When Darrow School Athletic Trainer Allison Pritchard heard a player yell, “Pritch! Jamo’s down!” during a recent basketball scrimmage, she assumed Jamison Thrower’s hamstring had flared up again.
But what she found on the court moments later was far more serious.
“He was looking straight up at the ceiling, not responding to me … it was like he was there, but not there,” Pritchard recalled.
Within seconds, he began vomiting and seizing. Then, he stopped breathing.
Pritchard immediately began CPR.
“I probably did ten, and on the tenth one, he jumped back to life,” she said. But moments later, Thrower’s heart stopped again. With no ambulance yet on scene, Pritchard started compressions a second time. “After six or seven compressions, he started breathing again,” she said.
The school’s health services coordinator applied oxygen while emergency responders rushed to the remote Columbia County campus. Thrower was taken first to Berkshire Medical Center, then transferred to Baystate Cardiology in Springfield, Massachusetts, for further evaluation.
His doctors compared the incident to Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin’s 2023 on-field collapse — a case of commotio cordis, a sudden cardiac arrest triggered by chest impact.
When Thrower woke up in the hospital, he said:
“It was so surreal. When I woke up … it was like someone was sitting on me — I was just looking at the wall for so long, just thinking about how grateful I was to be alive.”
Now recovering and awaiting medical clearance to play again, Thrower remains optimistic.
“My coaches believe in me,” he said. “I plan to just pick up where I left off.”
Thanks to Pritchard’s swift action, he’ll have that chance. Click here to read more!