JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A new Florida law now makes it mandatory for new student-athletes to get their heart checked before they can play a sport in high school.
They will be required to have an electrocardiogram (EKG) as part of their sports physical starting at the beginning of the 2026-2027 school year.
The goal is to catch undiagnosed heart conditions before a young athlete suffers cardiac arrest, which can result in death.
An EKG is a test that records the electrical activity of the heart by measuring electrical impulses through small electrode patches attached to the skin of the chest, arms and legs.
It is painless. The results can indicate issues such as heart attacks and irregular heartbeats.
Sudden cardiac arrest in student-athletes is not as rare as you might think.
Chance Gainer, a senior at Port St. Joe High School in the Florida panhandle, collapsed during a football game last September. He died less than a month after celebrating his 18th birthday.
The new Florida law is named in his honor.
Three other high school athletes died the same month as Gainer, also from heart issues, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, which also reports 42% of catastrophic events involving middle, high school, and college athletes were from sudden cardiac arrest.
Rafe Maccarone, a sophomore in Cocoa Beach, collapsed during soccer practice in 2007 and died. His family later learned he had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease involving thickening of the heart muscle.
There are often no symptoms until cardiac arrest occurs. His close friend, Evan Ernst, said the 15-year-old had passed every one of his sports physicals and was in perfect health until he collapsed.
Rafe Maccarone died one week shy of his 16th birthday.
“People just have no clue how common this is,” said Ernst, who was there the day Maccarone collapsed. “Rafe’s life represents the leading cause of death in sports.”
The American Heart Association reports 7,000 children suffer cardiac arrest each year.
Ernst insists that number is even higher, pointing to data that tracks the number of times an AED, Automated External Defibrillator, is used to shock a young athlete’s heart, which reveals 23,000 cases a year in the United States.
Ernst and his friends made a promise to honor Maccarone by doing everything they could to prevent any other young athletes from dying while playing.
He co-founded Who We Play For, a nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating preventable sudden cardiac death in student-athletes through affordable heart screenings.
The organization has already successfully convinced several school districts in Florida to require EKGs of student-athletes, but the new state law now makes it mandatory in all public schools.
While it only applies to first-time student-athletes in grades 9-12, Ernst hopes all parents will have their student-athletes tested.
“We’re hoping that every kid will want to get their heart checked and will ask their pediatricians, and this will be a leap forward to changing the standard of care in the state,” he said.
Ernst said Who We Play For is working toward offering EKGs either for free or for $20 to all Florida high schools through their athletic trainers. The test results will be read by pediatric cardiologists through a partnership with all 12 of the children’s hospitals in the state.
The Access to AEDs Act funds grants for public schools to develop programs promoting automated external defibrillation (AED) and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in schools.