Dr. Douglas Casa, a national expert on sports conditioning, said he had never heard of the log drill being used in football practice at the high school level. He said that in 20 years in the field, the only time he encountered the drill was as an expert witness in a court case after a high school wrestler died from heat stroke following the exercise. (Dr. Casa estimated that he had been an expert witness in over 40 cases in which athletes have died.)

Image Joshua Mileto

“My immediate thought is that Navy SEAL training is brutally hard, generally, for men in the mid-20s who are some of the best athletes in the whole world. And most of them don’t make it through the training,” said Dr. Casa, the chief executive of the Korey Stringer Institute, an organization based in Connecticut focused on preventing athletes’ deaths. “Most of the best athletes in the world can’t make it through. This is not a good idea for kids to be doing.”

The attention has provoked a sense of defensiveness in the Sachem East community, which includes several mostly white, middle-class towns on Long Island. (Sachem East is one of two high schools in the district; Farmingville is part of the larger town of Brookhaven.) As they grieved, Sachem parents and students remained careful not to point fingers and were protective of the coaches overseeing the training camp where Mr. Mileto died. Many insisted the community needed to grieve before turning to the cause of the fatal accident.

“After he passed, people started gravitating to asking, ‘What if we had done this? What if we had done that? What if we didn’t do that drill?’ But that’s the same thing that happens in any tragedy,” said Ryan Leone, 20, a recent Sachem East graduate who was on the field visiting when Mr. Mileto was fatally injured. He helped the coaches, whom he knew, provide emergency aid to Mr. Mileto.