game, and then not to finish it. As trite as it sounds now, the game had major playoff implications in the AFC, but after Hamlin fell, no one felt like watching football, much less playing football.

“It was completely the right decision [to stop],” Thomas said. “At that point, you’re worried about a human being’s life and it's more than a game. It’s about a player. It’s about each other and doing the right thing, and playing the game was not important at all.”

In his football career, Thomas has never seen anything like what happened to Hamlin.

“I have seen some big hits, and there’s a 10-minute wait and you get scared, and they may have to put a player on a stretcher, but you never think it will happen,” Thomas said.

Every parent, coach and player hopes it doesn't happen, but it can.

“I am getting chills just talking about it,” Nelson said. “My initial reaction was because of the way the play happened that it might be an arrhythmia situation; thank God they had so many medically trained professionals there to avert a disaster.”

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ football: Damar Hamlin injury is a 'worst nightmare'