He was propped up by others when Linda Schafer came into the locker room.

She watched as they took her son outside to get some air, his feet dragging behind him. His speech was garbled and there was a distant look in his eyes. He wasn’t knocked out, she said, but he wasn’t all there, either. He was just an incoherent mass of 6-foot, 3-inch dead weight.

“He didn’t know who I was,” Schafer said.

Quinn Schafer, then the quarterback for Bishop Luers High School, doesn’t remember any of it. In the third quarter against North Side High School last year, Quinn Schafer, now a freshman quarterback at Valparaiso University, suffered a concussion that erased his memories of the second half.

His teammates would later tell him they knew something was wrong, that his pupils were huge and that he wasn’t always making sense on the field. But they kept it to themselves, and Schafer stayed in a game where he was hit repeatedly.

He awoke in a hospital at 2:30 the next morning, IVs attached to his arms and his family surrounding the bed.

Concussions are under national scrutiny. A recent study suggests ex-professional football players might be at greater risk of chronic mental disorders from repeated blows, prompting Congress to grill NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell about such injuries during hearings late last month.

The way concussions have been dealt with at the high school level has changed drastically in the past 25 years as the medical community, coaches and trainers have re-educated themselves on how to treat, but just as importantly, how to spot such injuries. It’s been found that teenage brains are still developing and that repeated concussions can cause more harm than in adult brains.

And one group of Hoosier doctors is leading a charge to make the treatment and education of concussions among high school athletes uniform statewide.

But the group has not made much progress in northeast Indiana.

Spotting the injury

Linda Schafer watched the North Side game from the stands, as she did every game.

As a physical therapist, Linda Schafer never saw anything wrong with her son on the field and did not notice the slight wobble he apparently exhibited when he kneeled with the team after the game. Driving home, she was called back to the school where she met a trainer at the curb.

She said that she wished her son’s teammates would’ve spoken up on the field. And she wonders how the coaches missed the injury as well, though she holds no animosity toward the staff.

“I wouldn’t trust them that it wouldn’t happen to somebody else’s kid,” she said. “Maybe it’s not just the Luers coaches, maybe it’s high school coaches, but I wouldn’t trust them with the health of my child.”

Luers always has a trainer present at events that involve collision sports, said Matt Lindsay, the school’s athletic director and head football coach. Usually, if there’s the slightest hint of a head injury, the athlete is removed from competition.

“His was pretty severe, but his signs didn’t kick in till after the game,” Lindsay said about Schafer’s concussion. “We didn’t have any indications.”

Catching signs of a concussion can become a crux for coaches and medical staff. A bum shoulder, a bad ankle or a hurt knee are fairly easy to pick up.

But if someone has a head injury, it can be potentially difficult to detect, especially if the athlete isn’t forthcoming because he or she doesn’t want to be taken out of a game or is afraid of losing playing time.

The symptoms can include headaches, dizziness, vomiting, confusion and slow response to questions.

For instance, Quinn’s migraine headaches for several weeks after his injury were nearly unbearable. Doing anything fast hurt, he said, and even sitting on the sidelines watching his teammates practice was painful. He said he tried on his helmet one day just to remember how it felt, and he couldn’t even do that.

Sometimes, though, the symptoms can be much more subtle, such as a slight headache, and young athletes don’t recognize them as signs of a concussion.

“The kids are told if you experience any of these symptoms you need to tell a coach,” said Russ Isaacs, the athletic director and former football coach at Snider High School.

Isaacs began coaching in the mid-1970s, a time when players shook off such injuries and called them “getting your bell rung.” Coaches and even medical experts did not have the knowledge they do now, he said, to realize the potential dangers to an athlete’s health.

The developing brain of a teenager isn’t that of a 25- to 30-year-old professional athlete, medical experts say, and is at greater risk of second-impact syndrome, which is a second concussion on top of one not fully healed.

That can be devastating. And, though rare, concussions have been fatal for some high school athletes across the country.

“It wasn’t that we didn’t care about the kids, it’s that we didn’t know what happened and the true impact on the athlete,” Isaacs said of the past view on head injuries.

Today, Isaacs said, coaches are not involved in making the decision as to when an athlete comes back to play. Instead, coaches rely on medical trainers and professionals to make that call.

