Sports

Concussions rattle Central District athletes

Bellmore-Merrick students to take part in brain trauma study

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Playing catcher, Josh Levine, of Merrick, crouched low on the first-base side of home plate, ball in hand, preparing to tag out a runner trying to score from third base. Suddenly he realized that the runner was charging at him at full speed, lowering his shoulders as if he were readying to tackle him.

Levine’s heart was racing.

That’s his final memory of his junior-varsity baseball season at Kennedy High School in Bellmore this spring.

A video, captured by a passerby, shows the moment of impact when the runner, from a North Shore team, slammed into 16-year-old Levine, sending him hurtling back. His head struck the hard earth, and he was knocked unconscious.

“The kid barreled over him, which is totally illegal,” said Jill Levine, Josh’s mother. “It was a whole long, crazy, bad scene.”

Josh awoke in the dugout, dazed and confused. He was rushed to nearby North Shore-LIJ Hospital for treatment. He had suffered a concussion, doctors concluded.

The Herald Life has obtained a copy of the video, which was widely distributed via social media. The paper is not posting it nor identifying the offending player or his team because he is a minor.

Nearly five months later, Levine has trouble focusing, particularly when reading, his mother said. He is in all Advanced Placement and Honors classes at Kennedy. He took the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test last October and scored highly on it. Now he has trouble finishing the standardized tests required by colleges in the time allotted.

“This was a life-changing thing for him,” Jill Levine said. “Josh has never not finished a test.”

She said the Levines would be among the families likely to sign up for a national study conducted by the nonprofit Brain Trauma Foundation, which the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District has taken part in since the spring of 2014. The study aims to map more precisely the number of high school athletes who suffer concussions.

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