A heart condition ended his college basketball career It took transferring to discover it

A heart condition ended his college basketball career. It took transferring to discover it.. On the September night that his basketball career ended, Jaylen Brantley arrived at his mother’s home in Springfield, Mass., for a family dinner that seemed to have only one rule: There would be no discussion of the sport that had defined his life for 24 years. They would not talk about Brantley’s obsession with basketball from the time he was a toddler — one of his first words muttered was “shooting” — through his rise as a high school prospect in the Boston area. They would not talk about his nomadic path through college basketball, which took him from Marshall to a junior college in Texas to Maryland and finally to U-Mass. this past spring, where he transferred for his final year of eligibility to be closer to home. And they certainly wouldn’t talk about the news that was delivered earlier that afternoon, when a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital told Brantley that he had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition in which heart muscles become abnormally thick and can make it difficult for the heart to pump blood. Brantley stood stone-faced as the doctor explained this would end his playing career.