Jeremiyah Shepheard was in the middle of a travel basketball tournament in Tennessee in May 2025 when his body started sending warning signs he couldn't ignore. Dizziness hit first, then a dull ache in his chest, then his vision blurred until he collapsed right there on the court, with coaches and friends rushing to his side.
“I started getting dizzy, and my heart started hurting a bit. It just started to ache, and then my vision started going blurry,” Shepheard said, according to WFLA. He was rushed to a local hospital in Tennessee, but doctors there couldn't pin down what had caused the collapse. It wasn't until he got back home to Tampa and sat down with a cardiologist that the real answer surfaced: a congenital heart defect he never knew he had.
That defect had a name: an anomalous right coronary artery, a structural problem that required open-heart surgery to fix. Shepheard had the operation in June 2025. Separate reporting from Bay News 9 identified the specialist who made the diagnosis as pediatric cardiologist Dr. Anjlee Patel, who found the issue after running an electrocardiogram and a CAT scan on Shepheard's heart, per the station's report.
Back on the Court After a Long Recovery
Shepheard, now 18, said he's played basketball competitively since he was 7 years old, “the whole entire time,” as he put it to WFLA. After months of recovery from surgery, he returned to the court last fall. Bay News 9 reports he has since been fully cleared to play basketball again, closing a loop that began with a collapse nobody saw coming.
Rather than move past the scare quietly, Shepheard says he wants to turn the experience into something useful for other kids. “I kind of want to use my voice as an advocate to make sure most kids don’t have to go through what I went through,” he said. He now supports expanded heart screenings for student athletes and has worked with the American Heart Association to raise awareness about conditions like the one that nearly sidelined him for good.
Florida's Unique Screening Rule
Florida is currently the only state in the nation that requires an electrocardiogram as part of a student's annual sports physical for athletic participation, according to Bay News 9. Under a Florida statute, beginning with the 2026–2027 school year, the first time a student in grades 9 through 12 takes part in an interscholastic athletic competition or tries out for a team, that student must complete at least one ECG screening, per the Florida Senate's published statute.
Ahead of the 2026–27 school year, a Central Florida nonprofit called Who We Play For offered free ECG screenings at several locations so student athletes could return to the field and court with a full heart check. The organization has also arranged paid screenings, priced at $20, at schools and businesses across Central Florida, the Bay News 9 report notes.
Why Standard Physicals Often Miss These Defects
The push for ECGs comes down to what a routine sports physical can and can't catch. “I have a 20 percent chance of finding a deadly heart condition in a kid. At best,” said sports medicine physician assistant Shawn Sima, as quoted by MySuncoast. Sima added that roughly 85 children have been found to have Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome since Florida's screening requirement took effect.
MySuncoast's reporting includes another Tampa Bay case that echoes Shepheard's: 13-year-old Jensen Pearce, who plays softball and flag football, was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White after her heart rate never slowed down following a game. A cardiac ablation has since allowed her to return to sports, according to the same report.
A separate case out of Pasco County, also covered by WFLA, involved 13-year-old Jonathan Jackson, who survived sudden cardiac arrest after collapsing near a bathroom at school and being found unresponsive. His mother said the family never knew he had a heart defect that started at birth. WFLA also reported on a community heart-screening event held at Galen College of Nursing in St. Petersburg, open to anyone ages 10 through 25 for $20, with financial assistance available through Who We Play For for those who needed it.
Research on the condition itself underscores why screening matters even when symptoms seem vague. Coronary anomalies like the one found in Shepheard occur in just 0.2 to 1.2 percent of the general population, yet they account for 12 percent of sudden deaths in athletes, according to a study published by PubMed Central. The American Heart Association has said some form of preparticipation cardiovascular screening for high school and collegiate athletes is justifiable on ethical, legal and medical grounds, according to a statement published in Circulation.
For Shepheard, the numbers are secondary to the personal stakes. A kid who had been playing competitive basketball since age 7 nearly lost that future to a defect no one had detected, and he's now using his recovery to make the case that the next collapse on a court shouldn't have to happen at all.
