School where player died eyes personnel changes
Long Island community grieving over teen’s death during preseason drill
A week after a high school junior died when a log fell on his head in a football training drill, school administrators are poised to announce “changes in football personnel,” a spokeswoman said Friday.
Joshua Mileto, 16, died Aug. 10 when a 400-pound log he and four other East Sachem High School players were carrying struck him on the head, police said.
The tragedy has raised questions about the appropriateness of such training for high school players. Experts have said such vigorous training techniques are usually reserved for Navy SEALs, although some college football teams have also used log training.
Deirdre Gilligan, a spokeswoman for the Sachem School District, said an announcement regarding personnel was expected Friday evening.
She did not disclose specific details on what changes were being made. Coach Mark Wojciechowski has not commented since Mileto’s death; he did not respond to a telephone message left for him Friday.
The accident occurred during a six-week preseason camp on school grounds on eastern Long Island. Hundreds of people attended a funeral service for Mileto on Tuesday. A GoFundMe page set up for his family had raised more than $83,000 as of Friday afternoon.
Gilligan also announced that after some debate among administrators, school officials have decided to move forward with the football season. She said, however, that a planned weeklong training trip next
week to a camp in the upstate New York Catskill mountains had been canceled.
A police spokesman says the death has preliminarily been deemed accidental, although the investigation was ongoing.
Sports safety expert Douglas Casa has questioned the wisdom of having teenagers perform an exercise that involves carrying a heavy object and that was developed for Navy SEALs, “potentially a very different clientele.” Some websites have indicated SEALs carry logs weighing half as much as what the high school players reportedly were carrying.
“There’s so much potential for things to go wrong that I would really want people to think twice before doing something like that,” said Casa, executive director of the University of Connecticut’s Korey Stringer Institute, which works to improve safety for athletes.