After the Loss of a Son, a Football Coach Confronts a Terrible Truth

Michael Locksley was serving to coach Alabama to a nationwide championship in 2017 when his 25-year-old son, Meiko, was shot and killed.

Meiko was a standout high-school soccer participant who bounced between faculty applications as his thoughts and life slipped into darkness in his early 20s.

His father is now the pinnacle coach on the University of Maryland. Michael Locksley has mourned Meiko’s loss, partly, by main discussions about psychological well being and attempting to destigmatize it among the many younger males he coaches.

One factor he has not mentioned publicly, till now: Meiko had power traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative mind illness brought on by repeated blows to the pinnacle and sometimes related to soccer.

C.T.E. can solely be identified, with certainty, posthumously.

“I always thought, like, how do you go from a normal 21-year-old Division I football-playing person to, literally six months later, saying you hear people in the basement of an apartment where you lived on the eighth floor and you don’t have a basement?” Locksley mentioned.

He continued: “That didn’t make sense to me. So I just always would go back to saying, ‘Maybe it had something to do with these concussions.’”

Locksley mentioned that he didn’t know the exact position that C.T.E. performed in Meiko’s decline, and he’s proper. Researchers can not make direct hyperlinks, both. Were Meiko’s extreme signs and mental-health points brought on by, exacerbated by or unaffected by C.T.E.?

A direct and private — deeply private — hyperlink to C.T.E. could be essentially the most inconvenient of truths.

Locksley nonetheless coaches, main a serious program in a serious convention. And he has one other son, Kai, enjoying professionally within the Canadian Football League. He justifies his continued position in soccer with a risk-vs.-reward calculation.

“I want to be able to teach it and present it as safe as possible while still allowing this great game to give the rewards that it’s given to so many families that I’ve seen over the 30-something years I’ve been coaching,” he mentioned.

“My goal is to walk that thin line very truthfully,” he added.

Is it the view of a person who has suffered the incalculable lack of a son, but additionally has extra to lose?

The mind of Meiko Locksley is one in every of 152 belonging to contact-sport athletes beneath the age of 30 that had been donated between 2008 and 2022 to the UNITE Brain Bank and studied by researchers at Boston University.

In a paper revealed Monday in JAMA Neurology, the researchers reported that 63 of the athletes, or 41.4 p.c of them, had C.T.E. Most had been soccer gamers who by no means performed previous faculty, typically not previous highschool. One was 17.

That doesn’t counsel that just about half of younger soccer gamers will get C.T.E.; the donations had been made by mourning households determined to seek out solutions, most frequently after a suicide.

“This study clearly shows that the pathology of C.T.E. starts early,” mentioned Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and director of Boston University’s C.T.E. Center.

What got here to be referred to as C.T.E. was first identified a long time in the past in “punch-drunk” boxers. Symptoms can embody reminiscence loss, erratic conduct and despair.

These days, regardless of discoveries in contact-sport athletes and navy personnel of every kind, C.T.E. is most frequently related to getting older soccer gamers. Junior Seau, Ken Stabler, Mike Webster and Dave Duerson are a few of its most well-known victims.

Researchers reported earlier this 12 months that 345 of 376 donated brains of deceased N.F.L. gamers had C.T.E.

But there’s a rising subset of younger folks, too, just like the 63 within the newest research, whose lives, deaths and C.T.E. diagnoses are hidden in relative anonymity.

One was the son of one of many prime soccer coaches within the nation.

From ‘Few Bad Days’ to ‘Shoot Me Now’

On the kitchen wall the place Michael and Kia Locksley dwell is a framed piece of wooden that reads, “Home is wherever football takes us.”

Below it are 11 hanging wood slats, one under one other, itemizing all of the teaching stops. Towson. Navy. Pacific. Army. Maryland. Florida. Illinois. New Mexico as a head coach. Maryland once more. Alabama. Maryland as head coach.

They virtually attain the ground.

“I don’t know if I have room for any more stops,” Locksley mentioned.

Meiko Locksley was born on April 24, 1992, at the beginning of that chain. His mom was in faculty. His father was an assistant soccer coach at Towson, the place he had performed security, making $12,000, he mentioned.

Michael Locksley had one son already, additionally named Michael. The Locksleys had two extra kids after Meiko: a boy named Kai and a woman named Kori.

