EAGAN, Minn. — The memory of losing her husband is so hauntingly clear 25 years later that Kelci Stringer could still draw a detailed picture of her hurried path to the hospital room where Korey Stringer died from exertional heat stroke.
Having arrived in the middle of the night, Kelci realized she was too late once she saw two of Korey’s teammates with the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings, receivers Cris Carter and Randy Moss, sobbing on the floor.
For all that went tragically wrong at the beginning of that preseason training camp in 2001 in Mankato, she has since made it her lifelong mission to help keep others from such a preventable death.
“The work we’re doing and the way we’re doing the work is most important to me,” Kelci said, “because we’re giving back in a way that’s very exemplary of Korey.”
Named after the only NFL player known to have died from heat stroke, the Korey Stringer Institute opened in 2010 with three employees at the University of Connecticut and now has a 100-person staff and a satellite branch in Florida. Chief executive officer Douglas Casa, a professor of kinesiology who survived his own brush with death at age 16 when he collapsed while running a 10-kilometer race, has counted 463 laws and policies over all 50 states that have been changed or created by the institute’s advocacy.