Derek was a rascal, a habitual jokester and prankster who liked to see you squirm before sharing a laugh with you. He once downloaded a fake computer screen to trick a panicked teammate into thinking that his laptop had a crack in it, and another time gave a freshman player directions to the weight room, sending him all around the building to return to the same spot he’d started from—right across the hall from the weight room. His parents once suspected he had hosted a party at their State College home, but the only evidence was a broken coaster and the fridge being a few inches out of place. When Ken and Kristen told that story in the hospital, a bunch of his friends’ gazes dropped immediately to the floor, and they knew their hunch had been right.

But there was another side of Derek; he never hesitated to help people, and he never needed credit. When he was in grade school, he stood up to bullies on the school bus, getting beaten up the first time. He didn’t back down the second time, either, and the bullies, who had been terrorizing other kids, too, were kicked off the bus. In college, he helped a roommate cover his bills without saying anything to his parents or asking for additional money. Even the position he played, fullback, was by nature one of self-sacrifice; he paved the way for his teammates with timely blocks, letting others score the touchdowns. His teammates adored him, referring to him as simply “Sheely.” They never questioned his toughness.

The phone call had come so quickly, and Derek’s final days in the hospital were such a blur, that Ken and Kristen and their daughter Keyton ’15 Lib, who had just started her freshman year at University Park, didn’t have much time to process how Derek had been hurt. A freak accident, they were told. But the following March—two days after they had received a letter from the NCAA that expressed condolences but stated that the college athletics governing body could not “take the risk completely out of contact sports”—they received an anonymous email titled “Information Behind the Death of Derek Sheely.” One of his former Frostburg State teammates shared details about Derek’s final days on the practice field, describing a drill in which blocking fullbacks were not permitted to defend themselves. After one such drill, the email said, Derek appeared to be woozy, and later in the practice he complained to a coach that he had a headache. The coach called him names and told him to “get back out there” as a second coach looked on and said nothing. A few moments later, Derek went down on all fours. As the trainers helped him off the field, he collapsed. “I am not completely sure what was told to you as far as him telling a coach that he had a headache,” the teammate wrote, “but quite simply two coaches were aware that he did have a headache and took NO precautions to ensure his safety.”

Based on everything we were told, we thought what happened to Derek was like a lightning strike, a tragic and rare accident, and that no one was to blame … but all that changed in the light of the anonymous email and compounded by troubling insights shared by some of his teammates when they were interviewed by our attorneys. I have messages from teammates who shouldered blame to this day because they believed they should have done more to help Derek. Not a single message from an adult in charge, however. White-hot waves of rage coursed through me, unexpectedly expected, and I wanted to spit at them, strike them with missiles, pummel them with fists. We now had to shift to grieving the preventable death of our son, as if our grief couldn’t get any worse. This grief shift felt as if Derek died all over again.

There was never an investigation by the NCAA, but the organization, along with two Frostburg State coaches, an athletic trainer, and a helmet manufacturer—did settle a lawsuit filed by the family for $1.2 million; it marked the first time the NCAA had ever settled with an individual plaintiff in a brain injury case. To the Sheelys, it wasn’t about the money as much as it was about accountability, but they saw opportunities. They reached out to researchers at Penn State, including director of athletic medicine Wayne Sebastianelli, to see if those settlement dollars could make an impact that would extend far beyond the Frostburg State practice fields.

When he came to Penn State as director of athletic medicine in 1992, Sebastianelli didn’t know what he didn’t know about concussions. “When I had my first athlete unconscious on the field, I said, ‘I need to figure out what’s going on here,’” he recalls. “Basically, in those days it was, ‘How many fingers, what do you remember?’ And if you only had a headache, you went back in the game.”

Sebastianelli had lettered for two seasons on the football team at the University of Rochester, and when he first started exploring the effects of concussions with an accelerometer—a device worn on the helmet that uses microsensors to chart the speed and force of impacts—he wore (and paid for) it himself, powering into a tackling dummy at 110 Gs. When he met Semyon Slobounov, who had recently arrived at University Park after earning doctorate degrees in psychology at the University of Leningrad and kinesiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he saw someone who could provide the research framework. Slobounov saw a partner who had real-time access to student-athletes. “At Penn State, I realized that concussion is not really a neuropsychological issue,” Slobounov says. “It’s a medical neurological problem.”

Slobounov started the Sport Concussion Research and Service Lab in 1995. Since, the pair have collaborated on more than 60 papers and three books on sports-related traumatic brain injuries. When the Sheelys reached out to them, the researchers put the settlement money toward a study, which was also supported by the NCAA and the Department of Defense CARE Consortium, that would allow them to examine the effects of subconcussive impact on the brain. Over the course of the next five years, the researchers used accelerometers to measure the number of head impacts a group of 30 Nittany Lion football players sustained during practices, compared baseline and postimpact MRIs, and took blood and saliva tests. They also considered genetic factors and the different responsibilities—and exposure to head-to-head collisions—of various position groups. They found that the brain could suffer just as much trauma from repeated impacts as from the one that knocked a player out cold. “More and more evidence actually suggests that subconcussive impacts have the same damaging influence as a full-blown concussive injury,” Slobounov says. “There is nothing mild about mild concussion if you look at the cellular level.”

