Bryan Bing's mere presence for Methodist has meant quite a bit. Methodist athletics photo

“This kid could drop dead on my football field.”

Methodist coach C.J. Goss had to digest the reality for his star linebacker. Through the early weeks of the 2013 season, the prognosis for Bryan Bing’s football future was bleak.

Bing was an all-conference selection the prior year, but he began feeling dizzy and tired even before the first game of the season. He had never had any problems in the past, but what lie ahead was a bevy of tests from heart specialists: heart monitors, electrocardiograms, treadmill tests. The initial results weren’t terrible, Bing said, and the early projections were that he’d be out for about a month.

The first game, a road trip to Southern Virginia, came and went. Bing was relegated to a supporting role, unfamiliar territory for the team’s leading tackler.

That season “didn’t feel real to me because I wasn’t playing,” Bing said. “I had been working hard the whole summer, and I wanted to help my team out, but I couldn’t play.”

More time with the doctors came; more uncertainty came with it.

Bing said he was told that the heart test results weren’t where the doctor would like to see them. But there was something more to it, and he said he suspected something was up.

“If the test results are looking good,” he wondered, “why can’t I be cleared to play? What’s going on?”

Bing tried to be hopeful and reassured teammates that he would be back in uniform as soon as it was possible. But that time never arrived that season – and even if Bing didn’t fully realize it yet, it might never come.

“At this point,” his coach said, “I’m basically being told that this kid is never going to play football again.”

Goss said doctors avoided giving Bing a straight answer but that when they spoke with Goss, “They were a lot more brutal about where he was.”

Bing had an enlarged heart, and he wasn’t going to be cleared to play in the 2013 season. All he could do was wait until January, when he had an appointment with a specialist at Duke University Hospital.

The coach saw this as an opportunity to reach out to a young man who dedicated a large portion of his life to football and who was in jeopardy of losing that piece of him. Part of moving on was getting Bing to accept the reality that he might never play football again -- but also to know that there are other ways he could contribute to the team. Goss wasn’t going to turn his back on a player, which meant feeding the sense of belonging and dedication to the Monarch program.

“He’s a ridiculously smart football player,” Goss said. “He’s a leader on the field. …

“We put him to work on the sidelines, charting plays, holding up personnel cards, just doing the nickel and dime stuff on the sidelines. He certainly progressed from the responsibility that I gave him when I knew that [the heart condition] was going longer and it was becoming more severe.”

Doctors restricted Bing’s physical activity for three months – no training, no pick-up basketball games, no running. In many ways, that meant no fun. In the early stages, it took its toll on the criminal justice major who was a Methodist scholar-athlete and member of the 2012-13 USA South All-Academic Team.

“I was a little bit depressed,” Bing said. “I wasn’t trying to focus on my school work as much as I should have. … The only thing I could think about is whether I would play football again.”

His mother worked hard to lift his spirits, as did fellow students and friends from back home in Florida. Remaining a part of the team and getting to continue to work with players helped keep him from disengaging entirely.

Goss was happy to give Bing the opportunity.

“With Bryan, he was smart enough and he was enough of a leader with his football knowledge to be able to take on a role where he can take on a little position [coaching], he can talk in detail, he’s mature beyond his years. It’s a fun thing to have on the field,” Goss said. “He was at a point he can handle taking on coaching one guy. So we started him little, and eventually he branched off and actually could take a couple of the guys off and work some drills. … He really embraced the role, all with the intentions that he would be back on that football field.”

Even without their star linebacker suiting up on Saturdays, the Monarchs earned a share of the USA South title last fall and brought home an 8-2 record, their best mark since 2005.

With the football season having wound down and the holidays past, January arrived, and Bing went to Duke for more testing. There, the doctor sat him down.

“It was kind of scary because on one side, I’m thinking this is it, this is the moment I’ve been waiting for,” Bing remembers thinking. “I could be cleared to go or I could be told I’m not playing football anymore, let alone any other sport ever again in my life.”

Everything looked good; Bing was allowed to play once again.

“It was surreal,” he said. “I was so happy with everything that was going on. I was excited to get to go and play football again.”

Bing, who’s now 21, is a senior in the classroom but has one year of eligibility on the football field. This past weekend, at home against Southern Virginia, he had a team-high seven tackles and an interception.

He said his time as a coach has helped make him a better player.

“I got to see things from a different aspect of football,” he said. “I was on the other side with the coaches, so I learned why they do some things, and what’s going on, and how they approach things. It helped me be a smarter football player this year.”

He embracing his time on the field this season and hasn’t yet decided whether to return to play in 2015.

“The window to play football is such a small window, but a glorious window, in your life,” Goss said, reflecting on some of the things that are out of a person’s control. “I think sometimes it was a bigger team lesson to say that at any given time, football can end.”

Bing, however, is glad that it wasn’t his time to end.

Reaching out to me

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