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Sunday, July 21, 2002

By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

At 17, Eric Golacinski has become something of an expert on Christopher Reeve, the actor who went from soaring as Superman to surviving as a quadriplegic.

	Eric Golacinski, 17, with his mother Laurie Golacinski. (Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette)

Reeve, thrown from a horse seven years ago, hit the ground headfirst. Bones in his neck were crushed, leaving him paralyzed.

Golacinski, of Shaler, suffered a similar injury May 17 in a high school rugby match. He came within an eyelash of ending up as incapacitated as Reeve.

Golacinski broke his neck while tackling a Fox Chapel player. Neither he nor any of the three coaches of the Shaler Area High School club team recognized that he had a life-threatening injury, so he continued playing.

When the pain became unbearable, he took himself out of the match. He knelt on the sidelines without medical treatment for at least 30 minutes before his mother, Laurie Golacinski, drove him to UPMC St. Margaret near Aspinwall.

An X-ray revealed a fracture of the third cervical vertebra. One more jostle or even a deep breath might have left him a quadriplegic or even killed him.

Surgeons took a piece of Eric Golacinski's right hip and fused it in his neck. He appears on the road to recovery. His bulky neck brace came off Friday. He is walking and dreaming of college and a career as an engineer.

But his injury weighs on his family. Laurie Golacinski, a widow, has begun a campaign to abolish rugby in the Pittsburgh area. Ten area high schools offer rugby as a club sport, including four with girls' teams.

Last week, Golacinski asked Shaler school board members to drop rugby. They promised her that they would re-evaluate the program, a move that could spur similar discussions throughout the region.

As played in area high schools, Laurie Golacinski said, rugby is little more than a melee. More important, she said, the mayhem goes on without medical professionals available to treat serious injuries such as her son's.

Athletic trainers who work interscholastic football and soccer games are not on hand for rugby matches. Rugby coaches are trained in first-aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but they can be absorbed by the match, rather than focused on an injured player, she said.

Wally Elder, 39, a rugby enthusiast who was head coach of the Shaler Area High School team, said during an interview that he found himself in agreement with most of Golacinski's complaints.

He has become so disillusioned with high school rugby that he does not plan to coach it again. Matches last spring, he said, were marred by fights, unsportsmanlike tactics, profane spectators and the near death of Golacinski.

"There was a lot of ugliness going on. It really shouldn't be tolerated at this level," Elder said. "I've done a 180 [degree turn] on how I feel about it. ... The injury was really the topper, but there were a lot of things I didn't like."

C. William Schildnecht, a lawyer who is president of the Pittsburgh Harlequins Rugby Football Association, said what happened to Golacinski was a rare accident -- only the second serious neck injury he has seen in almost 30 years of playing and promoting the sport in Pittsburgh.

Aware of Laurie Golacinski's effort to abolish rugby in high schools, he is mounting a counter campaign. Schildnecht has written a letter touting the virtues of rugby and plans to send it to school superintendents, principals and athletic directors.

His Harlequins oversee the club competition, which Schildnecht said provided a valuable and exhilarating activity for teen-agers.

A derivative of soccer, rugby was started in England. As played internationally, Schildnecht said, the sport is fluid, challenging and fun.

He said his organization has tried to instill that brand of rugby in Western Pennsylvania schools.

"Unfortunately, in the United States, I'm not really proud of the way it's treated," he said, complaining that the artistry of rugby too often is mangled by the influence of football.

Schildnecht and the Harlequins formed a nonprofit corporation in 1995 that runs touch rugby programs for children. The high school club competition is rougher. Hard hitting is encouraged, and players wear no protective gear except for mouthpieces and athletic cups.

"In contact sprts there are always injuries," Schildnecht said. "We get ankle injuries, bumps, scrapes, bruises."

A broken neck, though, was something nobody could have expected or diagnosed, he said. He considers Golacinski's injury an aberration.

Schildnecht said the Harlequins run a tight ship, emphasizing safety and fair play. He estimated that three or four players were ejected from the high school rugby league last spring because of unsportsmanlike play.

On the whole, he said, rugby is good for children and provides Harlequins volunteers with a chance to give something back to the community.

"We've got 70 white guys going into underprivileged neighborhoods," he said of the youth rugby programs in Braddock, Hazelwood, Homewood-Brushton and McKees Rocks.

To improve safety at the high school level, Schildnecht said, he was open to the idea of providing trainers at matches.

His organization operates on a yearly budget of about $130,000 with a third to a half of the money used for the high school clubs.

"If we could find trainers to come in at a reasonable cost, we'd do it," he said.

In Schildnecht's view, Golacinski's neck injury was a case of everyone failing to grasp the seriousness of what had occurred. The play in which he was hurt happened in a blur and seemed uneventful.

After Golacinski took himself out of the match, Schildnecht said, the coaches evaluated him. "They took his word that it was a shoulder injury," he said.

Golacinski said the pain he felt seemed to be coming from his left shoulder, which he had dislocated during four years of playing football for Shaler Area High School.

His left side went numb from his jaw to his wrist. The pain that followed was excruciating. But, he said, no coach performed any evaluation or examination of him.

Elder, who was considered head coach of the Shaler team, agreed with that characterization.

He said he was surprised to see Golacinski on the sideline and asked him if he was all right. The boy replied that he could not continue to play because his shoulder was bothering him.

"That really was the extent of our conversation. At that time I had no idea of the severity of the injury. I got a call from one of Eric's teammates a couple days later, and that's when I learned he had a broken neck," Elder said.

While Golacinski was on the sidelines, assistant coach Bob Elizeus also inquired as to his well-being. Elizeus said he told the boy not to return to the field.

Even so, Elizeus said, Golacinski's injury did not seem appear so bad that he required emergency care. "It didn't seem like he was exhibiting symptoms that were that serious at that time."

Elder said he doubted that having a trainer on the sideline would have made a difference in Golacinski's case. "Not to downplay the effectiveness of trainers or the need for them, but I just don't believe in that situation that would have made any great impact."

Golacinski's mother disagreed.

She said the first hospital nurse who saw her son noticed that his right eye was dilated and immediately suspected he had a serious injury. The nurse hurried him to emergency treatment, where the neck fracture was detected within minutes.

Golacinski said an athletic trainer might have seen the same warning signals and called an ambulance, rather than letting her son remain on the sideline in pouring rain.

Beyond that, a trainer would be focused on a player's health, whereas the coaches were consumed by the match, which Shaler ended up losing.

"None of the coaches ever looked over their shoulders at Eric, much less evaluated him," she said.

Schildnecht said Golacinski's injury saddened the Harlequins family of coaches, players and referees. But, he said, what happened to him is not cause to derail the rugby program.

Lost in the discussion about the traumatic case of one boy, he said, are "the happy successes" that rugby also has provided.

So, in a faceoff with one determined mother, he will continue to fight for rugby to have a place in high schools.

"The Harlequins want to promote a game that we think is the best game in the world," Schildnecht said.