The grant covered the fees for the publication of 29 papers on their research findings, pre- and postseason MRI scans of the players involved, and the costs of shipping players’ blood samples, which had to be processed at a facility in Orlando, Fla., since there weren’t resources to do so at University Park. Perhaps more importantly, the funding allowed Sebastianelli and Slobounov to train multiple graduate students, who gained invaluable research experience and the opportunity to develop their own questions and ideas regarding an issue about which researchers still know very little. “It paid it forward for others to get interested and then stimulate their thought processes about trying to solve the problem,” Sebastianelli says.

Sometimes I just wanted to stop and sit in a dark room, because every day without Derek was my dark room. And that I looked for the bleak; in the dark was where I could see my son most clearly. I wanted to tell him I yearned for the very dark places, because there’s safety there. Derek must be there, so why would I ever try to leave the dark?

Kristen tried to start writing about Derek a couple of months after his death. But the pain was too near the surface, her thoughts too scattered to clearly express what she wanted to say. Gradually, she started writing journal entries, and poems. At Keyton’s suggestion, she took a 30-day online writing course about grief taught by author and psychotherapist Megan Devine. By 2021, she had enough words and an idea of how to weave them together to start putting together her memoir. It was almost ready to go in 2024, and then, she says, “I changed the whole structure.” Very Dark Places is a story about her son’s death, but it is also a story about his life, of the close bond between a mother and son who doted on and looked after one another, about how Kristen felt her identity shift in his absence, and how she struggled with the well-meant but troublesome urges of those around her to move forward, to seek solace in his memories. “‘Peace’ and ‘healing’ and ‘helpful’ and ‘comfort’ are words that give me trouble,” she says. “Writing the book helped. At the same time, it changed nothing, and it changed everything.”

It’s the only injury that the person who’s injured doesn’t know they’re injured. You cannot rely on the person who has a concussion or brain injury to make the decisions about their own health.

The Derek Sheely Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, was established in 2011. Its mission is to raise awareness about concussions and traumatic brain injuries, and to support college students who display the same qualities of academic success and leadership that defined Derek. A scholarship that has been awarded each year since 2012 to a Frostburg State student who meets GPA and community-service requirements was expanded to a full-tuition scholarship after the NCAA settlement. The first recipient, Max Green, contributed to the design of the concussion awareness pamphlet the foundation developed, which is part of concussion awareness kits that also include a fact card and contact information. More than 12,000 of these kits have been distributed across the United States since 2011. The first Derek Thomson Sheely Scholarship at Penn State, which supports first-generation students with demonstrated financial need, was awarded this spring to Donna Hercules, who was scheduled to graduate in May with a degree in biobehavioral health. The foundation has also supported other nonprofits, such as Nittany Greyhounds, a pet adoption service; On the Rise, a safe haven program for women as well as transgender and nonbinary individuals experiencing homelessness; the Proffitt Brothers Foundation, which supports veterans; and an annual fundraiser called 40 for 40—Derek’s jersey number—in his memory. “Everything he should be doing,” Kristen says, “we’re going to try to do.”

It would have been easy for the Sheelys to turn their backs on football, even though it was the sport that their son deeply loved. They understand more than most the brutality and risk involved, but they’re using the foundation, and their partnership with Penn State, to educate players, parents, and—they hope—coaches and trainers on the importance of being vigilant about head injuries. This spring, as part of an initiative with the health marketing agency Klick, the foundation is simulating concussion symptoms for video gamers and encouraging the most popular football game, Madden NFL, to put concussions back into the game. 

“It’s the only injury that the person who’s injured doesn’t know they’re injured,” Ken says. “You cannot rely on the person who has a concussion or brain injury to make the decisions about their own health, because they don’t have the capacity, or they have a diminished capacity to do that.”

Since Slobounov and Sebastianelli came to Penn State in the early 1990s, and especially since Derek’s death, the literature and data on sport-related concussions has seen immense growth—and so have the questions that researchers have had to form as they’ve learned more about a complex issue. Slobounov recently completed a paper that shows that athletes who suffered an orthopedic injury such as an ACL tear had a higher risk of postconcussion syndrome—and vice versa. There is so much more to learn about the effects of traumatic brain injuries, but in the meantime, the games—and the practice drills—go on. The researchers share the same hope as the Sheelys—that more trainers, coaches, and athletes themselves take those injuries seriously. “It’s not about toughness; it’s not about skill,” Sebastianelli says. “It’s treating the injury the right way regardless of where, when, and how it occurs. And it’s the responsibility of those who are around the athlete to execute that.”