CHICAGO — Alex Pierscionek, a hearing-impaired freshman, went out for his high school football team in 2010. He had never played organized football, but he was pushing 6 feet tall, weighed more than 250 pounds and made the freshman squad at suburban Chicago’s South Elgin High School as a defensive lineman. His new teammates gave him a nickname: Tank. “Football became everything to me,” he said.
He bulked up over the next two seasons and hoped to make the varsity team his junior year, but on a hot August day at training camp, he banged heads with an offensive lineman during a drill and blacked out.