By: Danielle Ulman

The death of former Dunbar High School basketball star and Boston Celtics captain Reggie Lewis during an off-season practice in 1993 shocked many, despite warning signs that Lewis may have had heart problems.

Lewis had previously fainted during a basketball game, setting off concerns about his heart health.

Not all athletes have a warning sign or know the risks of playing sports with heart problems. Bob Wade, Lewis’ former coach at Dunbar (and also a former head coach at the University  of Maryland), wants that to change.

Wade has teamed up with Johns Hopkins to offer a screening program to detect heart abnormalities in student athletes. Volunteers will test student athletes during the third annual Hopkins Heart Hype screening on Saturday at the 14th annual Basketball Academy Competition at Morgan State University’s student center.

Hopkins says that as many as 300 athletes from 18 teams, ranging from 14 to 18 years old, will be examined for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), an inherited heart defect, which produced the errant heart rhythm under exercise stress that caused Lewis’ sudden death.

Hopkins and Wade want to help more athletes discover hidden heart disease so they can save lives. They hope that their program will be a model for programs nationwide.

But some athletes may not want to know about their heart problems. After Lewis fainted during a playoff game, a team of 12 cardiologists at Boston’s New England Baptist Hospital told him he had an enlarged heart and should not play basketball. Lewis went for a second opinion at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where he got a new diagnosis that didn’t involve heart disease, rather a fainting condition brought on by exertion.

After his death, Lewis’ wife said he had gotten a third opinion and was told to monitor his heart. He was planning on doing just that, if he returned to playing for the Celtics. He just never got the chance.

Others are also working to compile a registry of sudden athlete deaths, following the deaths of several prominent athletes, including Joseph Kennedy, a Toronto Blue Jays pitcher, and Damien Nash, a Denver Broncos running back, who died after playing in a charity basketball game raising money for heart transplant research. Nash had started the Darris Nash Find a Heart Foundation for his brother, who had a transplant.

For more information, you can check out the Sudden Death in Athletes program, run by the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation.