Parent concerned with how coaches handled lightning
The mother of a Picacho Middle School football player, who administered CPR to a 13-year-old boy who was struck by lightning this week, told ABC-7 she and other parents have a lot of questions about how the situation was handled by coaches leading up to the lightning strike.
And after it happened, as well.
Anna Krause, whose son Noah plays on the team, said many parents of boys on the team, not just her, are concerned with the actions, or inaction, of the coaches involved.
She even went as far as saying some parents are considering pulling their sons off the team because they no longer trust those coaches with their children.
“You’re trusting these people with your children’s lives and if they can’t help your child then who’s supposed to help them?” Krause said. “A lot of parents are upset because they feel like the coaches let them down. The coach, all the coaches, let them down.”
Krause said she sought the permission of other parents before speaking with ABC-7 and they want to know why their children were still on the field when lightning struck.
“They could of stopped the game, or practice, and they didn’t,” Krause said. “It does not take a rocket scientist to figure that out that it’s raining, regardless it’s a few drops. You don’t know. You don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“The coaches indicated they saw no lightning in the sky,” said Jo Galvan, director of communications for Las Cruces Public Schools. “It started to drizzle and so the coaches decided we need to go back into the gym, and as they started to do that, out of nowhere there was a big bolt of lightning.”
Krause said the coaches, including Picacho Middle School head coach Tim Nelson, were nowhere to be found after the lightning strike.
“It upsets me because everybody is saying the coaches are the ones that gave him CPR and they didn’t do anything,” she said. “They didn’t help him. They just ran.”
Galvan disputes that, telling ABC-7 that after Nelson and other coaches cleared the field, they returned to help.
“Everybody, the coaches, they just need to come up with a better plan, an emergency evacuation,” Krause said. “They should be trained to do that.”
Galvan said LCPS is already reviewing its training and policies.
“Do we have the right training in place?” Galvan said. “Are we making the right decisions as to when kids need to be brought in? So, we’ll be talking about that more and making sure we have all the right information to the right people.”
Galvan told ABC-7 that LCPS does not require CPR certification as part of its criteria for coaches. She added, however, the district is now considering making that a requirement in the future.