Meiko was studying at 4 and completed his first Harry Potter ebook at 6. Kia insisted that he stability athletics with artwork, so he took piano classes; he performed “Here Comes the Bride” for a marriage at 9. He did some little one performing and modeling. He wrote poetry and rap. He received good grades. He laughed simply, danced routinely.

“He had very few bad days as a child,” his father mentioned.

Meiko started enjoying deal with soccer at 7. It was the late Nineteen Nineties. Concerns over concussions virtually didn’t exist, particularly for kids.

“They were 7 and weighed nothing,” Kia Locksley mentioned. “And the hits, it almost looked like they just bounced off each other.”

She is haunted by her carefree angle. She remembers Meiko being knocked out on the sector in center faculty. Moments later, he appeared OK.

“Everything that I looked for at that time was in place: He was walking, he was talking,” Kia Locksley mentioned. “But I look back now with the information, definitely, I should have had him evaluated then and taken precautions then.”

What makes C.T.E. particularly difficult is that it’s precipitated not simply by apparent concussions, researchers say, however by the cumulative impact of subconcussive hits — all of the smacks and jolts that may barely register on the time.

While Michael Locksley was offensive coordinator at Illinois, Meiko grew to become a star highschool quarterback. When his father was supplied the pinnacle job at New Mexico, Meiko performed for a highschool in Albuquerque.

He went to school to play at Youngstown State. It was about then that his mother and father seen worrying modifications.

Meiko had self-discipline issues and stopped going to class — uncharacteristic for Meiko and embarrassing for Michael, who presumed that his son was merely working with the unsuitable crowd.

Meiko transferred to New Mexico to play for his father, transferring from quarterback to security. Kia Locksley was in graduate faculty there. She and Meiko would meet on campus for espresso.

“He started talking about how he was depressed,” Kia mentioned. “And that was very new.”

The Locksleys received Meiko into counseling, and Michael had “guardrails” to maintain him on the proper path — as coach, he may monitor class attendance and request drug checks. Meiko’s conduct appeared to stabilize.

But Michael Locksley was fired early of their first season collectively. Meiko stayed. He sustained a concussion that saved him out of a number of video games due to extreme complications.

Meiko transferred to a Pennsylvania junior faculty, then to Towson. His mother and father had been close by. Michael had develop into offensive coordinator at Maryland.

Meiko’s mom seen he had a rising incapability to grasp easy conversations.

“I would be on the phone with him for so long about little things, and I just didn’t understand,” Kia mentioned. “I was confused, like: ‘What is wrong with you? Why are you unable to process this?’”

He was moody and simply agitated. He misplaced a worrying quantity of weight and have become much less involved about how he dressed and appeared. He received into an off-campus battle and was kicked off the soccer crew. He argued routinely with a girlfriend.

Then he started hallucinating.

“I got a call in the middle of the night, and Meiko was on the other end and his girlfriend had left,” Kia Locksley mentioned. “She went back to, he thought, New Mexico, but he told me she was still here. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he goes: ‘She didn’t leave. She’s in this closet.’”

Meiko performed what he mentioned was a recording of her, but it surely was utterly silent. “I heard nothing. But he heard her voice,” Kia Locksley mentioned.

Kia Locksley thought it was a psychological breakdown, indicators of an sickness. Michael Locksley suspected medicine.

Neither thought of C.T.E. or the influence of soccer.

The Locksleys felt fortunate to have cash and connections. Meiko went via a string of therapists and medicines. He went to Florida for a mind scan that turned up “hot spots” (injury from concussions, presumably), however supplied no actual solutions.

He was finally identified with schizoaffective dysfunction.

Once, at residence, Meiko grew to become enraged and smashed a window. Police had been summoned.

“And that’s when I heard him say,” Kia Locksley mentioned, “‘Why is this happening? I didn’t ask for this disease. Why do I have this? Just shoot me now. Just kill me.’ He went for the police officer’s gun. He wanted to die as opposed to dealing with the mental illness that he was struggling with.”

Kia Locksley discovered to look after Meiko by “emotionally detaching” from her expectations of him.

“I remember praying one night and just crying,” she mentioned. “I had to release and let go of who I wanted him to be, who I thought he was going to be, all the dreams that I had for him.”

Michael Locksley coped together with his son’s decline in a different way.

“I kept wanting to knock the wall down to say, ‘Come on out of here, man,’” Locksley mentioned. “It felt like he was a prisoner in his own brain.”

Then got here the night time of Sept. 3, 2017.

An Unresolved Death and a Diagnosis

The season opened the night time earlier than Meiko died. No. 1 Alabama performed No. 3 Florida State in Atlanta.

