Who are these people? 

Why am I surrounded? 

Why does my head hurt?

Why am I on the grass?

The thoughts run through senior Scott Matsen’s head as he regains consciousness. It takes him a second to realize where he is. Iowa City. It’s the summer before his junior year. He’s at football camp.

That wasn’t Matsen’s first seizure, nor was it the last. But it was the first time it happened when he wasn’t surrounded by his family and friends.

“It scared me. ‘Am I going to be able to go out in public now?’” he remembered thinking. “I’m thinking like, ‘Am I going to be ready for senior year, my life after?’”

Matsen was diagnosed with epilepsy when he was in first grade after having a seizure at elementary school drop-off. He hadn’t felt well that morning, and when the car door opened, he fell and blacked out.

He woke up in the hospital, surrounded by stuffed animals and his favorite blanket. After running some tests, the doctors told his family he likely had epilepsy.

Epilepsy is a brain condition that causes recurring seizures. While they can be influenced by factors such as stress, nutrition and lack of sleep, people with epilepsy don’t have control over when seizures happen. Matsen said he doesn’t always know when a seizure is going to happen, but his left eye will drift off when it is about to happen.

For his father, Nick Matsen, this aspect of epilepsy caused extra anxiety. He said he has had to learn to find a balance between taking care of his son while also letting him gain independence and grow.

“You have to worry about everything that a parent worries about when their teenage son leaves the house to go out with friends, or goes to prom, or goes to school, or goes somewhere late,” Matsen’s father said. “But then on top of that, the other caveat is, what will we do if we get a phone call in this situation that Scott has had a seizure?”

Because he doesn’t know when a seizure will happen, his condition affects all aspects of his life. For example, the sport he loves: football.

Since he was young, Matsen has been a big football fan.

As a Christmas gift in 2019, Matsen’s father gifted him Madden 20 NFL. Playing the game on his Playstation 4 made him realize how much he loved the sport.

“I’m playing, and I’m like, ‘This is what I want to be. Maybe this is what I want to do when I get older, this is why I want to play football,’” he said.

He started playing tackle football when he was in eighth grade, and joined West’s team as a freshman.

Matsen loved his freshman season. He loved his coaches and the game and was happy to be on the team, even if he didn’t get much playing time.

One of the times he played, he was sent out as the long snapper. It was one of his first times on the field during a game, but it was abruptly cut short after an opponent hit him and he fell to the ground.

“With four minutes left to go in the game, I get absolutely destroyed. I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t know if I have a seizure. I’m out for maybe three minutes … I was on kickoff coverage, and the rest is history.”

He doesn’t remember the rest of that game.

Matsen described his sophomore year as a “down year,” as he didn’t get any playing time.

He took a turn for the worse in his junior year. He started to show up to out-of-season lifts, but his seizures started to get much more frequent. As a result, he took his junior year off.

“There were at least 60 [seizures] between off-season to week one of my junior year, and I decided to take my junior year off because I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore. My body can’t. I’ve given up. The one thing I wanted to do, just my body’s telling me I can’t,’” Matsen said.

That year, Matsen filled his schedule with multiple P.E. classes. During one of them, School Facilitator and Assistant Varsity Coach Erik Nelson pulled Matsen aside and asked him a question that made him think.

“What do you want to do with your life?”

The question caught him off guard.

“I look back at my life, I’m like, ‘Damn, I’ve got nothing. Look at me. I have so much talent, and if I use this talent, if I could go anywhere, I could go to college free if I wanted to. And I just threw it away,’” Matsen said.

He took the rest of the year off, but returned to Trojan Field his senior year, a decision he made while working at Hy-Vee while bagging groceries.

“Someone had three boxes of Wheaties, and it was a football player,” he said. “I just looked at the box, and I’m like, ‘Do I want to be bagging someone’s groceries, or do I want someone to be bagging mine?’”

He asked himself, “What if this was me someday? Do I want to be on this box when I grow old?”

When he was on the team once again, he started playing defense, a change from the back-and-forth positions he was playing before.

The Trojans faced their cross-town rivals at City High early in the season. When Matsen looked at the roster, he saw something unexpected.

“The roster was put out, and I see my name, second string. I thought I was the king of the world,” he said.

That year, he gave it his all.

“I just loved it. Sure, I did not record a tackle, but I just felt so good because I was a part of something now,’ he said. “I worked hard, I fought hard, and I remember just falling down to my knees. There’s a photo out there somewhere, me on my knees, happy as a kid on Christmas Day with my fists in the air.”

But not all of his memories are happy ones. He said the one that sticks with him the most is senior night. While he got recognized for his years on the team, the accomplishment was shadowed by another seizure.

“I had a seizure senior night. I wanted to get out there,” Matsen said. “We were up by a lot; I don’t remember exactly by how much, but [Head Coach Garrett Hartwig’s] just like, ‘Hey, get ready to go out there next drive.’ And I just fell down.”

A game that left a more positive impact was a few weeks later on Nov. 7, against Dowling Catholic — the Iowa 5A quarterfinals. The Trojans were down 35-0, and Hartwig did something that Matsen didn’t expect: he sent him onto the field.

“He put me in. It’s fourth down, everyone knows you punt on fourth, and I try to block it, so I dive … and the guy I got through said, ‘Kid, why you crying?’”

Matsen was in his stance, waiting for the game to resume. He told the other player that the game was the last chance he was going to get. Despite being on the opposing team, the player told Matsen that wasn’t true.

“He’s like, ‘Don’t say that. You’re big, you’re strong, you beat me a couple times,’ because they were putting in their backups, ‘and you’re going to be something,’ that’s what he told me,” Matsen said. “I said, ‘No I’m not, I got epilepsy; my mind’s all messed up.'”

But the words stuck with him.

“I remember just sitting on the sidelines,” he said. “I thought maybe I could be something.”

So he started sending emails.

One response he got was from Adam Dutcher, offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator for Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa.

“Coach Dutcher asked me if I was open to playing O-line, which I had not played since my freshman year. I told them, I’ll do it. I mean, this was my shot. They just got done winning back-to-back national championships for the NAIA division.”

And so Matsen said yes, and now he is a collegiate football recruit.

“We sat down and talked, and I asked him, ‘Hey, is this really what you want? I have hardly any experience at O-line. I’ve hardly played high school football. This is really what you want?’ He said, ‘Scott, I believe in you.’ And I genuinely thought right then there, this is what I want to do, because I thought my life was over [before].”

Football helped him find his footing and confidence, no matter the struggles he had to face along the way.

“I am something now,” he said. “I got offers and opportunities to play at the next level, and that’s awesome.”