Hockey Player Jeremy Langlois Injured After Bone-Rattling Check — Here's What Happened

Injuries during high-contact sports are common. For football, hockey, and rugby players, it's almost expected that you'll have a devastating injury at some point. You just hope to beat the odds and recover from it.

When Maine freshman Jeremy Langlois went down hard on the ice, fans were breathless, hoping he would get up.

Unfortunately, Jeremy was quickly carted off the ice, and many feared the worst. Here's what we know about what happened to him and what we know about the prevalence of head injuries in ice hockey.

Jeremy was playing for the University of Maine on Nov. 23, 2025, when things went horribly wrong. Jeremy took a crushing body check from rival Brady Berard, a forward for Boston College.

He absorbed the check with his shoulder, according to Red 94, but as he went down, he struck his head on the ice and lay motionless. For 10 minutes, fans held their breath and hoped he would get up again.

While Jeremy was able to move his extremities, he was loaded onto a stretcher and carted off the ice eventually, then rushed to the hospital for imaging.

Luckily, he seems to have dodged a bullet. In a statement shared with the press, the University of Maine stated, "After a collision in Saturday's game, he was taken to Brigham and Women’s Hospital for evaluation where CT scans and X-rays were normal. He was released and has since traveled back to Orono where he is under the care of our sports medicine staff" (excerpts via College Hockey News).

Jeremy's injury joins a long line of devastating injuries among hockey players. It begs the question: Why are head injuries, specifically, so common in hockey? Players wear padded helmets, and yet it seems like there are still frequent devastating injuries.

A study of hockey games in Finland from 2017 to 2020 found an incident rate of 12.9 injuries per 1000 player-games (via ScienceDirect). Among those injuries, 36.2 percent of the injuries were related to the head, followed by upper extremities and then lower extremities.

Body checking accounted for a whopping 31.5 percent of the injuries, with 29.3 percent of those related injuries being diagnosed as contusions.

A study from Harvard found that, while many people associate chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) injuries with football, hockey is a common source of the head-specific injuries.

But knowing all of these statistics doesn't answer the "why." So, why are head injuries so common?

Ice Hockey Central notes that there are several contributing factors, including the fact that body checks are so common in hockey. There are a lot of hard things on a hockey rink — including the ice itself — so a hard fall or collision with a stick or puck can definitely explain why there are so many head injuries in the sport.

Heavily padded helmets hope to offset the prevalence of serious injury, but the commonality of CTE injuries is prevalent enough to suggest that current attempts to limit head injuries aren't enough.