Michael Locksley, an offensive coordinator for Alabama beneath Nick Saban, traded textual content messages with Meiko earlier than the sport, then known as him after the Crimson Tide received, 24-7.

“I can remember him saying, like, ‘Dang, Pops, man, y’all killed those boys,’” Locksley recalled.

Locksley cried whereas retelling the dialog.

The subsequent night time, Sept. 3, Michael and Kia had been at their Alabama house. They had been woke up by cops at their door.

Meiko had been shot within the chest in Columbia, Md., close to the place he lived. He died on the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Circumstances had been unknown that night time, and the case stays unsolved, six years later. Michael Locksley typically goes to the scene and sits in his automotive, hoping somebody may acknowledge him and inform him what occurred to his son.

It was Michael who beneficial the mind donation. By 2017, C.T.E. had acquired loads of consideration, and soccer coaches couldn’t feign ignorance about concussions.

Locksley had seen the 2015 movie “Concussion.” A 12 months earlier than Meiko’s demise, the N.F.L. admitted C.T.E.’s hyperlink to soccer.

“I really wanted to know if the concussions played any part in the connection with his deteriorating mental health,” Locksley mentioned.

The outcomes got here in a convention name with researchers. Meiko had C.T.E.

The injury to his mind was deemed to be Stage 1 of 4 phases, like 38 others within the under-30 research. Another 21 brains had been categorized as Stage 2. The remaining three — one N.F.L. participant, one faculty soccer participant and one rugby participant — had been Stage 3.

The news of C.T.E. swamped Kia Locksley with remorse.

“My God, I could have done something differently,” she mentioned, tearing up. After a pause, she added: “A little guilt.”

Michael Locksley discovered sudden consolation within the analysis. It was not medicine, he was relieved to know.

But he was now a soccer coach with a conundrum. He has spent years separating Meiko’s mental-health struggles from his C.T.E. analysis.

He regularly talks about “mental health” and his program’s open-door coverage for gamers experiencing private issues. He has spoken at size about Meiko’s struggles.

It is pure to surprise, understanding the C.T.E. analysis, if “mental health” is a handy euphemism, if not a little bit of strategic misdirection.

“I continue to differentiate between the two,” Locksley mentioned. “I’m a layman, and my layman’s mind-set is that they weren’t really connected, and maybe they aren’t. Maybe they were. I don’t know.”

Football ‘Changed the Lineage of My Family’

Michael Locksley has rebuilt Maryland’s soccer program, successful back-to-back bowl video games for the primary time in practically 20 years. He is paid a number of million {dollars} a 12 months. He has a big residence, drives good automobiles and oversees a program with shimmering new workplaces and soccer amenities.

It is his dream job. Locksley grew up in an space of Washington, D.C., that’s nonetheless troubled and harmful. He was the primary in his household to go to school, due to soccer. It is the place he met Kia.

“The benefits of playing the game of football, coming from where I was, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he mentioned. “The brown leather ball with however many ounces of air in it, it changed the lineage of my family.”

He continued, placing his emotions to phrases.

“Does it hurt that I lost my son? One-hundred percent it does. Does it hurt to know that he had C.T.E. and it possibly could have been because of playing college football, high-school football, youth football? Sure. But if you were to ask me today how I feel — I have grandsons now that love football and are playing contact football before high school.”

Kia Locksley now believes that kids mustn’t play deal with soccer, maybe till highschool. That echoes the advice of C.T.E. researchers who see a correlation between C.T.E. and the variety of years of full-contact participation.

Her husband sees that as impractical until a ban had been extensively carried out “and everybody did it.”

Meiko’s analysis has modified the way in which he coaches, Locksley mentioned. He is extra conscious of the indicators of concussions and appreciative of the protocols.

“It definitely makes me think twice about how we practice, how often we are having contact,” he mentioned.

But he dismissed the concept Maryland may take into account following the lead of some schools, like these within the Ivy League, that restrict contact solely to video games, which researchers suppose would vastly scale back mind accidents in athletes.

“If one team is doing things a certain way and another is doing it differently, then sometimes that does create a competitive disadvantage,” he mentioned. “I’m judged Saturday on winning games.”

That type of judgment begins once more this Saturday, as Maryland opens its season in opposition to Towson — the college the place Locksley received his begin and met his spouse, and the place Meiko final performed soccer.

The subsequent day would be the anniversary of Meiko’s demise.