An American football rests on a green field marked with white yard lines.
PHILADELPHIA – A former football player at the U.S. Military Academy can’t sue the NCAA over his amyotrophic lateral sclerosis diagnosis, a Pennsylvania appeals court has ruled.
Charles Schretzman, who played for Army in the 1980s, alleged the NCAA should have warned him that repeated head injuries from football could cause ALS decades later, but the Superior Court on Sept. 16 says the state’s no-duty negligence rule prevents his claims.
That rule says when a sport carries an inherent risk, a plaintiff can’t allege the defendant owed a duty to warn. A Philadelphia federal judge decided a head injury is one such inherent risk with football.
Judge Timika Lane’s opinion went through a history of cases blaming sports for head injuries in Pennsylvania.
“(W)e acknowledge that the case authority we cite above involve softball and baseball injures, and not football,” she wrote. “Nevertheless, the trial court applied the no-duty rule on a finding that head injuries and head impacts are common, frequent, expected and inherent in football.”
The inherent “risk” is not the development of ALS, the court found. It is a head injury from collisions.
The state Supreme Court in 1978 addressed the no-duty rule in a case brought by a fan who was struck in the eye with a baseball at a Pittsburgh Pirates game. The rule applies to risks that are “common, frequent and expected.”
In the years that followed, a nonprofit baseball association in Hershey defeated claims brought by a coach hit in the eye with a ball. In another ruling, an Eastern Suburban League couldn’t sue after being hit in the head with a softball and arguing the league should have had a helmet requirement.
Schretzman tried to distinguish his situation from these cases by claiming he wasn’t warned against developing a latent disease decades later caused by neurological injuries.
“A latent disease that players cannot see, predict or understand without specialized medical knowledge is not the type of risk that (other cases) deemed inherent to sports,” his attorneys wrote.
But the Superior Court disagreed, finding one of those earlier cases specified “the risk at issue… is being struck by an errant softball; the risk is not the injuries that resulted from being struck.”
