An Orange County school district has agreed to pay a former local high school football player $31 million to settle a lawsuit over a fall on the school’s practice field that his attorneys said resulted in a traumatic brain injury.

Lawyers for Emanuel “Manny” Garcia say their client was 15 years old, a freshman on the Corona del Mar High football team, when he was injured on March 9, 2021, after falling during practice on natural turf fields that weren’t maintained by the district.

Although wearing a helmet at the time, Garcia suffered a “life-altering brain bleed resulting in a traumatic brain injury with severe cognitive defects and emotional harms,” attorneys at Panish, Shea and Ravipudi said in a release Tuesday.

“It was a very scary injury,” attorney Jesse Creed said in an interview with the Daily Pilot. “Manny was in a coma. His GPA dropped dramatically afterward, and he generally became a special education student.”

Despite setbacks brought on by what is described in legal documents as traumatic brain injury with a subdural hemorrhage and intracranial bleeding, Garcia managed to graduate in June of this year with his peers at Corona del Mar High.

Meanwhile, the teen’s legal team was engaged in what Creed described as “hard-fought litigation” with the Newport-Mesa Unified School District that continued for more than two years ahead of the settlement agreement, which was signed on Aug. 22.

Attorneys allege the school district failed to adequately maintain the fields, even after receiving repeated warnings from coaches in multiple sports of the dangerous conditions and increased risk of head injuries.

“The warnings came from every nook and cranny of the district,” Creed said. “They came from coaches in football, soccer and lacrosse. They came every year, they were in writing, they were verbal. Warnings were communicated to the principal — they were credible, they were consistent, and they were clear.”

Responding to the February 2022 complaint, representatives for the school district stated their client “denies that plaintiff suffered damages in any sum.”

“At the time of the accident referred to in plaintiff’s complaint, the plaintiff was negligent or at fault and failed to use that degree of care and caution which a reasonably prudent person would have used under the same or similar circumstances,” attorneys from McCune & Harber wrote in a September 2022 response.

Newport-Mesa Unified spokeswoman Annette Franco declined to comment on the specifics of the settlement agreement Tuesday but wrote in an email the district regularly tests its fields, performing routine safety assessments and soil compaction tests.

“Over the years, we have made substantial improvements to our fields and athletic facilities, and we remain dedicated to their ongoing maintenance,” Franco wrote. “Additionally, we have completed numerous projects to enhance the quality of our athletic spaces and will continue these efforts to ensure the success and safety of our student athletes.”

Creed said evidence obtained during discovery indicated otherwise, including a May 2016 email from Corona del Mar High lacrosse coach G.W. Mix to then-Principal Kathy Scott and former athletic director Don Grable.

“I wanted to reach out and express my deep concerns for the current condition of our athletics field on our campus,” the coach wrote in the email. “Frankly, the surface on which we are asking our student-athletes to practice and compete on a daily basis is bordering on unplayable. Our fields have steadfastly become a safety concern, a liability issue and an extremely poor representation of our school.”

Creed called unregulated standards for youth sports fields one of the “silent dangers in California field sports.”

“There’s a lot of research about how to maintain fields to protect athletes, including our children,” he said. “The district had even become aware, as a result of parent complaints about those standards, and they did nothing.”

Garcia echoed the sentiment about the importance of safe playing fields for students in Tuesday’s settlement announcement.

“I want to thank the football coaches and program for standing by me,” he said. “Every school district should make sure the football fields are safe to play on so that this terrible thing never happens again.”