After the Loss of a Son, a Football Coach Confronts a Terrible Truth
Meiko Locksley was found to have had a degenerative brain disease often associated with football. His father, the head coach at Maryland, is still reckoning with the implications.
Football gave the University of Maryland Coach Michael Locksley a scholarship, a family and a career. But it also likely contributed to his son’s C.T.E. diagnosis.
“The game of football gave me a degree. I met my wife. I had a family because of it. It was my way out. But I also think that it’s important for me to walk the line between being a football coach while also being parent to a son diagnosed with C.T.E.
Michael Locksley was helping coach Alabama to a national championship in 2017 when his 25-year-old son, Meiko, was shot and killed.
Meiko was a standout high-school football player who bounced between college programs as his mind and life slipped into darkness in his early 20s.
His father is now the head coach at the University of Maryland. Michael Locksley has mourned Meiko’s loss, in part, by leading discussions about mental health and trying to destigmatize it among the young men he coaches.
One thing he has not said publicly, until now: Meiko had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head and often associated with football.
C.T.E. can only be diagnosed, 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 said.
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 said that he did not know the precise role that C.T.E. played in Meiko’s decline, and he is right. Researchers cannot make direct links, either. Were Meiko’s severe symptoms and mental-health issues caused by, exacerbated by or unaffected by C.T.E.?
A direct and personal — deeply personal — link to C.T.E. would be the most inconvenient of truths.
Locksley still coaches, leading a major program in a major conference. And he has another son, Kai, playing professionally in the Canadian Football League. He justifies his continued role in football 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 said. “My goal is to walk that thin line very truthfully,” he added.
Is it the view of a man who has suffered the incalculable loss of a son, but also has more to lose?
