Commentary by PJ Gibson, CHS Varsity Men’s Soccer player
I am a CHS senior varsity soccer player. On Sept. 5 at 7:30 p.m., the Carmel High School Men’s Varsity Soccer team will play in a Make Good Decisions / Brett Finbloom memorial soccer game.
The game will be one of the regular season varsity soccer games, and will be promoted as a “Pack the House Night,” as it is on a Friday night with no home football game scheduled.
Here is some background about why we are having this game. Three years ago, as I was trying out for the Freshman Team, I met a Senior Varsity player named Brett Finbloom. Although I never got to know Brett well, he was always smiling and joking around with his teammates, and I looked up to him.
The next year, about a week before he was to leave for college, Brett Finbloom, our former teammate, died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 18. Brett had gone to a party where a lot of underage drinkers were drinking too much, too quickly. Many thought that Brett needed medical help, but all of them waited to call 911 because they were either drunk and not thinking straight or were afraid of getting arrested for underage drinking. While people at the party scattered, someone did call 911. But it was too late.
The Indiana Lifeline Law had been in effect for just over a month, and no one at the party knew about it or Brett might be alive today. The law states that minors cannot be charged with underage drinking if they call for help and stay and assist authorities with determining what happened.
This year, on our Pack the House night, we will be promoting the Indiana Lifeline Law and Making Good Decisions. The Indiana Lifeline Law encourages minors to: Call 911. Stay. Cooperate. And Save a Life. Making Good Decisions means encouraging your friends and yourself to make good choices so that no one is ever in a position to have to call 911 to save someone’ s life.
There will also be Indiana Lifeline Law field banners, and both Senator Jim Merritt (who wrote the bill that became the Indiana Lifeline Law) and Mrs. Finbloom, Brett’s mom, will speak at halftime.
As seniors on the varsity soccer team here at CHS, we are the final group of players that knew Brett. It is important that new students can learn from what happened to him.
