There is a lot more to this story than Jeff Schroder having a heart attack and hitting the floor while officiating a college basketball game in Marshall, Minn.
Thankfully, it is Schroder himself, a 46-year-old married father of two, who is saying this a little more than a week after he lay on the Southwest Minnesota State University court in danger of dying right there in front of everyone.
He says this while sitting with his wife at his Brandon home, pressing a rolled-up towel against his chest that alleviates the strain of emergency quadruple bypass surgery.
Referee Jeff Schroder at his home Wednesday, Dec. 10, in Brandon. Schroder had a quadruple bypass surgery after a heart attack he suffered on New Year's Eve. Briana Sanchez / Argus Leader
The First Premier Bankcard employee is feeling better every day, though challenges remain. He is overwhelmingly grateful in spite of the trauma and discomfort that comes with being so close to something so frightening.
“I’m not afraid to dive in and talk about this if it might help somebody again down the road,” said Schroder, who has officiated basketball for 27 years in the area. “Maybe somebody will go get themselves checked out or purchase an AED (automated external defibrillator) who doesn’t have one now. If it can help like that down the road, then every interview I do is successful.”
No one would say that New Year’s Eve afternoon in Marshall started out as Schroder’s lucky day. But after the fact – after he stumbled and fell and the world went dark – a series of good fortunes piled up in a hurry.
“There was a movie out there called, “The Perfect Storm," Schroder said. “Well, this was kind of like the perfect heart attack. I don’t know how else to put it. I had two of my better friends refereeing with me who were able to get in touch with my wife (Larissa). A doctor was there who really wasn’t even supposed to be there. There were athletic trainers on hand. There was an AED there. No one wants to go through that, but it was about as perfect a situation as it could be if somebody was going to save somebody’s life.”
Schroder got interested in officiating while following his father, Chuck, around doing the same stuff. By the time he was in his teens, Jeff was riding along with his dad and doing the junior varsity game while the elder Schroder officiated the varsity.
The week leading up to his heart attack, the Brandon native had been trying to whip a virus that had been lingering within him for weeks. He was feeling well enough to do games Friday and Saturday and got about halfway through the game on Sunday – Southwest Minnesota State vs. Wayne State – when the lights began to dim.
“I didn’t feel that great, but I thought it was from the virus,” Schroder said. “Obviously I’d never had a heart attack before so I didn’t know what was happening, but I kept feeling weaker and weaker throughout the second half. Then everything just gave out.”
He’d already had several conversations with his officiating colleagues about how he was feeling. Twice Southwest Minnesota State athletic trainer Laura Crowell, seeing how fatigued he looked, asked him if he was OK to continue.
“The first time he told me he’d been sick and it felt good to sweat it out,” Crowell said. “The second time he said it was great to be out moving around.”
He doesn’t remember much after he fell, though his refereeing partners for the day, Jim Ricketts Jr. of Sioux Falls and Levi Pearson of Watertown, can fill in some blanks.
“Out of the corner of my eye I saw him go down,” said Ricketts, whose father Jim had refereed with Schroder’s father. “I knew something wasn’t right. If you trip and fall, you bring your hands out in front of you and he didn’t really fall like that.”
Seeing Schroder face down and not moving in front of the home bench, Crowell and SMSU coach Brad Bigler rushed to his aid. Crowell sent Bigler to the scorer’s table to get somebody to call 911. Wayne State athletic trainer Muffin Morris, a friend of Crowell’s, joined Crowell as did Jess Swedzinski, an athletic trainer from the area who was at the game.
“We were just trying to keep his airway open,” Crowell said. “He had a pulse and he was still breathing.”
They rolled him to his back to assist his breathing – they were thinking he’d banged his head – when the breaths became more labored. Moments later he was in full cardiac arrest.
Though he was not aware of it at the time, from that point onward Schroder started rolling sevens. As fortune would have it, Bigler’s brother-in-law, Jeremy Walker, a doctor visiting from Nashville, was standing nearby along with Lois Sinram, a nurse and Bigler’s godmother.
It was a bit of a surprise for the rest of the family that Walker was there at all. He’d anticipated work was going to keep him occupied in Tennessee, but at the last minute he was able to get on the same flight as the rest of his family to take in New Year’s in Marshall.
“It’s one thing to learn how to give CPR on a mannequin,” Bigler said. “Jeremy had been in a few code red situations in the last year and he’d saved lives. There’s an intensity to it with how hard you have to push.”
