Game Changer

A hard look into both the rewards and the dangers of high school athletics, Tommy Greenwald’s Game Changer (2018) investigates what happens when a promising football player, 13-year-old Teddy Youngblood, receives a life-threatening head injury during a scrimmage on the last day of the Walthorne High School Wildcats summer football camp. Even as Teddy lies in the hospital in a coma, the town divides over how to handle the injury, whether the coach is liable, and whether football is even necessary in high school. As the days pass and evidence emerges that Teddy’s head injury was something other than an accident, the debate over the fate of the football program and its players and its coach intensifies.

Greenwald, a veteran of young adult fiction and a successful playwright, draws on his theatrical background to inform the novel’s experimental structure, which supplements Teddy’s interior monologue with other types of narration, including transcripts, text messages, news articles, and social media posts. Game Changer was listed as a Young Adult Library Services Association Top Ten Pick for Reluctant Readers and has won both the Kentucky and Rhode Island middle school reading awards.

The study guide uses the first edition Amulet paperback published in 2018.

Plot Summary

A copy of a hospital admittance report describes the status of 13-year-old Edward Youngblood, admitted with head trauma and possible internal bleeding, who is comatose. Few details are known about the incident that led to the injury. On the last day of the high school football team’s summer camp, Teddy, a freshman the coach already noticed for his speed and his determination to play, was injured during a scrimmage game between the freshmen and the seniors. The game is a tradition that marks that the freshmen are officially on the team. Teddy collapsed coming off the field.

At the hospital, Teddy’s father, Jim, waits in his son’s ICU room. He urged his son, who loved football, to play despite the risks. Jim believed football would help toughen him up. Now he feels devastated, even guilty. The entire town rallies behind Teddy. Teddy’s mother, Sarah, arrives at the hospital. Sarah left the family in a search for happiness and to discover her own identity. Teddy’s little sister, Janey, stays by his bedside, telling her brother to wake up. The doctor assures them Teddy can hear them but cannot respond. The coach, a local sports legend, comes to the hospital and tells Teddy’s father how deeply sorry he is and how the whole team, really the whole town, is praying for the boy.

The coach’s daughter, Camille, begins a website dedicated to posting encouraging and inspiration messages to Teddy, to rally the community and bring them together. At first, students post prayers and good wishes. But as Teddy remains in the coma, the website postings begin to suggest that maybe Teddy’s injuries were not an accident. One of Teddy’s teammates, Ethan, has all but disappeared: He refuses to come to school, and he has not answered his phone.

Teddy’s best friend and teammate, Alec, uses the webpage reach out to Ethan. The school arranges for all the football players to talk with a therapist to help handle the trauma of Teddy’s accident. Meanwhile, a poster who identifies themselves only as Clea suggests on the webpage that Teddy’s accident was more than a football injury. Football players caution Clea against making accusations with no evidence. The local newspaper has begun to investigate the accident, and the school cautions the coach not to visit Teddy without a lawyer.

Two days pass, and Teddy’s condition remains unchanged, although he does squeeze his mother’s hand, and at another point, his family believes to see his eyes flickering open. At the school, Ethan keeps returning to talk with the therapist. Something is troubling him, but he cannot bring himself to tell the doctor. Although Teddy’s father is uninterested in addressing the rumors, his mother is adamant about ferreting out the truth. On Teddy’s tribute page, Clea says that on the last day of camp, the team would always play a game, where freshmen competed for prizes including a case of beer and a steak dinner for whoever could hit the hardest in a tackle. The competition was dubbed the Hit Parade.

The reactions are swift. Camille shuts down the website. Police come to the Youngblood home. They want to talk to the anonymous Clea, but no one knows the identity of the poster. The coach denies knowing anything about the Hit Parade. The school board meets to discuss shutting down the football program, a championship program that had become part of the town’s identity. The therapist urges Ethan to talk, and advises that he would feel better, and that Teddy’s family deserves to know the truth. Finally, Ethan relents—at a bedside confession, Ethan tells a shocked Youngblood family that, yes, the seniors goaded the freshmen to hit and hit hard, and even offered incentives to do so. The team, including Teddy, taunted Ethan for being particularly soft on tackles and Ethan, fed up with the taunting, delivered a late tackle to Teddy, helmet to helmet. Teddy wobbled a bit before collapsing as he tried to leave the field. The injury was no accident—it was a deliberate cheap shot, and now Teddy is in a coma. Alec reveals that he was the poster named Clea and that he wanted to reveal the truth behind Teddy’s injuries and the team’s toxic culture. Teddy opens his eyes. It is the miracle his family has prayed for. The novel closes with Teddy saying, “I remember” (285).

The school immediately suspends the football program. The police department promises a full investigation.