Thousands of high school and college athletes in the Ark-La-Tex are getting electrocardiograms or EKGs thanks to the Brandon Goyne Foundation, in cooperation with a Houston-area organization that’s working to prevent sudden cardiac arrest.
Brandon Goyne, a 20-year-old LSU Alexandria baseball letterman, collapsed and died on the first day of spring training in 2013. An EKG could have detected his rare heart defect.
His mother, Debbie Goyne of Waskom, Texas, is the region’s heart screening director for the nonprofit Who We Play For. She crisscrosses the area providing low-cost EKGs for $15 per student. While 96 percent of EKGs come back normal, Goyne says, she’s still seen the close calls.
“Of the 7,000 [students], we’ve had seven that have definitely had something come back. We’ve had a kid who had to have open heart. We’ve had one who had to have an internal defibrillator put in. They may not be able to go back to football, but they can still participate and do things. Of course, they’re still here,” Goyne said, who sent so much business to Who We Play For that she was hired a year ago.
In Shreveport, Captain Shreve High School head baseball coach Todd Sharp had his 60 athletes tested in August. C.E. Byrd’s football team followed suit. (A number of East Texas high schools also have provided the testing, including Longview High School this week.)
Sharp says the EKG results – back in two days – gave him the peace of mind he needed to move forward with conditioning.
“The last thing you’d want is a player to not feel good on the field or go out and collapse, or any of the tragic stories you’ve heard about with athletes doing that. I don’t want that on my hands. If it’s a little bit preventable, I’m going to take those steps to do it,” Sharp said, who is also the school’s athletic director.
Goyne says the procedure takes three to four minutes per student – mostly prep time and entering data. The reading of the heart’s electrical activity through electrodes placed on the chest takes 15 seconds, and she doesn’t need any special exam room.
“I’ve screened in a concession stand before and people had to lie down on a freezer. We can go anywhere. The machine is small. It’s my laptop computer and the EKG machine actually resembles the remote control for your TV, with electrodes coming out of it,” Goyne said.
Who We Play For has screened more than 50,000 students since it was started by a Houston cardiologist almost a decade ago.
Goyne has EKG screening events set for LSU Alexandria on Oct. 6, Waskom ISD on Oct. 13 and 14, and the Girard Park Recreation Center in Lafayette on Oct. 17.
