Nobody Was Responsible

In 1990, my middle brother Bill died at work.

It was our family’s business, four generations of the same work, the same site, the same tasks. That day, it was only Bill and my father on the job. Bill collapsed into a well pit, six feet deep, overcome by fumes. He was pinned between the wall of the pit and the pressure tank. My father could not get him out. There was no retrieval equipment. No respiratory protection. No training on confined space hazards, not for Bill, not for my father, not for anyone in our family across four generations of doing that exact job.

Nobody told us what we were breathing. Nobody told us what to do if someone went down. Nobody told us how to get them out.

OSHA existed. The regulatory framework designed to protect workers in exactly that kind of situation existed. But what did not exist, on that job site, in our family’s business, was a designated, trained person whose defined role was to say: this space is hazardous, here is the equipment you need before anyone goes near it, and here is what we do if someone went down. The rules were there. The responsibility was not assigned to anyone. No one was named.

The OSHA confined space standard that could have saved Bill’s life did not go into effect until 1993. Three years after Bill died. That rule would have required a designated competent person, atmospheric testing, retrieval equipment, and a written permit before anyone entered that pit. None of that existed in 1990. That is how safety standards are born in this country. Not from anticipation. From catastrophe. Every warning sign posted in a workplace, every protocol binder on a coach’s shelf, every law with a child’s name attached to it. Somewhere behind it is a name. Someone who didn’t make it home. That is what it takes to make a rule exist.

Bill was 26 years old. If I had not chosen the path of athletic safety, working as a student athletic trainer, I would have been in that pit with him that day. Instead, I was the one who received the call.

When it was over, the answer was what it always is in these situations: nobody was responsible. There was no credential. No designated person. No authority whose job it was to know the danger and prevent it.

I spent the decades after that loss in athletic equipment rooms, on sidelines, in coach education, and in curriculum development. And everywhere I looked, I found the same structural failure that killed my brother, wearing a different set of uniforms.

Youth athletic safety law in this country has grown substantially. Concussion protocols. Heat illness prevention. Sudden cardiac arrest awareness. More than two dozen states have passed legislation naming these exact risks and requiring programs to address them. The laws are real. The liability for non-compliance is real. The intention behind them is not in question.

What the laws don’t do, in almost every state I have examined, is name who is responsible. Not by credential. Not by defined scope of authority. Not by any standard that holds when a coach is standing on a field and a kid goes down.

What that means in practice is that the person responsible for athlete safety is whoever is standing closest when something goes wrong. A coach. A volunteer. A parent on the sideline. Someone with good intentions and no defined authority, no credential, and no trained protocol attached to their name.

That is not a safety system. That is luck.

When I understood the shape of the problem, the first place I started was coaches. Because in most programs, the coach is the person. They are the one on the field. They are the one who has to make the call.

The problem is not that coaches don’t care. The problem is that the training most coaches receive is generic, not mapped to what their state law actually requires. An Ohio coach is operating under different statutory obligations than a Virginia coach or a California coach. A coach who completes a general concussion awareness module may have received useful information, but they have not been trained to their specific legal compliance standard.

That gap produced the Sports Safety Essentials (SSE) compliance curriculum.

The SSE is not a general safety course. It is built statute by statute, citation by citation, state by state. Ohio coaches get training mapped to Lindsay’s Law. California coaches get training mapped to eight separate statutes, including AB 2007, AB 2800, and the Nevaeh Act. Virginia coaches get training mapped to the VHSL concussion protocol. Every module is built from the actual law, not a summary of it, not an interpretation of it. The law itself.

Ten state programs are complete and deployable today: Ohio, California, Virginia, Florida, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. The architecture is modular. When a new state is ready, the framework is already built, statute in, compliant curriculum out.

The SSE answered one question: how do we get coaches trained to their state compliance standard? But trained coaches are not the same as designated safety officers.

There is a difference between a coach who knows the concussion protocol and a person whose defined role is to execute that protocol, with authority, with accountability, with a credential that says this is the person responsible when something goes wrong on this field. I watched that distinction matter. I built a curriculum to close it.

That produced the Youth Safety Officer (YSO) credential.

The YSO is designed for the person on the field. The coach who takes on the safety role. The volunteer coordinator. The designated staff member in a program that will never have an athletic trainer on staff. The YSO curriculum is built around the three conditions that actually kill young athletes: concussion and traumatic brain injury, sudden cardiac arrest, and exertional heat stroke. Not general awareness, protocol-level, field-level, decision-ready training.

The YSO is not a CPR card with a better name. It is a defined role, with scope and authority attached. A program that trains a YSO has given someone a specific job when something goes wrong, not just a course completion certificate. And a YSO who later pursues the DAS isn’t starting over. The ground is already broken.

Above the field is the program. At the top of the framework sits the Director of Athletic Safety credential.

The Director of Athletic Safety (DAS) is the institutional tier of the framework. Where the YSO is built for the field, the DAS is built for the person who runs the system, the equipment manager, the athletic coordinator, the program director who is accountable for emergency action planning, compliance documentation, hazard identification, and safety leadership across the entire organization.

The DAS is a five-course professional credential built to NCCA accreditation standards and pursuing independent accreditation. It covers risk management and OSHA compliance, anatomy and physiology for non-clinical safety professionals, kinesiology and biomechanics, root cause and hazard analysis, and safety leadership and institutional change. This is not a training module. It is a professional credential built to hold up under independent third-party review, the same accreditation standard that governs the credential for athletic trainers themselves.

What the DAS does at the program level is what the YSO does at the field level: it answers the question. Who is responsible? This person. What are they credentialed to do? This. That answer, clear, documented, credentialed, is what does not exist in most youth athletic programs in this country right now. The DAS is that answer.

Together, they form the first complete answer to the structural failure I have been watching for thirty years, the same failure that killed my brother, wearing a different set of uniforms.

None of these credentials replaces a certified athletic trainer. That is not what they are for. They are for the majority of programs in this country that will never have an athletic trainer on staff, programs that still have legal obligations, real liability exposure, and young athletes who deserve more than luck that whoever is nearest has the right training.

I know what it sounds like when that call comes. I know what the voice on the other end means before it finishes the sentence. Thirty-five years of this work have been aimed at one thing: making sure somebody else never has to find out.

Let’s see if we can stop making the call.