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I agree that it would have been known, but sickle cell trait should not interfere with his playing football. The only time these patients experience problems is when their oxygen content is greatly decreased, as in advanced COPD, flying in an unpressurized air craft, or severe bleeding during surgery. Even then, you would not expect them to just collapse and die.

I have a friend and colleague who had no idea that he had sickle cell trait until his baby son's screening test came back positive. They were in the process of having it repeated when his brother's new baby also had a positive test. Since the parents and the children were Caucasian, everyone was tested and it was found that both brothers were carriers. My friend is a veteran of the USN and has been active all of his life with no ill effects. It has turned out to be good for me that he has sickle cell trait because he very graciously allows my hematology students to draw his blood to use for our positive control when we do sickle cell testing. They all fight over who is going to draw his blood. They know him very well because they also have him for a class and he has great veins.

The boy could have died from an unusual electrical problem with the heart. Another possibility is Marfan Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects all of the connective tissue in the body and can lead to rupture of the aorta or other major blood vessels during vigorous exercise due to structural weakness of the vessels. Athletes that have collapsed and died are reported to have suffered from this condition. People with Marfan Syndrome tend to be tall and thin with long arms and legs. With this body type, they are often involved in athletics, especially basketball. Since the symptoms can go unnoticed, unless they have had genetic testing, these individuals have no idea that they are like ticking time bombs.

If he had sickle cell I’m pretty sure it would have been known and he wouldn’t have been playing football.

Not true. Check this story about Ryan Clark from the Steelers.

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"Freak thing" doesn't begin to describe what happened in Denver, not more than a couple of days after Clark's wife, Yonka, joked to him, "Hey, why don't you come back with your spleen intact this time?"

When he previously had played in Denver while with the Washington Redskins, Clark had been diagnosed with a spleen contusion following the game.

Turns out he was misdiagnosed.

And, just like in 2005, the high altitude in Denver, coupled with the sickle-cell trait that Clark has, caused his blood to sickle during the Steelers' Oct. 21 game against the Broncos.

His blood vessels burst this time, Clark said, and the resulting loss of oxygen to his spleen killed parts of it.

"Once it died," Clark said, "bacteria said, 'Hey, that's a good place to go chill.'"

Clark felt well enough after the Steelers' 31-28 loss to the Broncos to call his wife, which always has been his post-game ritual.

But Yonka Clark later got a call from one of his teammates who said Clark had to be taken off the team bus and whisked away to a hospital because he had been experiencing such discomfort. That turned out to be only the beginning of their harrowing ordeal. The worse Clark felt after he returned to Pittsburgh the more, it seemed, the battery of tests he took showed that nothing was wrong with him. "I was trying to be really respectful of the doctors and the trainers, and they tell you that you're going to be OK and sometimes I was kind of made to feel like I was milking it," Clark said. "I'm sure that wasn't their intentions, but they were talking to me like 'You're really OK. I don't know why you feel like you can't do certain things.' "

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Frustrated and scared, Clark sought another opinion in the middle of November. When he told the doctor about his symptoms, Clark immediately was sent to the hospital.

He had his spleen removed after an infection was discovered -- the operation took more than four hours because his spleen was in such bad shape -- and a couple of weeks later his gall bladder came out, too.