The boy would have loved it out there last Saturday.

He would have been up before dawn, feeding the cattle, feeling the brisk wind as it reddened his cheeks. He would have relished walking across the soft Illinois dirt in his work boots as the sky turned yellowish pink. The other boys, his football teammates, would all be sleeping. Not Hayden Schaumburg. He didn't live for Friday nights the way he lived for Saturday mornings.

But Hayden wasn't out there last Saturday.

So the people came instead.

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Two weeks ago, Schaumburg charged down the field to block for his Watseka High teammates on a kick return. There was a fierce collision, and the 16-year-old junior collapsed onto the field.

"Went down in a heap and never moved again," says his head coach, Steve Lucas. "I've been around this game for 40 years. I knew it wasn't good."

Lucas ran onto the field and looked into his player's eyes. They were searching.

"Hey, Dad, are you there?" Hayden asked.

Clint Schaumburg arrived and bent over his son. "I'm here," he said.

"Dad," Hayden said, "I'm scared."

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Hayden Schaumburg is one of those rare kids who happens to be popular and successful and not the least bit pretentious about it. He's the "hardest working player on the team," says Lucas, and he's also on the track team, in the show choir and a member of the National Honor Society.

"If I had his heart in my other players' bodies," Lucas says, "we'd never lose a game."

Hayden's heart, though, is in farming. He's his school's chapter president of the Future Farmers of America, and at 16 he was already working the 2,000 acres of land owned by his dad in the county seat about 90 miles due south of Chicago. Hayden has learned to drive the combine and manage a small plot filled with sweet corn. He's shown cattle at the Iroquois County Fair.

"It's been embedded into him since birth," says family friend Shawn Peters. "It's truly what he enjoys. He knew when high school football was over, he'd be done playing. He accepted that."

Hayden wanted to go to agriculture school at the University of Illinois, and then come back home to help his dad.

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Hayden was laid out on the football field for 45 minutes that October night. His mom, Jolyn, stood watching with her hands covering her mouth. There was a plan to airlift him north to a Chicago-area hospital but it was too windy. So Hayden was taken by ambulance.

"It's stuff you're not prepared for," Peters says. "I was a little bit in shock. This is the stuff you see on TV. And being from Podunk, sometimes TV is not enough."

Hayden needed eight hours of surgery. He had broken his neck.

His coach drove up to visit him, not knowing what to expect. "As a coach," he says, "you think this only happens somewhere else." Lucas walked into Hayden's hospital room and saw a player he considered as a son, lying there sedated and helpless. Hayden wanted so badly to greet his coach, to show him some emotion. He shrugged his shoulders so emphatically that the nurse had to reset all the machines.

The coach began to cry.

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"Is there anything I can do?" is a question many of us ask when consoling someone who has been hit by tragedy. Most of the time, there isn't an answer to that, other than prayer. In this case, though, there was something. And it seemed so clear and obvious that nobody in town remembers who came up with the idea.

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