The Entrepreneur
Evan Ernst, 33
Executive Director, Who We Play For, Merritt Island
Team: 70+ co-founders, medical advisors and board members
The Backstory
Rafe Maccarone was Evan Ernst’s soccer teammate at Cocoa Beach High. During a practice in 2007, Rafe suffered a cardiac episode. A teammate with ROTC training and the coach started CPR while others searched for a defibrillator, which was unfortunately locked away inside the school. Rafe was rushed to the hospital, but he died the next day of sudden cardiac arrest, Ernst says. “Forever ingrained in our brains is wearing our high school soccer jerseys while we carried Rafe’s casket through his childhood church.”
Ernst and his teammates later learned of many more stories like Rafe’s. For youth athletes, a sudden cardiac arrest is too often the first indication of an underlying heart condition; it’s the No. 1 cause of death for them. The teammates started a student scholarship in Rafe’s memory, and then in 2013, a group of them gathered at their Florida State University fraternity house. “We started asking each other: Could we create a national movement to help save kids like Rafe?” Ernst recalls. “We began to understand it was a now or never moment. We had to do this now before we had jobs and were way too practical to try and do something crazy.”
That discussion launched what would become Who We Play For, a nonprofit organization. At its core, Who We Play For runs mobile electrocardiogram (ECG) screening events across Florida and beyond. The brief test identifies previously unnoticed heart conditions, such as Rafe’s, and could have saved his life, says Ernst, Who We Play For’s executive director.
For more than 10 years, Who We Play For has provided low-cost or free screenings and notifies families of any abnormalities. Who We Play For also advocates for more access to automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and CPR training.
Making Impact
Today, Who We Play For, the largest heart-screening nonprofit in the U.S., has screened about 300,000 student athletes and documented more than 300 kids with life-threatening heart conditions, Ernst says. The team has helped pass 30 laws around the country that for the first time required school districts to provide ECG heart screening to play sports or engage in activities like ROTC, marching band or dance. To scale its impact, the nonprofit has partnered with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and Florida’s HBCUs. Internationally, it brought heart screenings to Central America.
The most impactful initiative, if it gains approval, could be the Access to AEDs Act, a federal bill backed by the Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin who suffered a sudden cardiac arrest on the field and survived. The bill, which has bipartisan support, would provide funding to public and charter schools across the country for defibrillators and CPR training.
Team Effort
“None of us are rich, or particularly smart or talented. We are a bunch of relentless kids from a small town who were willing to ask for help over and over again. People in Florida from the Legislature to hospitals to professional sports teams and so many more have stepped up and joined arms to make a difference,” Ernst says.
Along with volunteers, about 15 co-founders work in the nonprofit full-time, including: Kieran Easton, the director overseeing the heart screening programs since day one; Klynton Holmes Jr., who builds the tech for the nonprofit; and Ernst’s younger brother Zack, a former corporate lawyer who specialized in health care regulation and who returned to work at Who We Play For in honor of Rafe, his childhood best friend. About 40 health care leaders serve as medical advisors to the nonprofit. Rafe’s father, Ralph Maccarone, chairs the 15-member board of directors.
“FSU helped to make us believe anything was possible. Who We Play For was founded in the FSU Jim Moran Entrepreneurship Program, and a decade later they have always had our back, with money, resources, office space and mentorship,” says Ernst. WWPF is now a member of Groundswell Startups, an innovative incubator on the Space Coast.
Next Play
A couple of years ago, the team realized they had the largest database of pediatric and young adult ECGs in the country. Who We Play For received a grant from Amazon Web Services to work together to build the first automated interpretation tool for pediatric and young adult screening ECGs powered by machine learning.
“The reality is that 1 in 300 youth have a detectable and potentially life-threatening heart condition. That’s equivalent to nearly 140,000 lives that could be protected across the United States,” Holmes says. “We hope to drastically raise the standard of care for preventing sudden cardiac arrest across the United States and one day globally.”
To that end, WWPF spun out a startup, Ainthoven, to build out the life-saving platform. That would also solve a big challenge in scaling: Currently there’s a shortage of specialists to interpret the ECGs. “We are empowering medical providers with the ability to read these ECGs as good as electrophysiologists or the best cardiologists,” Ernst says.
Ainthoven — the company’s name is a nod to Willem Einthoven, the Dutch doctor who invented the ECG in 1903 — has raised about $500,000. Up next: taking the project to the FDA.
Adds Zack Ernst: “It has been the honor of a lifetime to help to now bring this first-of-its-kind life-saving tool through the FDA and eventually to the market. We are hoping this interpretation tool will be what empowers the U.S. health care system to adopt screening ECGs for the 30 million kids between 12 and 18.”