Conrad Weiser’s perfect season was no miracle, but coach’s recovery was
2024 Berks football coverage presented by
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Dan Browne will tell you he saw all of this coming.
Like his players, the long-time Conrad Weiser assistant football coach endured a painful 2023 season that saw his team win just twice. Still, he was encouraged.
By the end of the season the Scouts were playing good football and he knew they had a lot of good players coming back. They were primed for a rebound.
The 57-year-old football lifer wasn’t about to let a near-fatal car collision just weeks before the start of practice keep him from being part of it.
“Oh, I was getting back,” he assures without hesitation, “even if they had to put me in a wheelchair and wheel me down (to the field), I was getting back.”
It nearly came to that. Browne spent 42 days in the hospital, including 12 days in late June and early July hooked to a ventilator. He was unconscious for days, unaware if he’d ever see another football game . . . or take another breath on his own.
“He probably should’ve died,” says his wife Michele, a registered nurse who thought she had lost her soul mate several times during what Weiser head coach Alan Moyer termed a “summer of hell.”
A high-speed collision that totaled his 2012 Toyota Corolla, crushed his ribcage, and set off a chain-reaction of life-threatening internal damage made the prospect of Browne celebrating the culmination of a perfect season – on Oct. 25, his birthday, no less – a miraculous moment.
How much one had to do with the other – the coach fighting for his life, his inspired players rising to unexpected heights – is impossible to quantify. Miracles can’t be explained, only appreciated.
No doubt the stories are intertwined, the symbiotic relationship of players and coach serving to save each other.
“I think the boys needed to see him (back on the field),” Michele Browne said, “and he needed to see them. They’re part of each other’s world; it goes so far beyond football.”
Dan Browne didn’t realize the monumental challenge he was about to confront as he left a football workout June 20 and made his way down Delaware’s scenic Coastal Highway to join Michele at their Ocean City, Md., condo. They had plans to celebrate their 28th anniversary there.
Just south of Dewey, De., Browne’s years of thinking as a driver’s ed teacher at Conrad Weiser came into play. A northbound car was struck and ricocheted across the grassy median and into his southbound lane. Browne swerved his vehicle left, avoiding a head-on collision, but the high-speed impact was significant – more than he realized at the time.
It crushed the passenger side of his car – had someone occupied that seat they would not have survived – and left Browne with cuts on his face and aching ribs. Still, he was able to climb out of the mangled vehicle. He declined medical treatment at the scene and suggestions to be examined at a nearby hospital. He wasn’t about to waste precious hours of his beach weekend stuck in an emergency room, so he hopped into Michele’s car for the 30-minute trip to their condo.
“Dan has always been tough as nails,” says Michele.
Even nails, when struck hard enough, bend — or snap.
On his way down the highway Browne began to feel the true effects of the collision; his chest pain intensified and he had trouble breathing because of what would soon be diagnosed as five broken ribs. Michele diverted to Atlantic General Hospital in nearby Berlin, Md.
Things progressed from bad to worse to . . . to life-threatening in a matter of hours. Tests revealed he had a lacerated liver and a lacerated spleen. He went into renal failure, which shut down his kidneys. And then into multiple-organ failure. Then into septic shock and respiratory failure, the latter due to a partially collapsed lung.
“It happened very quickly,” Michele recalls.
His blood pressure was dangerously low; his heart rate was dangerously high. After a few days he was intubated, then air-lifted to the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore where he could receive specialized dialysis treatment.
It was there that doctors discovered an abscess in his liver, one that would work its way to his stomach and then spleen.
A few days after arriving at the Baltimore facility Michele was went into an emotional tailspin when she arrived to see a Crash Cart outside her husband’s room. She’s been in nursing for 30 years. She didn’t need anyone to spell out what that meant.
“My heart dropped,” she said. “I knew right away something was wrong.”
Browne was suffering from Atrial flutter – a condition that can lead to stroke or death. He was shocked five times within an hour to get his heart beat back into a normal rhythm.