Snider is staffed by trainers and doctors from SportONE, an arm of Orthopedics Northeast, which provides staff for 22 high schools and colleges in the area.

Christina Ehle-Fails, a SportONE trainer at Snider, where she also teaches, said concussions have been rare at the school. She said an athlete with any sign of a head injury gets extensively questioned after being taken away from competition.

“We really handle it with kid gloves,” she said.

The series of questions usually involves the athlete’s symptoms but can include where they are, what are they doing, or what their day is. Though Ehle-Fails said athletes might be able to fudge answers to some of their questions, trainers could still give something almost akin to a sobriety test, making someone stand with feet together and head back.

“If we’re not completely satisfied, we’re not going to let them play,” Ehle-Fails said.

Still, some athletes remain silent or do not heal properly from a first concussion.

A January article in Time magazine detailed a study that showed 41 percent of high school athletes nationwide who suffered a concussion between 2005 and 2008 returned to the field of play before they fully healed.

The study, done by the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, also showed that half the female athletes with concussions in volleyball and basketball returned too early.

In the past year, researchers in Boston found the onset of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brain of a dead 18-year-old high school football player, according to the Boston Globe. The disease is typically caused by blows to the head and has symptoms much like Alzheimer’s. It’s been found in former NFL players but never in a football player under the age of 36, the newspaper reported.

Uniform treatment

The severity of concussions can vary.

It’s typical for athletes to sit out a week or more until their symptoms subside. Ehle-Fails said that at Snider, if a player goes 24 hours without any symptoms, that player can start doing calisthenics or begin running again but usually will not play or return to full-speed practice.

Two doctors in Indianapolis have partnered with the Indiana High School Athletic Association in an attempt to make the treatment of concussions and the criteria for an athlete to return to competition uniform statewide.

That involves offering schools a computerized test the physicians say can help detect head injuries in athletes and the extent of such injuries.

The Indiana Sports Concussion Network was created roughly three years ago by sports medicine specialists Dr. Pat Kersey and Dr. Todd Arnold, both of Methodist Sports Medicine.

The network uses a computer test created by doctors in Pittsburgh that is designed to measure the functions of the brain, such as how it handles information, long-term and short-term memory and reaction time.

With a grant from Clarion Human Motion – an Indiana orthopedics program specializing in bone, joint, spine and muscle care – Arnold said the network can let schools test all freshmen in certain contact sports for free. That would create a baseline test. If the athlete ever received a head injury, he or she could take the test again and the results can be compared.

“Basically, what it helps you do is create some return-to-play criteria,” said Heidi Musgrave, a Fort Wayne neuropsychologist, who is the only local clinician in the network. “You have a ton of pressure from coaches and parents, which is, ‘put ’em back in, put ’em back in.’ ”

Musgrave said Keystone Schools is the only school in northeast Indiana that has taken advantage of the test. Thus far, the network has been in contact with 143 schools, according to Arnold.

After an injury, Musgrave said the second tests are usually covered by insurance. She said that even if a baseline test wasn’t done, an injured athlete can go through with a test and the results can be compared with other athletes’ results.

Linda Schafer described a similar test a doctor wanted her son to take, but after some research the family decided to pass. She feared such a test might become part of his permanent record.

When asked about the network, Snider’s Russ Isaacs said he hadn’t heard of it.

No deterrence

The concussion was only a blip on Quinn Schafer’s football career.

He missed three games and was back on the field against rival Bishop Dwenger High School. He was a little worried and had some first-game-back jitters, but they were quickly gone after he took his first hit. He felt fine afterward.

Quinn Schafer holds no grudge against the Luers coaching staff.

“They were trying to win, I don’t think they were focused on one individual,” he said. “I don’t blame anyone. It’s just a part of the game.”

Linda Schafer, though, described a somewhat different return for her son, one that took much longer than the first hit during the first game back. She embraces his passion for football and wants to see him succeed. Still, that night was a scary one, even scarier in hindsight, she said.

He shows no signs of the injury today, but she thinks it took all or most of the season for her son, who helped his team win a state title the year before, to truly return to form.

“I was talking to a gentleman the other day, a total stranger who remembered my son,” she said. “He even said, ‘He never came back all the way, did he?’ ”

jeffwiehe@jg.net