Kalan Camero had thought about the moment dozens of times.
His senior year at Hawaii Preparatory Academy. Team captain. An undefeated basketball season. Reaching the playoffs of the Big Island Interscholastic Federation basketball tournament. Reaching the finals. Winning it all.
In the fourth quarter of the BIIF semifinals in 2014, facing the Honokaa Dragons, Camero went up for a rebound. His legs got taken out mid-air and he flipped backwards, landing on his head.
“I didn’t knock out,” Camero, now 20, said.
His coaches and a trainer came on to the court, asked him his name, asked where he was. Somehow, Camero ended up sitting on the bench, but he doesn’t remember how he got there.
“I was kind of regaining my memory,” he said. And he knew where he was: “‘This is the semifinal game; I should be playing.’” His hands began to cramp up and lose feeling. Someone called 911. Initially, people thought he had a neck injury.
It was a concussion.
“It’s a contact sport, so anything can happen,” Camero said. Still, “you don’t really go out there thinking about that too much.”
At the emergency room, Camero had a CT scan, which turned up no internal bleeding. At that point, he felt normal, and his memory was back. But the effects of the fall lingered.
He slept a lot the next couple of days. He tried to do homework, but would get a headache if he did too much. He got headaches anyway.
HPA had made it to the BIIF finals, but lost to Kohala. It was HPA’s first loss of the season. Camero was on the bench the whole time.
When he’d thought about his last moments of high school basketball, that wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
“That was a tough position,” Camero said. “(It) was my senior year; I really wanted to get out there.”
It was two years after the Hawaii state Legislature had passed its first bill codifying post-concussion protocol.
Camero went through the entire process. He took his baseline tests again, but didn’t pass right away. He jogged and rode a stationary bike, working his way through the return-to-play process. But he couldn’t clear the hurdles before the BIIF championship game.
“Each individual is so different,” said Kamehameha Schools Hawaii athletic trainer Zeny Eakins. That’s why athletes going through the recovery process take it easy, one step at a time, with observation from trainers the entire time.
“High school kids tend to feel like they’re indestructible,” said Waiakea High trainer Dan Renteria.
Camero sat on the bench during the Division II tournament, too. He’d been medically cleared to play, but his doctor cautioned that he was still at high risk for re-injury if he took a hit.
“An injured kid who’s got some double-vision or blurriness is more likely to have a second injury,” said Josh Green, a Kailua-Kona emergency room physician and state senator. “You could save your season, your career, by sitting.”
“My parents kept telling me, and my coaches, that it’s just not worth it,” Camero said. “And I agreed with them.”
HPA won the state title, the first time in four years an unseeded squad had done so.
“Our team pulled it together,” Camero said, still proud of the win. That’s what he loves most about basketball, he said: “Being on a team, and being able to come together and do something bigger than yourself.”
By the time baseball season rolled around, Camero wasn’t feeling any more post-concussive effects.
Physically, the fall in the semifinals “doesn’t really affect me anymore,” he said. There are other side effects, though.
“When I see people hit their heads, it makes me a little queasy,” Camero said. “Just because it’s happened to me; I know the feeling.”
That sentiment is echoed throughout the Hawaii high school sports world: It’s still hard to get a sense for what a concussion is like until you’ve experienced it personally.
Awareness is starting at younger ages, though. This year the Legislature passed stricter rules that require annual concussion education for players and parents in youth athletics. It’s something that leagues like Pop Warner football and the American Youth Soccer Organization were already doing, but educators and legislators alike want more people involved.
“A lot of youth sports have been pretty good about getting education about concussions in,” said Ross Oshiro, co-director of the Hawaii Concussion Awareness Management Program, which coordinates many of the educational efforts, like clinics. “Football, soccer: they have protocol already in place. It’s the sports like baseball, basketball, martial arts where they might not.”
“Suffering a concussion when you’re in middle school is kind of like suffering any other injury (at that age),” Eakins said. “They’re still young, they’re trying to figure themselves out: Am I really hurt? Is this how I’m supposed to feel?”
“Younger kids, they don’t really know that they’re dinged,” said retired Hilo High girls’ soccer coach Paul Bello, who was also involved with youth soccer for twenty years. “They think ‘My head’s supposed to be spinning.’”
But, he added, “I think it’s gotten a lot better,” Bello said. “They have seminars and classes for a lot of the youth organizations. That’s gotten really big lately, and it’s great.”
“I know my son understands it more than I did when I was his age,” said Hawaii High School Athletic Association president Chris Chun. Chun’s son is 13.
“You only have one brain, so it’s pretty important,” Camero said.
Now a sophomore at Menlo College in San Francisco, where he majors in sports management and still plays basketball, Camero is a best-case scenario for concussion education and recovery.
This season, after redshirting his freshman season, he played his first basketball game in two years. A weird feeling, he said, to be back on the court, but a good one.
The Menlo team will be playing on Hawaii Island this December, during the Big Island Classic in Kailua-Kona.
“That’ll be pretty fun, playing at home,” Camero said.