Cook family, Canyon football coping with heartbreak

ANAHEIM HILLS, Calif. – It's a large, wide-open field adjacent to a set of basketball courts, a stone's throw away is the basketball gym with COMANCHES scripted across it.

On that large, wide-open field, the Canyon high school freshman football team is preparing for its last game of the season.
  
A normal Tuesday afternoon practice is unassuming to most.

For Jim Cook, this Tuesday practice is a step toward his new normal. For the first time in three months, Cook steps onto the field. He walks around and is greeted by the team's coaches.

One at a time, they ask him how he's doing.

"I'm doing the best I can," is a response Cook throws back.

"Where exactly did it happen?" Jim asks one of the coaches.

"Right over there in that area," the coach says pointing in the opposite direction of where the two are standing on the field.

It was at that spot, three months prior, where Jim's life was forever changed.

Jim's son, Mitchell, a member of the Canyon freshman team collapsed during practice warm-ups in August.

He experienced sudden cardiac arrest.

Attempts to revive him were immediately successful, but a few hours later, as Mitchell was being transported from one hospital to another, paramedics once again needed to perform CPR.

"At that point," said Jim, who was riding in the front seat of the ambulance, "I knew that we had lost him."

14-year-old Mitchell Cook passed away.

Jim Cook, a single father, is developing a new normal that consists of himself and his oldest son Matt, a junior on the Canyon junior varsity and varsity squads, continuing life with Mitchell no longer being present.

Halloween just passed. For the Cook family, it was tough. Normal consisted of Mitchell building a haunted house in the front yard of the house for the neighborhood kids to come visit.
 
"I would always see Mitchell a week before Halloween, setting up these big tarps and everything and setting up these skeletons, painting stuff," said Matt cracking a smile. "He was getting his costume ready and all he could think about was scaring all these little kids."

Halloween came and went with a lot of memories of Mitchell and the haunted house on both of their minds.

The new normal also sometimes consists of asking "What if?"

When Mitchell collapsed, there was not an automatic electronic defibrillator (AED) present on campus. Jim Cook is now pushing for them to be present throughout the school district.
 
"We see them on planes and businesses everywhere," Cook said. "Unfortunately, this particular school and the school district didn't at the time."

What if there was an AED on hand?

Cook feels he may still have his son today.

"Statistically, yeah," he said. "He would have had a much better chance with an AED than without."

Cook doesn't attend the freshman games; instead, he's at the JV games cheering on Matt.

Every day, Jim Cook leaves his job in Commerce and bears traffic to make it in enough time to pick Matt up from practice.

When he had both of his sons, all three of them would get in the car and it would be Mitchell yelling out of the window at all of his teammates as Cook drove past.  

"Good practice, good practice," Mitchell would say.

Today, Cook gets behind the wheel. Matt sits into the passenger side and they take off, just Jim and Matt.

Their new normal.