Hanover
Why is this happening? Will my life be the same? Will I ever play football again?
“That helicopter ride might have been the most frightening time in my life,” Schmidt said recently, his body streaming with sweat after a Dartmouth College practice on Memorial Field. “I don’t know how long it was, but it felt like a lifetime. There were all these thoughts coming to my mind, and I wanted to say them, but I couldn’t.”
Schmidt couldn’t say much of anything. The 17-year-old had suffered a stroke, and with it damage that caused speech aphasia. The condition meant that when Schmidt arose around 5 a.m. that morning and encountered his mother in the hallway of their Pennsylvania home, some of his words came out garbled.
“I found him standing there and asked what he was doing,” Suzette Schmidt said. “He said he was going to take a shower, but the last three words weren’t words. I don’t even know how to describe them.”
Suzette Schmidt initially thought something was wrong with her and asked Alex to repeat himself. When that response came back in similar fashion, she forced down a sense of panic and sent her boy off to the bathroom. Then she woke up her older son and relayed her fears. Not long after, she looked into Alex’s room and found him unable to dress himself. She gently told him they were going to the hospital in nearby Doylestown.
“As a parent, you realize you have to keep it together,” said Suzette Schmidt, who was joined that night by her husband, Eric, who had been working in Denver. “I think Alex was confused, because he was starting to realize that his words weren’t coming out the right way.”
Schmidt was able to begin playing organized football at age 4, so deep is the passion in Bucks County for the game. His hometown of Perkasie, population 8,500 and roughly 35 miles north of Philadelphia, also produced former Dartmouth football star and 1970s Big Green coach Jake Crouthamel, who later became Syracuse University’s athletic director.
From the very beginning, Alex seized upon the sport and, at the time of his stroke, had received an offer to play for the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. Other college programs were also sniffing around a youngster who’s now listed at 6-foot-3 and 280 pounds and lines up at defensive tackle. The day of the stroke, he had set his alarm early because he was excited for the start of Penridge High’s spring practice.
Instead of footwork drills and defensive formations, however, Schmidt found his helicopter landing at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was rushed inside for a lengthy string of tests. The stroke diagnosis had been suggested in Doylestown, but now specialists worked to confirm it and tried to discover why an otherwise-healthy teenager couldn’t coherently speak.
Alex’s flight had lasted only 12 minutes, but his mother and brother’s drive to CHOP was a 90-minute ordeal in rush-hour traffic. They hadn’t been directly told of the suspected diagnosis but had inferred enough to ponder the possibilities.
“I was trying to convince myself that it couldn’t have really happened,” said Suzette, who authorized several tests on her son by phone while still on the road. “How does a 17-year-old wake up with a stroke?”
To this day, no one knows.
“That annoys me a lot,” said Schmidt, who was tall enough that his feet hung off the beds at CHOP. “I’m fine now, but it’s always in the back of my mind. I want an answer to what happened.”
Schmidt stayed in Philadelphia for three days and, upon being released, was given a clean bill of health, with the exception of his speech difficulties. He was allowed to drive a car and do virtually everything else — except play contact sports.
“The doctor said she wouldn’t clear him for at least a year,” said Suzette Schmidt. “She said his chance of having another stroke was only 5 percent, but she thought having a concussion might slow down his speech recovery. Understandably, Alex was very upset with her.”
Visits to other doctors followed, but none would sign off on the resumption of Schmidt’s football career. College recruiting, which kicks into high gear the summer before a prospect’s senior year, had to be put on hold. Schmidt endured speech therapy 2-3 times per week and was given vocal exercises to practice at home, but he found the practice tiresome despite making clear improvement.
“It was amazing how quickly his speech came back,” Suzette Schmidt said. “But he didn’t want to go to (a CHOP satellite office) and sit on chairs made for children and say words to a beat.”
The Schmidts eventually found Jeffrey Kutcher, a Brighton, Mich.-based sports neurologist who had worked with the University of Michigan’s football team and treated athletes who had suffered strokes. Alex endured another battery of tests, but on the nine-hour drive back home, his mother spoke up.
“I said, ‘This is it,’ ” Suzette recalled. “If this doctor says no, we’re not going to go try and find another doctor who says yes.”
Two weeks passed. Penridge’s first game approached, and Schmidt practiced without contact and was voted a team captain. Two days before the season’s kickoff, a call came from Michigan. He was cleared to play.
“One of the best feelings of my life,” said Schmidt, who has a tattoo on the inside of his upper left arm featuring a ribbon and the date of his stroke. “I wasn’t willing to give this sport up because of one thing that happened.”
But how, Suzette Schmidt is asked, can she work around that one thing? Even if the risk is relatively low, allowing your son to resume knocking heads on virtually every play isn’t something many parents could do.
“Plenty of people will ask why we’re allowing him to play football, but it’s always been Alex’s passion,” said his mother, a school board member and medical clerical worker. “My son survived a stroke, and I’m not willing to sit there and worry about it.”
Suzette believes Alex’s drive to return to the field played a large part in his recovery, which was almost totally complete after four months. She believes her family sought out the best possible medical opinion and wasn’t willing to deny her son his passion.
“He said that when he went out there for that first play of his first game back, it was the first time he’d felt normal in three months,” she said.
Schmidt, who did a postgraduate year at New Jersey’s prestigious Peddie School, turned down offers from Brown, Columbia and New Hampshire, but he hasn’t played this season for Dartmouth, which hosts Sacred Heart (3-2) tonight. The Big Green (4-0) features a formidable defensive line, so Schmidt’s release has to be going all out on the scout team, a reserve unit that runs an upcoming opponent’s formations and plays.
“He lets the (offensive) first-stringers know he’s coming for them every play,” senior defensive end Rocco Di Leo said. “He doesn’t let up at any time, and he’s definitely made to play inside, with the banging around and contact.”
No doubt about it — Schmidt is a violent player. Whomever he’s facing usually receives a crack in the head and a blow to the chest, backed up by the drive of a bulldozer and various rips and pulls with his gloved hands. Dartmouth’s prohibition on tackling players to the ground during practice and the need to wait his turn for games are frustrations he must endure.
Defensive line coach Duane Brooks, who tends to his players’ emotional well-being as much as their football skills, admires Schmidt’s roughneck style and had him share the story of his stroke with his position mates. Some of them cried while listening, Brooks said.
“He’s as physical as anyone, and that’s going to be how he leaves his mark,” the coach said. “He has that funny, ducky walk where he waddles a little, but he can run. You look at him and think there’s no way he can play. But when they snap the ball, he can play.”
Said Di Leo: “It’s tough as a freshman to realize you’re not as good as you need to be, but he’s a bruiser, and we need that.”
Schmidt is also more than willing to discuss his travails. His words still sometimes lag a split-second behind his thoughts, which explains his occasional pauses and slight stutters. Brooks said his charge uses self-deprecating humor to diffuse any awkwardness, however, and is grudgingly admired for the tempo at which he plays.
“I always feel like I have something to prove,” Schmidt said. “Maybe the older players get annoyed at times, but I’m trying to make myself better and them better.”
So what happens when Schmidt improves enough to play in games? To crash headfirst as many as 30 times a game into opponents weighing more than 300 pounds? He’ll be carefully watched, and many doing so will hold their breaths at times. Even Schmidt himself.
“I try not to think about it, but it’s always there,” he said of the chance of further brain injury. “I can’t let that go, but it can’t be my main focus.
“I’m not going to let that small chance stop me from doing what I love with my friends and fulfilling my goals.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.