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Taking the Pulse: a Health Care and Life Sciences Podcast · Taking The Pulse

Episode 258: Connor Shaw’s Story: Surviving Sudden Cardiac Arrest and Launching Heart Huddle

·20 min·1 clip
Connor Shaw describes collapsing into sudden cardiac arrest while coaching his son's football game, with his family watching.
September 17th is the hinge. The host asks Connor Shaw to shift from workplace wellness into the personal story behind Heart Huddle. Shaw starts on an ordinary field: a Wednesday night football game, his wife, three children, and her mother close by. That plain setup does a lot of work. Cardiac arrest is not treated like a distant medical category; it is something that can crash into a family routine. From there, Heart Huddle turns the story into a plan people can actually picture. Shaw talks about trained bystanders, reachable AEDs, and local response teams that know how to work together. The places he names are just as practical: rec department fields, city parks, schools, homes, cars, even patrol cars. He keeps the scale local and does not pretend to be the technical authority. First responders and community partners are the people he wants assessing where equipment and training belong. Caleb Carter has a clear role, with Shaw saying he will serve on the Heart Huddle board; emergency response teams and AED distributors or manufacturers have also shown interest. The CPR piece feels doable. Asked about certification, Shaw says a course can be done in a day, around four hours. The show never lets the story float away into sentiment. It keeps pulling the conversation back to logistics, cost, infrastructure, sustainability, and who is ready when someone has to respond. After a short Gamecocks and Tigers aside and congratulations on Shaw's new baby boy, the close lands on gratitude and needed work.

As heard by us

A personal cardiac-arrest story becomes a straightforward case for CPR, AEDs, and readiness.

Connor Shaw turns a personal cardiac-arrest story into a plain case for readiness. The conversation moves from the crisis itself to the work he wants Heart Huddle to support: more people trained in CPR and more AEDs in rec department fields, city parks, schools, homes, cars, and…

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Why you'd press play

When a Wednesday night coaching game turns into cardiac arrest, preparedness stops being abstract.

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