MI N D F OR CH A N G E FORMER COLTS CHAMP BEN UTECHT RAISES BRAIN INJURY AWARENESS
Writer / Christy Heitger-Ewing Photography Provided
Ben Utecht grew up in an athletic family. In fact, he calls himself a three-sport athlete, having participated in football, hockey and baseball. “Team sports in general were a significant part of my upbringing,” says Utecht, a fouryear starter for the University of Minnesota as a tight end.
JUNE 2021
He had quite the memorable start to his NFL career with the Indianapolis Colts when he caught a pass from Peyton Manning during the third quarter and dodged Deion Sanders for a touchdown. “That was a pretty overwhelming and special experience,” says Utecht, who was part of the Colts 2006 Super Bowl championship team. Though it’s a great memory, Utecht went through a phase of memory loss as a direct result of playing the sport he loved. Though he had accepted that contact sports have the potential to create injury, at the time there wasn’t more education around concussions than there was around orthopedic injuries. “You just kind of put them all into the same category,” Utecht says. “If anything, you probably thought an ACL tear was more serious than a concussion, so you didn’t really worry about it.”
