ALTO, TEXAS — Mourners gathered on the track that rings the Alto High School Yellowjackets’ football field in Texas Saturday, Oct. 17. They held hands and prayed in remembrance of junior Cam’ron Matthews, who died after a game under the Friday night lights the day before, marking the sixth U.S. high school football player to die this season.

It was not clear from local media reports what exactly happened, but several CNN affiliates reported that the 6-foot junior told his teammates during a huddle that he felt dizzy shortly before halftime.

He then collapsed and a helicopter transported him to a Tyler hospital.

Neither the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office nor the nearest coroner, in Dallas County, had Matthews’ cause of death Sunday. The Dallas County coroner said it would forward its autopsy results to Cherokee County, where Alto is located.

In 2014, five of the country’s 1.1 million high school football players died of causes directly related to the sport, such as head and spine injuries, according to a survey by the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina.

The past decade has seen an average of three fatalities each year directly attributable to high school football, the survey said. In 2013, there were eight deaths directly linked to high school football. Between 2005 and 2014, the deaths of 92 other high school football players were indirectly related to the sport.

The reason for the high number of high school football fatalities compared with college and the pros comes down to numbers.

There are about 1.1 million high school football players in the nation, compared with about 100,000 in the NFL, college, junior college, arena football and semiprofessional level, the NCCSIR survey found.

High school football players suffer three times as many catastrophic injuries — deaths, permanent disability, neck fractures and head injuries — as college players, according to a 2007 study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine.

In addition, the skill level of many younger athletes leaves them more susceptible to serious injuries.

Making matters worse, nearly 70 percent of high school athletes with concussions played despite their symptoms and 40 percent reported that their coaches didn’t know of the injury, according to a 2014 study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine.

The risk of serious injuries and death at the high school level is exacerbated by the shortage of full-time athletic trainers at practice and games — due largely to costs. A study this year in the Journal of Athletic Training said only 37 percent of the nation’s public high schools have full-time athletic trainers.

“Nearly all of the causes of death in sport are influenced by the care in the first five to seven minutes,” said one of the study’s authors, Douglas Casa, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut.

Source: CNN