The Tough Choice

“The only thing I remember is sitting in the locker room at halftime.”

Tanner Johnson’s memory of the concussion he experienced during Red Oak’s homecoming game last season is fuzzy and spotty. Most of what the senior does recall was supplied by Tiger assistant coach Juan Batula and his parents, Clete and Sally, when he woke up in the ambulance on the way to Montgomery County Memorial Hospital.

Johnson, the Tigers’ starting quarterback last season, shifted out to receiver on a play when the ball came to him on a pass. Johnson turned to snag the pass was struck in the helmet by a Glenwood defender. The collision knocked him unconscious.

It was a helmet-to-helmet hit recalls Johnson’s father, Clete, who was in the press box doing the radio broadcast for a KCSI, but not a dirty hit.

“I wasn’t really too worried at first because I’ve seen Tanner get injured before and he’d always bounce back. He’s a pretty tough kid,” Clete said. “As he laid there and didn’t move, I started to get a little anxious. When people come up to replace me on the radio, I really started worrying then.”

Clete said Tanner was unconscious for three minutes, according to one of the doctor’s at the game.

Clete and Sally had always told Tanner that they wouldn’t go onto the field if he was injured, so both of them stayed on the sideline, fear welling  inside as they watched trainers tend to their son.

“He wasn’t moving, they put him on the board,” Johnson’s father remembers. “It was probably 20-25 minutes before they took him to the hospital, but we were up there waiting already.”

Tanner was released from the hospital later that night. Doctors told him his concussion was a Grade III, considered the most serious of concussions, recalled Tanner.

A neurologist met with the Johnson family and told them Tanner would experience some memory problems and likely suffer headaches. Every concussion is different, doctors said. Recovery would be slow and unpredictable. They advised Tanner to sit out the remainder of the football season.

Tanner would sit out the rest of his junior season in football and was eased into basketball. Because of the effects from the concussion and concerns about possibly getting another one, which are increased following a severe head injury like he experienced, Tanner, a varsity starter since his freshman year, is not playing football this season.

“At first, Sally and I talked that we weren’t going to let him play. That was just going to be a parental decision,”Johnson’s father said. “As we talked to the doctors and especially after we saw the neurologist in Omaha, he kind of confirmed that it would be okay for him to play. He can take a hit in the head and have nothing happen or another concussion can come on, it just depends on the hit. So we kept our thoughts to ourselves and let Tanner go about thinking about what he was going to do.”

Tanner bounced back and forth debating the decision all off season, according to his father.

“That thought was still in the back of my mind. I was afraid to hit,” Tanner said. “I wanted to be able to play basketball. I knew if I got another bad one (concussion), I would have had to sit out basketball.”

Red Oak Head Football Coach Jeff Spotts said Tanner has been outstanding on the sidelines for Red Oak this season. The senior is always there to greet and cheer teammates and never afraid to offer coaching advice.

“He’s part of the team,” Spotts said. “He’s no different than any other kid that’s out for football that can’t play week-to-week, based on any type of an injury. He’s there, he’s an emotional leader.”

Spotts said Tanner has been the same kind of leader off the field he was on it.

“Anytime you have a kid that wants to play, but for whatever reason isn’t able to get on the field, it’s troublesome,” Spotts said. “Anytime you have a leader that wants to get on the field, but isn’t able to, it’s a sad feeling because you want the kid to be able to participate.”

Spotts declined comment on the specifics of Tanner’s injury, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) as his reason.

As tough as it was for Tanner to give up football is would have been harder, he said, to have to sit out basketball again.

“I probably would have tried to fight through it because I love it so much,” he said if he had decided to play football and did get another concussion. “I don’t know what I would have done.”

While basketball will always be his first love, Tanner has been playing football for most of his life, starting with flag football. He excelled at most positions on the gridiron but it was at quarterback where he settled as a 15-year-old starting under center for the Tigers his freshman year. It was then that he knew just how much he loved football.

“That’s when I really started to fall in love with it because it is so much different on the varsity level,” he said.

Johnson’s best season was freshman year when he passed for 549 yards and three touchdowns and ran for 391 yards and two touchdowns in 2009.

“It was a lot different,” Tanner said of quarterbacking the varsity a year removed from middle school. “The speed of the game and the players were a lot bigger than middle school.”

Along with basketball and football, Tanner is also a standout in track and field and baseball.

Tanner thinks he has experienced hard hits before that left him woozy, but the hit last fall was the only one that was diagnosed as a concussion by the neurologist.

His concussion was also the only one the Red Oak football team had last season, the first under new concussion rules from the state of Iowa.

Under the rules, adopted by both the Iowa High School Athletic Association and the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union last summer, no student athlete can return to competition or practice after suffering a concussion until obtaining a medical clearance from a licensed health care provider.

Teams can remove a student from participation if they feel the student is showing signs or symptoms of a concussion at any time.

Johnson said whenever he gets hit in the head now, he gets a headache.

“I never had that before, so I don’t know if that was from the concussion or what it was, but yeah I get headaches a lot easier now,” Tanner said.