Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
QuickTake:
Dan Pritchard, a volunteer at the NCAA track championships, went into cardiac arrest Saturday at the meet. His wife saw the emergency happening from the stands, as did thousands of fans. Pritchard received immediate attention from medics on site and was released from the hospital Monday.
The hat.
Patrice Pritchard will never forget the hat. It was sitting upright, straddling the line separating lanes 1 and 2 in the southeast corner of Hayward Field during the final day of competition Saturday, June 14, at the 2025 NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships.
“That’s how she knew it was me,” said Dan Pritchard, 71, Patrice’s husband and the owner of the big-brimmed straw sun hat. “She looked down there and saw all the commotion, saw somebody giving CPR, but didn’t know (who was down) and then somebody moved and my hat was lying there.”
Patrice Pritchard watched the scene unfold from Section 226, in the stadium’s northwest corner. The couple’s son, Dane, 36 and a University of Oregon graduate, had gone to the restroom.
Dan Pritchard, one of hundreds of TrackTown USA volunteers working the four-day track meet, was part of the hurdles crew, the folks who set up and take down the upright frames before and after a race.
Pritchard was in cardiac arrest.
A swirl of athletic staff and EMTs in front of Section 113 performed chest compressions and strapped a Lund University Cardiopulmonary Assist System, or LUCAS, device around his chest. They got him on a gurney, off the track, and into the on-site ambulance.
‘I don’t remember hitting the track’
In the early 1970s, Dan Pritchard was a high school football star at Rex Putnam High in Milwaukie and went on to play college football at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He’s still active in sports, refereeing high school football games and wrestling matches, and in the summer, he’s a baseball umpire.
Pritchard was working only his second track meet as a volunteer. (He also worked the state high school track and field championships May 29-31 at Hayward.) He just finished loading hurdles onto carts on the track’s backstretch at the conclusion of the women’s 400-meter hurdles around 7:30 p.m.
Pritchard was pushing the carts off the track. His co-hurdle crew member, Tom Duenas, a Washington County sheriff’s deputy, was just a few steps behind Pritchard when he went down.
Pritchard said he had experienced some shortness of breath while pushing hurdles on Friday, the meet’s third day, but he discounted it because he’d just eaten a hearty helping of the preevent meal of teriyaki chicken and rice. He’d also been nursing a pulled hamstring he’d aggravated a couple of times while working the meet.
Then came Saturday.
“Everybody was hustling, and I was trying to keep up with them,” Pritchard said Tuesday, sitting with Patrice in the backyard of their Springfield home.
“Man, I’m really tired,” Pritchard remembers thinking. “I don’t have to push this fast, I think I’m just going to … slow … down.
“And that was it. I don’t remember hitting the track.”
Duenas immediately began performing CPR and yelling for medics, but they couldn’t hear him because of the crowd noise, said Lori Nakasone, associate crew leader for the hurdles and steeplechase events Saturday.
But they soon saw Duenas, because the on-site EMT crew hangs around the tunnel entrance below Section 116, where athletes enter and exit on the south side of Hayward.
Grant Wilson, the UO’s associate director of athletic medicine for cross-country and track and field, arrived and took over CPR for Duenas, as the EMT crew followed.
A hush fell over the more than 9,300 fans in the stadium. It was deadly silent for a good minute or two.
After getting a pulse, the EMTs wheeled Pritchard through the tunnel, the LUCAS device continuing compressions on his chest.
“Tom, bless his heart, was trying to brace me because he was turning colors,” said Nakasone, 60.
“You never want to have a face-to-face encounter with a LUCAS machine,” Pritchard said.
“It still hurts,” he said, feeling his chest. “It just beats the heck out of you.”
On the other hand, “that’s what saved my life,” said Pritchard, who was told the cause of the cardiac arrest and subsequent heart attack were blockages in two coronary arteries, one about 85%, the other 95%. Doctors also found an aortic valve that needs replacing.
“I’m telling you what, they’re amazing,” Pritchard said of the EMT crew. “I definitely want to find out who they are.”
‘It could have gone either way’
After learning Pritchard had been taken to RiverBend, Patrice Pritchard and her son headed straight there, not knowing his condition.
They were called back to a room in the emergency department, where Pritchard was recovering, but they still didn’t know how he was.
When they walked in, someone was standing in the way, blocking the view of Pritchard’s face.
“You just don’t know,” said Patrice Pritchard, a retired nurse.
“I was so relieved when I stepped around that person and saw you,” she told her husband on their backyard patio.
Nakasone, who’s been volunteering for track meets at Hayward Field for five years, said she’d never before seen anyone go into cardiac arrest at one of them.
“It was surreal,” she said.
Dan Pritchard has a three-hour gap in his memory. One moment, he was pushing that hurdles cart, and the next, he was in a bed in a regular RiverBend room. It was about 10:30 p.m., Saturday. His wife and son were there.
And he was alive.
“You don’t know what you’re going to be thinking when something like this happens until it happens,” Patrice Pritchard said. “And your mind can go down a rabbit hole: what if this happens, and then? And I had to stop myself from doing that. Just because I’m a believer in God, and he’s got his hand in this, and it could have gone either way.”
Asked if he’ll be back on the track at Hayward soon, Dan Pritchard, who came home Monday, said Nakasone gave him one job the rest of the track and field season:
“Your assignment for the rest of the year is spectator.”
