A Junior College basketball player in Oklahoma has died days after suffering a head injury during a game. He was 20.
Ethan Dietz, a sophomore at Connors State College, was injured in the second half of a game on November 22, in Texas, according to the school — days before the athlete died on Tuesday, November 25. A spokesperson told ESPN that initial reports indicate Dietz suffered a head injury, but there was no more information at the time.
“Ethan exemplified what it means to be a Cowboy, to value hard work and being part of a team,” the school said in a statement, confirming the student’s death. “While the team and the Cowboy community are processing our own grief, our hearts go out to his family and friends.”
According to the ESPN report, the school canceled several other men’s and women’s basketball games following Dietz’s death. A vigil will be held in his honor on Monday, December 1, at the college’s campus in Oklahoma.
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Footage of the game shows Dietz seemingly getting elbowed in the head during a play in the second half. Dietz immediately goes down behind the basket and looks to be in pain before he reaches for his head.
One of his teammates then helped him up and walked him to the bench, where he sat out of the game for a few minutes.
Just two minutes later, according to the live stream of the game, Dietz checked back in and continued playing despite the head trauma.
A few minutes after returning to the game, Dietz signaled to his coach while pointing to his head, presumably asking to be taken out of the game. At the next game stoppage, he walked to the bench and did not play the rest of the game.
Ethan Dietz Connors Athletics
Afterwards, he stayed on the bench during the team’s postgame handshakes, eventually requiring help from a teammate to leave the bench and head towards the locker room.
According to a report from KNWA Fox 24, after the team returned back to Oklahoma after the game, Muskogee EMS was called for reports of an “unresponsive person.” The first responders arrived around 9:16 p.m. local time and rushed Dietz to a Tulsa hospital about 30 minutes away from campus, where he later died.
“Ethan Dietz was the kind of player a coach always hopes for,” said Connors State College head coach Bill Muse in a statement. “He was talented athletically and academically and he understood the importance of hard work.”
Landon Mannion, one of Dietz’s classmates and friends, spoke to KJRH-TV in Tulsa after Dietz’s death, saying they met in eighth grade and stayed friends all throughout high school.
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“The first day he ever got to class, he sat beside me and I just started talking some trash to him and he talked trash back and I was like, ‘You’re my friend and we’re staying together,’ ” Mannion explained.
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Mannion and his mom, Amber, visited Dietz in the hospital before he died.
“Dietz became one of my own because he was friends with Landon,” Amber told KJRH-TV. “He touched a lot of lives. He just brought a lot to the room.”
Landon added: “I’m not a big crier at all, but there was a lot of crying.”