Editor’s note: Este artículo está traducido al español.

Three physical education classes shared the Western High School football field on a cool December morning.

It appeared to be a normal day — until teacher Steven Mull heard cries for help.

One of the boys told his friend he felt like he was going to have a heart attack. Then he crumpled to the turf.

The panicked shouting of his classmates told Mull this was a true emergency.

Mull reached the student in less than 30 seconds, called over his portable radio that he needed one of the school’s automated external defibrillators and immediately started doing chest compressions.

“He had no pulse. Like, he was not there,” said Mull, who is also the Western baseball coach. “He was super pale. Full cardiac arrest.” 

The adrenaline and focus made some of the details hazy in Mull’s memory, but the harrowing moments turned out for the best. The boy, 14, would regain a heartbeat after two shocks with the AED delivered by two other PE teachers. They were in the nearby gym with their own students when they heard the radio call.

“It was the way he said, ‘now,’ that everybody knew” that this wasn’t a drill, said Samantha Hunt, one of the two teachers.

Mull will be honored for his actions at tonight’s Sun Standout Awards, the Sun’s annual high school sports awards show.

He doesn’t brag. He shares credit with his colleagues.

But he knows — because he said the medics said so — that everything happened exactly when and how it should have to save the boy. Any difference in timing or actions and he would have died.

Mull started chest compressions without hesitation, pumping blood through the boy’s heart.

He had a handheld radio, as all PE teachers do. The first people to hear his call were steps from the closest AED to the field. 

Western has multiple devices around campus, but the main office and nurse station is about a quarter-mile across the sprawling campus. The user-friendly devices give audible, simple directions so any bystander can quickly and capably render aid.

The two teachers who showed up first are also athletes who would swiftly reach the scene — Nagle, who handed it off, is a cross country coach.

Critically in all this, Mull had recently renewed his CPR certification, and only weeks before the incident, he and the same two PE teachers who assisted him that day did a surprise drill. A trainer came to Western, dropped a mannequin torso on the football field, and observed as they administered lifesaving measures with the idea that maybe they’d need to do the same one day for a real child.

“The situation was literally, exactly, how it was when it actually happened,” Mull said. “I was the first one on doing the CPR, and then the girls came out with the AED in the drill as well. When it actually happened, it was the exact three people out there first.”

But, he said, you can only drill so much. Emotions can’t be practiced. He knew the mannequin was a dummy, so his focus was on making the time cutoff.

When things got real, school nurses also arrived, along with police, administrators and medics who drove an ambulance directly onto the field. The boy was stirring as medics loaded him onto a stretcher. 

About half an hour after he was revived, Mull said he got word that the boy had a steady heart rate at the hospital. After filling out a report with shaking hands, he and his two fellow PE teachers took the rest of the day off.

Hunt and her colleague Kaylee Nagle said Mull is humble, but he was the real hero because he decisively started the chain of events to keep the boy alive. Nagle said she was just in the right place at the right time.

“We were all pretty distraught after, honestly, but it worked out OK,” she said. “It was best-case scenario. The kid was OK. That’s all anyone really cared about.”

The incident stayed with the teachers.

They developed safety plans for the teams they coach. Mull said the potential for another crisis is on his mind more, but he knows he has an AED about 10 feet away from his baseball field.

Hunt, who coaches softball, has told her girls that if anything happens when they’re on the field to run to Mull at the baseball diamond one field over.

The boy was in one of the other PE classes, and Mull didn’t know him. He returned to school within a month.

Mull said they still haven’t formally met, but he did receive a grateful email from the young man’s mother, and he said that’s good enough for him.