Coaches cautioned against MRSA threat
ROGERS — It’s been almost a decade since Casey Russell told his football coaches at Gravette his back hurt too badly to practice. It was September 2009 and the Gravette junior was experiencing severe back pain that he thought came from a routine hit on the football field. A few days later, his case turned out to be anything but routine.
The severe back pain was thought to be a pinched nerve, but lurking inside Russell’s body was an infection caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA. The infection ravaged Russell’s body from the inside and, on Sept. 23, he died from complications related to the infection.
“I don’t think anybody suspected MRSA, really,” former Gravette football coach Bill Harrelson said Thursday. “Then after he went to his doctor, they tested for it and he immediately went into surgery.”
Casey never recovered from the surgery.
Harrelson was one of more than a hundred coaches from Northwest Arkansas schools who took part in the annual Mercy Coaching Clinic at the John Q. Hammons Convention Center.
Andrea Ittner is part of the Mercy Sports Medicine team as a certified trainer. She works with Rogers Public Schools and has been a trainer at Allen (Kan.) Community College. From 2011 to 2016 she was a trainer for Gravette and Bentonville schools.
“The majority of you in this room are carrying staph infection as we speak,” Ittner, who conducted Thursday’s session, said. “It’s contained in the nasal passages of the nose. For the majority of people, it lays dormant your entire life. But for some people, it opens up and it becomes alive, and then comes the infections.”
MRSA has impacted all levels of athletic teams from high schools to professional sports. In 2013, three players from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers contracted MRSA, and in 2015, New York Giants tight end Daniel Fells saw his career ended after
contracting the infection.
Athletic locker rooms, fields and courts are prime areas for the infection to start as athletes share close spaces, share exercise equipment and have skin-to-skin body contact in most sports.
Nika West, the wrestling coach at Fayetteville, said keeping the mats clean are a key component in preventing the spread of infection.
“We clean our mats before practice and after practice,” West said. “We have wall pads up, so it’s important for us to keep those clean as well.”
West said his wrestlers take it even a step further by applying an anti-bacterial foam to their bodies before they take the mat.
“It looks almost like shaving cream,” West said. “You put a little in your hand and it expands. We make sure all of our wrestlers put that on before they get on the mats. It just helps clean their body a little bit and almost serves as a big, giant Band-Aid.”
Ittner stressed that proper hygiene is the best way to prevent the spread of staph infections, like washing your hands with anti-bacterial soap, showering after workouts and keeping practice and game equipment and uniforms washed and cleaned.
“How many of your kids come in and say, ‘Coach, I forgot my shirt today’ and they go borrow one from one of their friends,” Ittner said. “So they grab a shirt out of someone’s locker that has been sitting there for two weeks. There is a lot of bacteria on that jersey, so they just spread it from one person to another.
“And besides that, it’s disgusting. Or if they borrow a friend’s shorts, that’s even more gross.”
MRSA often starts as a red bump that might appear to be an insect bite. The area can swell and become filled with pus that, left untreated, can rapidly spread to muscle, bone, and organs in the body and become lifethreatening.
In the case of Casey Russell, there were no outward signs of a staph infection, Harrelson recalled.
“We don’t know how it ended up in his body,” Harrelson said.
MRSA was first brought to the forefront in the 1960s and was mostly associated with healthcare patients. Since then more cases have been documented as “community acquired” MRSA and spread by skin-toskin contact, or touching objects like towels, equipment and workout areas.
Ittner said it was not uncommon now for trainers at the college level to have 50 towels each on the practice field.
“Once a player wipes his face with the towel, we toss it into the pile to be washed,” she said. “So we’re washing a couple of hundred towels each day, but if that’s what it takes to make sure no one is infected, then that’s what we have to do.”
We clean our mats before practice and after practice. We have wall pads up, so it’s important for us to keep those clean as well.” — Nika West, wrestling coach, Fayetteville High School