Another Exertional Heatstroke Death in Kansas Junior College Football: Tirrell Williams, Fort Scott Community College

by Irvin Muchnick

Sam Zeff of Kansas Public Radio, who did some of the very best reporting on the exertional heatstroke (EHS) death of Braeden Bradforth three and a half years ago following the first regular football practice of the summer at Garden City Community College, now is out first with news of another EHS fatality at a Kansas junior college football program. The victim was another 19-year-old, Tirrell Williams, last August, at Fort Scott Community College.

You can read the text version of Zeff’s report at https://www.kcur.org/sports/2022-02-21/kansas-school-denies-wrongdoing-in-unfortunate-death-of-football-player-last-summer.

What makes the Fort Scott casualty especially resonant is that last November this school made the stunning decision to drop intercollegiate football. In making this announcement, Fort Scott made no reference to the death of Williams three months earlier.

Junior college football has a deep history and a passionate following in Kansas, and has been the proving grounds for bootstrapping athletes who, because of academic or other deficits, have had to jump-start their careers from the very bottom. (Star wide receiver Tyreek Hill went from Garden City to Oklahoma State University to the Kansas City Chiefs.) See https://concussioninc.net/?p=14892.

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Concussion Inc. shortly will have new developments in the University of California’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that I was the prevailing party in California Public Records Act litigation that liberated more than 700 pages of previously suppressed internal documents in the 2014 offseason conditioning drill death of Cal football player Ted Agu.