What Arizona State Got Wrong in Its Response to Matthew Mayich’s Collapse

The university’s first three weeks show why the process becomes the message in any crisis

Matthew Mayich collapsed on a Tempe practice field on August 20 during his first day of coach-led workouts at Arizona State, and his family’s attorneys now say the 21-year-old defenseman suffered exertional heat stroke that caused irreversible brain damage with no chance of recovery. Investigators will need months to establish what happened during that hour. The university settled the other question within days, and that is where its crisis response has run into trouble.

Anyone who has waited on an explanation from an employer, an insurer, or a school board recognizes the dynamic. Audiences decide whether they believe an answer by watching how an institution searches for it, and they reach that verdict long before the answer arrives.

What happened to Matthew Mayich at Arizona State?

Mayich flew into Phoenix from Ontario days earlier and had never trained in Arizona heat. His family’s lawyers describe a military-style session with almost no water led by a former Green Beret the coaching staff brought in, while an attorney for that instructor disputes that account. Arizona State says coaches and training staff were on site along with a third party who had worked with the hockey program before.

Three separate inquiries are now running in parallel. Senior vice president James Rund leads the university’s internal review, campus police have opened their own investigation, and the family’s attorneys are conducting a third. Mayich remains hospitalized.

Why did “a review, not an investigation” backfire for ASU?

Because the public heard a verdict where the university intended a procedure. Athletic director Graham Rossini told a local radio show that Arizona State was reviewing the workout, that this was not an investigation, and that nobody was suggesting anything had gone wrong.

Inside a university that language is routine paperwork, sorting out which offices get pulled in and what rules apply. Outside the building it sounded like a conclusion reached before anyone had looked at anything. Institutions damage themselves through this kind of translation failure far more often than through dishonesty, which is why media training earns its keep in the first 48 hours rather than the sixth month.

The same pattern showed up around Mayich’s name. Arizona State withheld it for more than two weeks on privacy grounds, then let the hockey program identify him publicly on September 5. A reversal that arrives while pressure is building tends to look like a product of that pressure, whatever the actual reasoning behind it.

Does an internal review count as an independent investigation?

Rarely, once the stakes climb this high, and Arizona State is finding that out in public. Rund is a senior official reporting up a chain that ends with the leadership whose judgment forms part of the question. Mayich’s family has asked the university to retain an outside firm and to have the coaching staff step aside while the work proceeds, and Arizona State has done neither, so practices continue under the same coaches and the season remains on schedule.

Independence stands in for trust when outsiders have no way to check anyone’s good faith for themselves. A homeowner told that the contractor whose ladder came through the roof will be looking into the matter feels this immediately, and the contractor’s sincerity does nothing to resolve it. We watched the same pressure shape coverage for a higher education institution navigating a sensitive legal situation, where the credibility of the process mattered more to reporters than the underlying facts did.

What makes an investigation credible to the public?

Audiences apply the same test every time, usually without putting it into words:

• Who runs it. An outside party with no stake in the outcome carries a weight that no internal reviewer can create on his own.
• What it can examine. A review limited to a single workout answers a far smaller question than one allowed to ask why that workout was approved in the first place.
• Whether witnesses feel safe. People who still report to the subjects of a review give guarded answers, and everyone reading the findings understands that.
• What it measures against. Published heat guidelines and recognized athletic training standards give the findings something outside the building to be measured against.
• Where the findings go. A promise to publish made at the start carries weight that later assurances never quite match.

Organizations that answer those questions in week one buy themselves a great deal of patience. Organizations that cannot will be assumed to be managing the outcome, fairly or otherwise.

How should an organization respond in the first week of a crisis?

Lead with the people affected before describing any procedure, say plainly who owns the job of finding answers, and explain what that person is allowed to examine. Leaders under scrutiny reach instinctively for protective language, and protective language reads as distance to everyone standing outside the institution.

Nobody expects complete answers within days, and complicated situations genuinely require time to sort out. People forgive far less when they sense that an institution cares more about how a situation looks than about what happened to someone inside it.

Why this matters beyond college athletics

Arizona State will eventually publish findings about August 20, and those findings will land in an environment already shaped by three weeks of decisions about language, independence, and disclosure. The evidence arrives late to a conversation that has already formed its conclusions.

Every organization eventually faces its own version of this, whether it runs a hospital system or a nine-person family business. The facts belong to the investigators, and how you go looking for them belongs to you, which is why the process becomes the message.

Red Banyan works with leaders facing exactly this kind of scrutiny. Talk to our crisis team if you’re facing a situation requiring rapid response, and consider crisis prevention and planning services to protect your reputation now.