Matt Reed: How Brevard soccer grads save lives

Rafe Maccarone's death from heart failure at a soccer practice in 2007 crushed Cocoa Beach High teammates who had known him since childhood.

But it also inspired them. Seven years later, the award-winning nonprofit they formed in Maccarone's memory has provided low-cost or free heart screenings to nearly 50,000 young athletes. It has likely saved dozens of lives.

The group is called Who We Play For. To learn more, I interviewed founders Evan Ernst and Zane Schultz, now graduates of Florida State University.

Question: Explain what you do — and why you've kept going.

Ernst: It started with one simple belief, that Brevard County and Cocoa Beach could drive a national movement to protect student athletes' hearts. We go into middle schools and high schools around the country and provide affordable screenings.

Schultz: We talk to principals, athletic directors and even superintendents and do whatever is most convenient for them. We bring in an EKG machine, set it up … divide up the girls and guys.

The screenings take about five minutes apiece. It's simple.

Q: How big is the need?

Ernst: Sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death of student athletes in the United States. Up to 10,000 kids a year die from detectable heart conditions. Our friend Rafe was one of them. And we learned that one simple, painless, five-minute EKG could have saved Rafe's life as well as those other 10,000 kids.

Q: You're not doctors, though. Who reviews the test results?

Ernst: We send all the results to a team of cardiologists in Texas. They are some of the best in the country. They send back their results within three business days to a HIPPA-certified nurse or athletic trainer at the school, who then sends them out to the participants.

Q: I saw a photo on Twitter of you two donating a defibrillator machine to the Cocoa Beach skate park. Explain.

Schultz: That was Sunday night. We fund-raised for that. The picture is with a gentleman named Scooter, born and raised in Cocoa Beach, who is visionary and reached out. We were happy to get that for him, an automated external defibrillator.

Q: I suppose skaters are as likely as any other athletes to have heart problems.

Ernst: With an AED, anybody can use it. When you open it up, it walks you through it. It speaks to you.

Q: Rafe Maccarone would be 23 now, but I vividly remember our headlines. What does he mean to you today?

Ernst: Rafe was a kid we played soccer with from third grade through our junior year in high school. We played club and high school together, trained together every day. Then, one day -- in the year we thought we could go all the way to the state championship -- he collapsed at practice and died due to HCM, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

We adopted a mantra: "Play for Rafe."

Schultz: Soccer was an incredible outlet for us, a bunch of 16- and 17-year-olds. The community helped us start a scholarship, and we did a 5K. It was so beautiful.

For the next seven years, we kept figuring it out, step by step. We made a lot of mistakes. But we were proactive about going to conferences and seeking sit-downs with influential people in the community. It turned into something special.

Question: Results?

Ernst: It's pretty wild. Last summer, we were the first to ever put on a college-run heart screening, at FSU. We screened 175 kids. Of those, 11 had heart conditions. One actually had a life-threatening heart condition.

After that, we merged with another organization in Texas, and now we're all Who We Play For. Together, in Washington, Texas, Louisiana and Florida, we have screened more than 49,000 kids.

Of those, 60 kids are living today because of it.

Q: Your signature annual event in Cocoa Beach, including a downtown block party, is interesting. Describe that.

Schultz: The December to to ReMem6er is our jewel. We had an alumni game. It's a chance for all these young people in Brevard who haven't seen each other while in college to come together.

We all have this special connection that is Rafe. When it happened, people we didn't even know were reaching out to us. That raw compassion we saw gave us the motivation to keep going.

Q: You run a second soccer game called "Brevard's finest" -- about 45 players, mostly college-aged going full-speed. Why did you call it that?

Ernst: The weekend Rafe died, he was supposed to play in a 3-vs.-3 soccer tournament with my little brother and a couple others. Rafe came up with their team name: Brevard's Finest.

Contact Reed at 321-242-3631 or mreed@floridatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattReedWrites