Lessons learned in 2010 death of Southern Indiana player

EVANSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - Five years ago, Jeron Lewis, University of Southern Indiana's powerhouse basketball forward and center, stepped onto the court ready to play the game he loved.

The Screaming Eagles were hot. Undefeated in their first 15 games, the team was facing longtime rival Kentucky Wesleyan at that school's home turf in Owensboro.

Also riding high was 21-year-old Lewis. The 6-foot 8-inch 260 pound man led the team in field goal percentage and rebounds.

But time stopped five years ago Wednesday for Lewis, his family and his team.

With 4:32 left to play in the game, Lewis collapsed on the basketball court.

Twenty-three minutes later, he was dead.

Shaqueta L. Thomas, Lewis' fiancee and mother to his child, remembers the night clearly.

"I was waiting for him to call. He'd always call in the locker room telling me how the game was. I didn't get the call," she told the Evansville Courier & Press (http://bit.ly/1DI4IYH).

She saw on Facebook that someone was praying for Jeron.

"I'm calling and calling and nobody's answering. Finally Jamar (Smith) answered and said, 'I'm sorry, sis. I'm so sorry.' I didn't know what he was talking about," she said.

She was holding their son Jamel, then just one month old.

Coach Rodney Watson took the phone and told her the news, just as he had told Lewis' teammates minutes before.

"I didn't believe it at first. I was shocked," she said. "Then after I started getting phone calls from everybody. That's when reality sat in. I was just devastated."

They met in high school - Thomas, a cheerleader; Lewis, a football player.

"I remember him as this crazy, tall giant," she said with a laugh. "Him walking through the hallways at school, him being silly, dancing, laughing, just making everybody around him feel good and have fun all the time."

They started to hang out after games. They fell for each other. A few years down the line in 2009, the couple found out they were going to have a baby.

"He was nervous," she said. "I think I was more nervous than he was. He had all these expectations for himself. He wanted to be the best father for Jamel."

Now 5, Jamel favors his father in terms of looks, and he's a big kid. He's already half his mother's height.

One of her first fears after hearing of Lewis' death was how their son would grow to handle the loss.

"I thought, 'How am I going to explain this to my son when he gets older?" she said.

They look at picture albums of Lewis together, and Jamel understands where his dad is, she said.

"We'll sit and talk about him. (Jamel) said that his dad comes to him in his dreams. I think he kind of talks to him in his dreams."

In the month he had as a father, Lewis, who was in Evansville, would call Thomas, who was in Fort Wayne, daily.

"He called every day after practices and checked up," she said. "It was cute because Jamel was a month old, so he couldn't talk back, but I guess Jeron wanted to talk to him and give him some fatherly words, as he put it.

"He was trying to be the best dad that he could be."

The 2009-2010 season was Rodney Watson's first as coach for the Screaming Eagles men's basketball team. He was new, and his first impression of Lewis, when he met him the summer before, was less than stellar.

"He looked like anything but a fit college basketball player," Watson said, recalling Lewis' weight when he met him.

But his opinion of Lewis rapidly changed over the fall semester. The players chose Lewis to be a team captain.

"He was always the calming force. He was always the voice of reason. I really underestimated Jeron as a ballplayer and as a man," he said.

Lewis was known to clown around and playfully make fun of teammates, including his coaches, Watson said as he recalled times he was the butt of Lewis' jokes.

"He always knew when enough was enough, and he knew when the mood needed to be lightened up," he said. "He had a remarkable personality, more so than any young person that I've ever known."

Watson credits Lewis with holding the team together after the NCAA punished the university by banning the team from postseason tournament play due to a previous basketball coach's discretions.

The players could've walked away and transferred to other schools, where they had to chance to play in the tournament.

"Jeron pulled everyone together in the parking lot after we had left and said, 'We didn't come here to walk away from this.' And that's really how that team was held together - it was saved that night by Jeron Lewis," Watson said.

The team was remarkable, he recalled, winning its first 15 games and losing none. At the time, Watson was thinking about how well his work at USI was going to do for his future career, he said.

Lewis' death, however, forever changed how Watson viewed the game and life.

"Certainly with Jeron, it has absolutely given me a far different perspective that this game is certainly just a game," Watson said, looking at a picture of Lewis on his desk.

"When I shake a man's hand and tell them good luck at the start of a game, I mean it. And I don't just mean good luck with winning the game. I hope everything comes out of this game in a good fashion," he said.

Lewis' death also drilled into the school's athletic department the need to properly screen and educate athletes about health risks. The coroner ruled that Lewis died from complications from having an enlarged heart.

According to a study published in 2011 in the Journal of the American Heart Association, almost 1 in 44,000 NCAA athletes die annually from heart-related complications. For black college basketball players, the rate is 1 in 5,700.

Watson said Lewis' death is constantly on the mind of everyone USI's athletic program, and that basketball players are screened for heart defects by Deaconess Hospital's Heart Group.

"We try to be very prudent about it." Watson said. "... Hopefully we can be a vehicle for people to screen and be smart about training."

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Information from: Evansville Courier & Press, http://www.courierpress.com