The Scouts’ Aug. 23 season-opener against Abington appeared light years away at that point. No one was thinking about football.
As Browne lay stricken in the ICU, a hundred miles away the Scouts diligently went about their daily summer workouts, prepping to make their way back to respectability after going through back-to-back losing seasons for the first time in more than 40 years.
They didn’t realize how important their commitment would be to their stricken coach’s recovery.
Moyer used Browne’s life-threatening situation to inspire his players; he used the Scouts’ comeback hopes to motivate his long-time coach to fight for his life. He knew one could lift the other.
Once the infection in Browne’s stomach began to clear his outlook did, too. He was discharged from the hospital in late July and spent a week at a rehab facility to begin to rebuild his body. He lost 30 pounds during the ordeal and his right leg and arm atrophied, causing him difficulty standing and walking.
His mind was clear and it soon turned to football. His doctors told him his physical recovery would take the length of a football season, but he would have none of that. Preseason practice was about to kick off. He needed to be part of that.
“My goal was to get back for two-a-days,” Browne said. “I had some convincing to do with my wife.”
It didn’t take much. Michele Browne is a football wife. She knew her husband was far from recovered and understood the physical demands it takes to withstand long days of practice in the summer heat. She also realized that being around his football family would be vital to his recovery.
“Football isn’t just what he does,” she said. “Football is who he is. It’s part of him. I’ve known that since the day I met him. I knew that was going to be a big part of his emotional and psychological healing. It was a no-brainer: We needed to come back. We had to come back.”
Browne can walk on his own now, though he still uses a Rollator to make his way from the school down the long macadam path that leads to Weiser Stadium. He’ll sit on the Rollator occasionally to take a break during practice.
It’s too dangerous for him to stand on the sidelines during games so he’s up on the press box roof each Friday night. He turned over the majority of the defensive coordinator responsibilities to Ernie Woolf, though he remains an integral part of the Scouts’ defensive preparations. (He continues to work with the offensive line, too.)
It took weeks for his voice to return a “football coach level” but that mattered little. His players hung on every word upon his return.
“The first day he came (to practice), you couldn’t even imagine the emotion that was going through all of us,” said senior H-back Evan Miller. “We’d been hearing about his fight throughout the (summer). It (showed us) that we knew we had something special if he’s willing to come out for us.”
His rib cage was still aching when two-a-days began – broken ribs take months to fully heal – and he didn’t have nearly the stamina he needed, but Browne didn’t miss a day of practice once he returned.
“You’re a football coach, you go to practice,” Browne reasons. “It’s a good example to show the kids there are times in life you need to step up and do the things you need to do. You tell kids to be resilient; to actually show ’em (what that looks like) is a good thing.”
How much Browne’s determination to return factored into the Scouts’ unexpected Lancaster-Lebanon League Section 3 crown and first unbeaten season in 28 years is hard to say, but Moyer knows it played a big part.
Football coaches are always looking for ways to motivate their players: Browne was there every day to remind them what fighting adversity looks like.
“He’s got an energy (about him),” Moyer said. “Kids were jumping up and down and high-fiving each other when he came back to practice. I think (his story has) really carried us.”
Browne will downplay that. He gives all the credit to his players. He was certain months before his accident they were on the road back.
Some have called the Scouts’ turnaround the feel-good story of the Lancaster-Lebanon League this season. Browne doesn’t see it that way.
“This is not a surprise,” he said. “No, no, no. Now 10-0, OK that might be a little surprise, but I had us (going) 7-3, 8-2. I was very confident.”
Browne can’t imagine missing a single one of the 10 wins that have comprised one of the greatest chapters in Conrad Weiser’s football story.
“I was not gonna miss it,” he said. “I’d have been pissed (if I did), that’s for sure.”
Conrad Weiser opens the District 3 Class 5A Tournament
Friday at home vs. Bishop McDevitt, 7:00
