He was an athlete and a college-bound honor student. Then a concussion stole it all.

LA QUINTA, Calif. – Kevin Salamone’s eyes were locked on a soccer ball, floating tantalizingly through the air, so he never saw the elbow coming.

He jumped for a header just as a defender's arm crashed down on his skull, bashing his brain from above. The blow left Salamone stunned, with vision blurred so badly that he could no longer recognize the faces of his teammates. He signaled that he needed a substitution, then stumbled toward the sideline. When he got close, he asked for help.

“My head really hurts,” Salamone said, speaking through a fog.

He recalls a coach telling him to sit on the bench, insisting he "would be fine." Salamone took a seat, but he knew his coach was wrong. Over the last few minutes of this soccer game, he had been struck in the head twice, and now the damage felt cumulative. His vision was still blurry and his head wouldn’t stop throbbing.

Salamone asked a teammate to go find the athletic trainer.

A minute or two later, the teammate returned alone.

He said the trainer wasn’t coming.

That was fourteen months ago, at a soccer game between Shadow Hills High and Indio High School, two rival schools in the Desert Sands Unified School District. Salamone, a Shadow Hills senior, suffered a traumatic brain injury that was so severe he never returned to high school and was forced to delay college.  Salamone has now filed a lawsuit against Desert Sands Unified, claiming he received no medical attention from school employees and that the district as a whole is unprepared to help student athletes who suffer concussions. According to the lawsuit, when the Desert Sands athletic trainer was told about Salamone's injury, he “laughed and walked in the opposite direction."

Salamone’s story, told for the first time in this article, is a harrowing warning about the stakes in high school sports, where most athletes have little to gain and everything to lose if they suffer a head injury. Although concussions were once considered a minor injury, a growing body of research has linked them to brain deterioration, memory loss, erratic behavior, domestic violence and dementia. Teenage athletes are particularly vulnerable because their brains are still developing, and damage can be magnified if a teen is struck twice in rapid succession, known as “second impact syndrome.” California enacted a law to prevent these second impacts in 2015, but the law only works if the concussion is properly diagnosed and the athlete is benched before they have a chance of being hit again.

This is why Salamone’s injury also spotlights the startling absence of concussion training in California, which sets no minimum standards for athletic trainers, allowing nearly anyone to assume the responsibility for diagnosing concussions on the sidelines. Most states require athletic trainers to pass a certification exam, and the rest at least require trainers to register with the government. Only California does neither, foisting the responsibility for concussion preparedness entirely on to school districts.

As a result, less than one-fifth of California high schools keep a certified athletic trainer on the sidelines. Of the six trainers in Desert Sands Unified, only one is certified.

“The law is bad, there is no doubt about that,” said Jerry Underwood, an attorney who represents Salamone in his lawsuit against the school district. “Other states have gone so much further to protect their children than we do. But districts don’t have to stop at the minimum state requirement, which is much lower than it should be.”

The Desert Sands Unified School District refused to discuss Salamone’s injury or comment on his lawsuit. The district has yet to respond to the suit in court.

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Salamone, 18, of La Quinta, known to family and friends as “Izzy,” grew up in the Coachella Valley, first attending Amelia Earhart Elementary, then John Glenn Middle and eventually Shadow Hills High. At the time of his injury, he was on the Shadow Hills honor roll and had been accepted to Vanguard University, a small Christian college in Costa Mesa where he planned to study kinesiology on a scholarship. Salamone was also an Eagle Scout who liked to snowboard and scuba dive.

But, more than any of his other hobbies, Salamone loved soccer. He began playing soccer when he was six, played in a youth league through middle school, joined the Shadow Hills junior varsity team as a freshman and then became team captain as a sophomore. In his junior year, Salamone jumped to the varsity squad, which beat out about 100 teams to play in a CIF division championship game. His injury came two-thirds of the way through his senior season, on Jan. 27, 2017.

Salamone spent most of the next week in the hospital, feverish from a swollen brain. He was then stuck at home for five months – unable to go to school, play sports, drive a car, watch TV, read books or play video games. He spent most of his time in a darkened room listening to audio books, none of which he can remember, and only graduated from high school because a teacher came to his home to spoon-feed him the curriculum of his last few classes.

These months were like a walking coma, Salamone said, and his only clear memory from this time are torturous headaches.

“They were indescribable,” he said. “I can remember thinking this is the end. I felt like death, basically. All I wanted was for it to stop.”

Today, a little more than a year after his concussion, those headaches are gone, but Salamone says he is a shadow of the friendly, confident and quick-thinking teenager he once was. He says he stumbles on math problems that he could once solve in his head and grasps for words that he knows but simply cannot reach. He remains sensitive to bright lights and loud noises. Athletics are out of the question.

Worst of all, he says, even his personality has changed.

“I use to be – I still try to be – outgoing and friendly to everybody. People knew me as the kid who was always smiling, and trying to make other people,” Salamone said.

“And I’m trying to be happy again,” he adds, “but it’s a lot harder now.”

Salamone is also at risk of losing the college education he worked so hard to obtain. After his injury, Vanguard University agreed to delay Salamone’s enrollment for one year, but he will lose his spot at the college and his scholarship if he is not ready to attend by the fall semester. In January, Salamone enrolled in two College of the Desert courses – public speaking and photography – in hopes of rehabbing his brain with some light classwork.

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As Salamone tells it, his injury happened like this: He was playing striker in the Indio High game when he slipped through the defense with the ball, rushing toward the goal with a defender on his heels. Salamone was seconds away from an unchallenged shot when his foot was hooked from behind, causing him to stumble and fall. As he tumbled to the ground, he was struck in the back of his head, likely a kick that came from somewhere behind him.

