Tragedy that alerted a nation to the true perils of concussion
Gordon Stringer explains how Rowan’s Law, named after his rugby-playing daughter, is helping to save lives in Canada
Seven years have passed since my late daughter, Rowan, hit her head on the pitch during a school rugby match in Ontario, Canada. She immediately lost consciousness and would never wake again. She was just 17.
Rowan was an active kid who loved all sports. She played lacrosse, athletics, soccer and ringette but rugby was the one she really fell for. Ironically, when her high school set up a girls’ team, she only signed up because a boy who she liked was one of the coaches, but she ended up becoming the team’s captain.
Away from sport, Rowan had a heart of gold. She volunteered at our local children’s hospital and was already signed up as an organ donor – we met the woman who received her lungs. Having enrolled in the University of Ottawa’s nursing programme, she was due to start her studies in the autumn of 2013 to become a paediatric nurse. But Rowan never made it to her first class.
My daughter died on May 12, 2013, from Second Impact Syndrome. This is when the brain swells rapidly after a person sustains a second concussion before symptoms from an earlier one have subsided. We only found this out three years after Rowan passed, when an inquest into her death laid bare the substandard concussion protocols in youth sport in Canada. We discovered that Rowan likely suffered two concussions over the five days in the run-up to her death.
The problem was she did not realise she had been concussed on either of those occasions. She had searched the word “concussion” on Google and text messages to her friends showed she wasn’t feeling right. “Nothing can stop me,” she wrote to one of her friends before her fatal match, “unless I’m dead.”
She sustained the first head trauma during a pre-season tournament for her school team on a Friday. The following day, she complained of a headache, but we thought nothing of it. On the following Monday, she took another hit during a game. She came home with this massive bruise on her thigh and, of course, we were all focused on that because it was a visible injury.
Rowan played in her third and final rugby match the next day. I suggested to her that she sit it out because her leg was still badly bruised. The doctors did
‘Nothing can stop me,’ she wrote to a friend before her fatal match, ‘unless I’m dead’
everything they could to try to relieve the severe swelling on her brain – even removing part of her skull – before taking us into a room on the Saturday for that talk.
The inquest provided my family and I with some sort of closure. Crucially, the jury issued 49 recommendations to sports organisations and schools in Ontario to improve drastically youth concussion protocols in Canada.
All 50 US states have laws dictating the management of youth concussions. In Canada, Rowan’s Law, which came into force in 2017 in Ontario, was the country’s first.
I remain hopeful that Rowan’s story can help drive cultural change in sport and that other provinces in Canada will adopt similar measures to the ones set out in Rowan’s Law, so that my daughter’s memory can live on and touch even more lives.