Robert Komosa doesn’t play football for applause or glory, and he certainly doesn’t do it to pile up gaudy statistics.
In this, the most glittering Rolling Meadows football season in recent years, the junior running back has carried the ball one time for all of four yards.
Numbers, though, never tell the whole truth about an athlete’s contribution to his team. In Komosa’s case, they are almost a complete lie.
The Robert Komosas of the football world help form the glue that binds together a successful team. Their value comes in practice sessions, where they help assure the team’s starters are ready on game day.
No college football scholarships await them, and they won’t enter a pro game without paying. They play football because they love it, simply because it’s fun.
“He takes what he does very seriously,” senior receiver Tim Guza said Thursday of Komosa, whom he has known for 14 years. “He really enjoys playing football.”
Players sometimes pay dearly for that devotion. Football is a dangerous game; serious injuries can occur in an instant.
On Wednesday it happened to Komosa.
He was performing on the scout team, the substitutes who do the grunt work of impersonating the upcoming opponent for the benefit of the starters. On a play called “24 Iso,” Komosa ran right, then saw an opening and cut left.
Then the seemingly routine careered into a freak and frightening accident that left the 6-foot-1-inch, 175-pound Komosa fighting for his life. Rolling Meadows coach Doug Millsaps said that one to three defenders tackled Komosa, and the momentum from the collision carried him into a metal fence school officials estimated to be 11 to 12 feet beyond the sideline of the practice field.
According to doctors, Komosa fractured two vertebrae in his neck when his head hit a fence post.
“It happened so fast,” junior receiver Bob McNamara said. “A couple of guys hit him on the legs. Another guy tried to finish him, to complete the tackle.”
Komosa, 17, of Arlington Heights, was rushed to Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge and later flown by helicopter to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. He was listed in critical condition Wednesday night.
A neurosurgeon who treated him at Lutheran General Wednesday night described Komosa as unconscious and paralyzed. Northwestern Memorial officials declined to release information Thursday at the family’s request, but school officials said he responded to his mother and sister that morning.
“I saw him fall like a ton of bricks,” junior lineman Kurt Gersch said. “Now, all that is going through your head is seeing him hit that pole and hearing that noise.”
School officials said Thursday they will review the safety of their practice fields. Ron Freeman, assistant principal for athletics, said a fence has been in place at the field since the school was built 29 years ago “and we’ve never had an incident.”
Rolling Meadows is 5-1 overall and 2-0 in the Mid-Suburban League East, which ties it for first place with Buffalo Grove. Those two teams will play as scheduled at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Rolling Meadows, Buffalo Grove coach Rich Roberts said Thursday.
Millsaps said Komosa has played a big part in Rolling Meadows’ success, even though he rarely plays.
“He encompasses everything we believe in, and that’s integrity, hard work, taking care of each other, caring,” Millsaps said. “That’s what makes this team special.”
Millsaps and school officials met with every player, including members of the freshman and sophomore teams, Thursday morning to update them on Komosa’s condition. A crisis management team was available to answer questions.
“I think there’s a real sense of loss,” Millsaps said. “We’re all scared.”
Teammates and acquaintances described Komosa as a quiet young man who loved to fix cars. Russ Novak, the father of one of Komosa’s closest friends, said his son, Matt, and Komosa wanted to open an automotive repair shop after they finished high school. Russ Novak said Komosa worked as a car porter at an area dealership.
“He wanted to achieve things. He had goals,” Novak said.
Frederick Mueller, chairman of the department of exercise and sports science at the University of North Carolina and an expert on catastrophic sports injuries, said injuries such as Komosa’s have decreased dramatically in the last 30 years.
Mueller said head and neck injuries cause about six deaths and about six cases of paralysis a year. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he said, those injuries caused 25 to 30 cases of paralysis annually and another two dozen deaths.
That drop has come even though the number of students participating in football has grown substantially, he said. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, football is the country’s most popular sport, with about 1 million participants last fall.
Mueller attributes the decrease in injuries in part to a rule change in the late ’70s that prohibits tackling or blocking with the head and face, improved medical care, better coaching and improvements in helmets.
Football, however, remains risky business.
Dr. John Powell of Michigan State University said a recent study he conducted found football, among 10 high school sports surveyed, had the highest rate of injury, with about 50 injuries per 100 players. The study also found that football accounted for the largest share, 13.3 percent, of head, neck and spinal injuries among the 10 sports.
In addition, it found that 10.3 percent of football injuries are neurotraumatic, and that about one in 10 football injuries was considered major.
“Every sport has an inherent risk,” said Powell, a member of Michigan State’s department of kinesiology and the athletic department’s sports medicine team. “Football has an inherent risk no matter what we do, even under the best circumstances that we can imagine.
“When you have people running at high speeds and collisions occur, you’re going to have injuries of some variety.”
Still, he said, instances of catastrophic injuries are “consistently rare.”
“You’re talking about . . . hundreds of thousands of games and hundreds of millions of collisions producing maybe eight to 12 (such) events a year,” Powell said. “It has to be the right angle, the right force at the right fraction of a second.”
And often, it matters little how skilled a player might be.
“Skill is a factor, definitely,” Powell said. “But for that fraction of a second, when the force was being applied, that force didn’t care what your skill was.”
