Nowadays we all have a lot of different roles in our lives. I’m a Marketing
Director at Independence Blue Cross (IBX), where I’ve worked for 13 years.
I’m also a wife, a mom, and a coach. And I serve as President of the

North Penn Little League.

I find each of these roles both challenging and rewarding in different ways.
The most challenging role is probably “coach mom,” but I’m hoping that will
be the one with the biggest payoff in the long run. Managing a Little League
can be demanding at times, but it’s also very rewarding. I get to see the
kids not only improving their baseball skills, but also learning how to deal
with challenges, and, more importantly, making friends and having fun. As a
volunteer-run organization that relies on registration fees, fundraisers,
volunteers, and generous sponsors to exist, it seems like there’s never
enough time or money to do all the things on my list. But it still all has
to get done somehow.

Sudden Cardiac Death in Athletics

I joined the North Penn Little League Board in 2021 and became its president
in January 2023. And right before that happened, Buffalo Bills player

Damar Hamlin had a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA)

on the field during a game. Basically, his heart stopped suddenly.

He was immediately resuscitated on the field and has

made a full recovery. But, for me, that incident was a scary wakeup call. If that kind of
emergency could happen during a pro football game, it could happen at
another sporting event…like a Little League game.

Luckily, SCA is pretty rare in athletics. One study of the National
Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) estimated that it happens to about

one in every 40,000 U.S. collegiate athletes. However, it’s still the most common cause of non-accidental death in that
population.

SCA also kills about 2,000 children in the U.S. every year, and is responsible for up to five percent of all deaths among children
between the ages of five and 19.

If a player collapses on the field, every second counts. So if you’re
responsible for a Little League, you’ve got to make sure people are equipped
to respond quickly.

Getting an Automatic Emergency Defibrillator

When I became president of the league, it was very important to me that we
have an automatic emergency defibrillator (AED) on hand. Not only do I think
it’s the right thing to do, but I just can’t stand the idea that there could
be a cardiac emergency on the field and we wouldn’t be prepared to respond!

So I began shopping around…and quickly discovered that

an AED can cost upwards of $1,400. That was not in our budget! What were we supposed to do?

That’s when I came across

Simon’s Heart, an amazing nonprofit that, among other things, allows people to crowdfund
the purchase of an AED. This was the solution! I started a campaign on
Simon’s Heart and

asked my LinkedIn connections to contribute.

I don’t know how we did it, but in just two weeks, we had raised the money
we needed. I was astounded. But I’m finding that when you ask for stuff like
this, people want to help.

I ordered the AED, it came, and now it’s in our coaches’ room. I hope we
never have to use it. But it’s there — ready to save lives.

Next Steps

Now that we have our AED, we are looking to get CPR and AED

training

for the volunteers in our league who are likely to respond to these kinds of
emergencies. Since our volunteers already do so much, our League would like
to cover the cost of these trainings, and they can be pricey, too. But we
were able to find a local ambulance company, VMSC of Lansdale, that will
train us at cost. We should be able to implement the trainings in fall 2024
or spring 2025.

There also are some resources out there for getting free CPR trainings, such
as

Penn Medicine’s Mobile CPR

or

IBX’s Mobile Hands-Only CPR Kiosks. You don’t get certified, but you do learn the steps to identify and
respond to a SCA emergency. And, for that matter, even if you haven’t been
trained to use them, AEDs will walk you through what you need to do to until
a medical professional arrives. I just wanted my Little League’s volunteers
to have the option of becoming fully certified.

Thanks to our Simon’s Heart fundraiser, we now have one AED at our main
field. But our league is growing. We’re up to 450 kids now — that’s 50 more
families than last year. And we have two other locations. So, we really need
to get more AEDs.

It will happen. We did it once, we can do it again. And if we can do it,
other organizations like ours can do it too.

AEDs Save Lives

If you’re reading this, and you’re responsible for the safety of young
athletes, please consider getting an AED. If you know someone else who’s in
that position, please share this blog with them.

Yes, AEDs aren’t cheap; but with the help of organizations like Simon’s
Heart, cost doesn’t have to be a barrier to owning this game-changing
technology.

In the U.S.,

bystanders save about 1,700 lives every year

by using AEDs while waiting for emergency medical services to arrive. The
more AEDs there are, and the more people who

know how to use them, the more lives can be saved.

This content was originally published on

IBX Insights.

About Erin Thurston

As director of member marketing at Independence Blue Cross, Erin Thurston is
accountable for the member outreach strategy and multi-channel execution of
communications for the Commercial segment. Additionally, her team manages
the acquisition marketing and retention efforts for under-65 individual and
family health plans. Outside of IBX, Erin is a wife and a mom of two young
boys. As a former collegiate athlete, she enjoys attending her boys’
sporting events and all things fitness.