Salamone said he was hit so hard that he went blind and deaf for a moment, but he never lost consciousness and he clearly remembers the sensation of being alone in the darkness and the silence. Then his senses slowly came back, blurry and muffled at first, like when a solider gets shell-shocked in a war movie.

As soon as he could stand, Salamone arched his back and flipped up on to his feet, trying to look cool. Teammates crowded around him, impressed but worried. Salamone tried to act unhurt, not wanting the Indio players to know he had been rattled.

“I remember the center ref came up and asked me if I was OK,” Salamone said. “I said ‘My head hurts but I’m good,’ because I wanted to keep playing. That’s just how I am.”

Salamone stayed in the game, and minutes later he was elbowed in the head as described at the beginning of this story. He then stumbled to the sidelines, sat on the bench and requested help from the athletic trainer. Because Indio High was the home team, the school’s trainer was responsible for providing medical attention to players from both teams.

When the trainer didn’t respond, Salamone decided he would need to leave the game to get help. He fumbled with his iPhone, eyesight too blurry to dial, then used voice commands to call a friend and ask for a ride. In the car, Salamone was so woozy he struggled to give directions to his own house. His mother then rushed him to the hospital, where a CAT scan confirmed that he had a serious concussion. Salamone was sent home later that night, but rushed back to the hospital three days later after he awoke so feverish and nauseous that he was unable to walk.

These symptoms were mystifying to Salamone’s mother, Cera, who said she’d long feared her soccer-loving son would tear his knee or break his leg, but generally assumed his brain was safe as long as he wasn’t playing football.

“It was terrifying,” she said. “I kept thinking he’s got to have a brain tumor and he’s going to die. I kept thinking there must be something else wrong, because you always hear about concussions as if they are no big deal.”

This mindset – that concussions are “no big deal” – is a longstanding misconception in American sports culture, slowly being eroded by research on head injuries. Concussion awareness is now most prominent in football, where the risk is obvious, but research has revealed soccer injuries as the second-most common cause, with at least some evidence suggesting that soccer concussions are often more severe than those in football. Concern about concussions led U.S. Soccer to ban headers for younger players in 2016 and has spurred a larger debate about the future of concussion safety in the sport overall.

And yet, at Desert Sands Unified, it appeared as if no one was worried about concussions, said Underwood, Salamone’s attorney. In a detailed interview with The Desert Sun, Underwood alleged that the school district failed his client in at least four distinct ways:

• First, he says Desert Sands had no “concussion protocol,” which is a plan-of-action for how to react when an athlete suffers a possible concussion. Although California law does not require schools have such a protocol, many districts – including the neighboring Palm Spring Unified – have reached above state standards to adopt a protocol on their own.
• Second, Underwood alleges Desert Sands coaches and athletic trainers have not undergone sufficient concussion training.
• Third, Underwood says school staff should have shown more concern when Salamone was struck the first time. Although Salamone wanted to keep playing, he mentioned that his “head hurt,” which would have triggered a medical response if staff were properly trained.
• And finally, Underwood said the Shadow Hills coach and the Indio High athletic trainer should have been far more responsive after Salamone was hit again and then specifically asked for help.

Taken together, these failures reveal a school district that has done little to prioritize the safety of its athletes, Underwood said. He stressed that Salamone didn’t get any help until he left school grounds.

“In this day and age, it’s unacceptable for an event to occur where a player is calling a friend just to get to a place where somebody will take an interest,” Underwood said. “What’s more important at this moment in time – what’s going on in the game? Or this kid?”

“I think we all know the answer. It’s just a game out there on the field.”

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Although Desert Sands Unified would not comment on Salamone’s lawsuit, the school district sent a statement to The Desert Sun saying it follows athletic injury guidelines from the California Interscholastic Federation, or CIF, which governs high school sports statewide. After two weeks of requests, the district also released an "injury protocol" for Shadow Hills High School – a single-page, undated Microsoft Word document – that says trainers should assess the severity of an injury on the field. The document's metadata says it was created Tuesday by an attorney in Los Angeles.

Desert Sands also refused to say if its trainers were certified, insisting this would be an invasion of their privacy.

Online records say that most aren’t. Only one of Desert Sand’s six athletic trainers are listed in a certification database published by the Board of Certification, the nation’s only accredited athletic director certification program. The lone certified trainer is not assigned to Indio High, where Salamone was injured during the soccer game.

Desert Sands also said it requires athletes to get a medical exam at the start of each season and informs both the student and parents about the risks and symptoms of concussions. When a concussion occurs, the district uses CIF protocols – called “return to learn” and “return to play” – to determine how long a student must sit out before they are ready to go back to class and athletics. A 2015 state law mandates that athletes sit out for at least a week.

But experts stressed that these protocols and laws only work if a concussion is actually diagnosed, which is why it is so important that schools have certified athletics trainers on the sidelines. Otherwise, concussions will be overlooked, and athletes like Salomone will stay in the game and be hit again.

“If your school and your district really believes that health and safety is of the utmost importance, then you’re going to hire a certified athletic trainer,” said Patty Curtiss, a concussion safety advocate who previously worked as a trainer at College of the Desert.

“Without it, you’re just going to miss a lot.”

Reporter Brett Kelman covers public safety for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at (760) 778-4642 or brett.kelman@desertsun.com or followed on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman.

Email reporter Andrew John at andrew.john@desertsun.com. Follow him on Twitter @Andrew_L_John.