Walker took over on the chest compressions while a trainer ran to get the AED. They cut Schroder’s shirt open to attach the device’s leads and then stood back and waited for a response from the unit, which assesses a victim’s heartbeat and provides audible instructions on what should happen next.
The AED said Schroder’s heart needed a shock. Translation: If you don’t do something soon, he’s gone. They pushed the button, his chest lurched, his heart reset itself and Schroder was again among the living.
“We watched him come back,” Crowell said. “His color came back, his breathing was sporadic at first, but he was retaking control of himself.”
Pearson was now on the phone with Larissa, finding out what medications Schroder was taking, while the paramedics got up to speed on what had just happened. At that point, Schroder stirred and Crowell heard a new voice amid the chatter.
“I can hear you talking, you know,” Schroder said.
It was a gift to the rest of his refereeing crew and those who had worked to save his life. Though Schroder doesn’t remember it, he kept talking. When Ricketts approached Crowell after his colleague regained consciousness, he asked her whether he was ornery.
“I said yes,” Crowell said. “Some of his language was very colorful.”
“I heard that,” Ricketts said, “and felt a lot better about things.”
With Schroder now headed to the Marshall hospital, where he would later be airlifted to Sioux Falls, there were still almost 12 minutes of basketball to be played.
The remaining two referees went back to the coaches and asked them if they wanted to keep going. There were consultations with NSIC officials and SMSU administrators. Both teams wished to proceed and they finished it up – an 86-65 Mustang victory – with Ricketts and Pearson doing the officiating.
“I went to Jim and we agreed we needed to take a minute before finishing the game,” said Pearson, a Watertown PGA teaching pro. “Jeff was alert and talking when he left. He was in the best hands and he was going to be just fine. As grave as it all looked, on the opposite side of things we told ourselves it was going to turn out well. We were going to get through it.”
The rest of the game proceeded without any thing remarkable happening other than the gym being conspicuously quiet to the end.
“My communication with those guys was a lot different the rest of the game,” said Bigler, who along with Walker visited with Schroder at the hospital before he was flown to Sioux Falls. “Even last weekend, I was controlling my emotions quite differently than I usually would. When something like this happens, it’s a good reminder that they’re good people.”
The what-ifs were abundant in the aftermath. What if Schroder had decided he was too tired to continue and had gone to the locker room, where there would have been no one there to save him? What if it had happened on the ride home with Ricketts?
“At Jeff’s age and condition, cardiac arrest doesn’t enter your mind at all,” Pearson said. “One of the things I’ve taken from this is that when someone tells you they’re not feeling well, pay a little closer attention and learn what the signs might be.”
It had been an incredibly grim, but ultimately inspiring, chain of events.
Doctors have since told Schroder, who had always checked out fine at his yearly physical, that he could not have seen it coming. There is a history of heart disease in the family, however, and the clock on the incident ultimately started ticking when he was back in his 20s.
“A paramedic told me Jeff had had what they call a ‘widow-maker,’” Crowell said. “He’d been a paramedic for more than 20 years and he’d only seen a person go from full cardiac arrest to being able to speak again twice in his career.”
Schroder is mending. He moves slowly and tires quickly, but he’s walking on his own and will soon start a cardiac rehab program that will include three sessions a week. Doctors have told him it will be two months yet before he really begins feeling like himself again.
Still less than two weeks since he fell, he can deliver information on his own discomforts with matter-of-fact calmness. Assessing the outpouring of support from his refereeing colleagues and others that followed his scrape with death is not as easy. It’s all still overwhelming.
“I’m truly blessed to have the people I have around me within the reffing community,” Schroder said. “I really don’t know how to express that. There’s a camaraderie that you can’t really explain. I’ve had high school coaches reach out – guys where we’ve had our ins and outs during games – who have been very kind. And just having Jimmy and Levi there with me that day and knowing they had to get a hold of my wife. They were the guys who had to go back out there and finish the game after seeing one of their buddies go down. That took a lot.”
Schroder will return to officiating, he said, at the highest level they will take him. If that’s eighth-graders, so be it. The irony as he looks back on the ordeal is that the highest praise goes to those who were with him when he wasn’t aware of it.
“I don’t know how to say it really – I owe those people everything,” he said. “What else can you say after they saved my life? I owe them everything.”
