NBC: Soccer coach Amy Griffin was in a Seattle hospital visiting a young goalie who was receiving chemotherapy when a nurse said something that made the hair on Griffin's neck stand up.
It was 2009. Two young female goalies Griffin knew had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Griffin, associate head coach for the University of Washington's women's soccer team, had started to visit the women and other athletes in local hospitals, helping them pass the time during chemo with war stories from her three decades of coaching.
That day, the nurse looked down at the woman Griffin was sitting with and said, "Don't tell me you guys are goalkeepers. You're the fourth goalkeeper I've hooked up this week."
Later, the young woman with the chemo needle in her arm would say, "I just have a feeling it has something to do with those black dots."
Artificial turf fields are now everywhere in the United States, from high schools to multi-million-dollar athletic complexes. As any parent or player who has been on them can testify, the tiny black rubber crumbs of which the fields are made — chunks of old tires — get everywhere. In players' uniforms, in their hair, in their cleats.
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But for goalkeepers, whose bodies are in constant contact with the turf, it can be far worse. In practices and games, they make hundreds of dives, and each plunge sends a black cloud of tire pellets into the air. The granules get into their cuts and scrapes, and into their mouths. Griffin wondered if those crumbs – which have been known to contain carcinogens and chemicals – were making players sick.
"I've coached for 26, 27 years," she said. "My first 15 years, I never heard anything about this. All of a sudden it seems to be a stream of kids."
Since then, Griffin has compiled a list of 38 American soccer players — 34 of them goalies – who have been diagnosed with cancer. At least a dozen played in Washington, but the geographic spread is nationwide. Blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia dominate the list.
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