Conditioning

Football players know this as "gassers", Basketball players as "lines", Baseball players as, "Circuts". It all translates to sprints up and down a field, court or gymnasium to build stamina. However when it is done in 94 degree weather until someone collapses it's negligence.

Sophomore Max Gilpin and his Pleasure Ridge Park teammates spent the tail end of a three-hour practice on a sweltering August day in Louisville running the drill that is a coaching staple across the country, hoping to impress enough to earn varsity playing time that fall. They sprinted 12 times in what felt like 94-degree heat, sometimes with helmets and pads, as the coaches pushed them to go harder and harder. It was a drill like those on many high school football fields, until Gilpin, a 6-foot-2, 220-pound offensive lineman, collapsed to the turf just 15 minutes after a teammate went down.

Three days later, the 15-year-old Gilpin was dead from heat stroke, with authorities saying his body temperature was 107 degrees when he reached the hospital. Five months later, his first-year head coach David Jason Stinson is facing a reckless homicide charge, with a prosecutor saying the coach should have realized a player could get heat stroke in such broiling weather.

Gilpin was one of six heat-related deaths in high school and college athletics in 2008, said Dr. Frederick Mueller with the National Center for Catastrophic Injury Research at the University of North Carolina. More than 120 athletes have died under similar circumstances since 1931. Conditioning is, an important part of athletics that needs to be done.....with common sense.