Jodi Klostreich continues brother Page's legacy off the field

Aug. 23—If you or a loved one are having thoughts of self-harm please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or online at 988lifeline.org/chat.

JAMESTOWN — Throughout his decorated hockey and football career that saw him make it all the way to the professional hockey ranks, Jamestown native Page Klostreich dealt with repeated head trauma.

The consequences of those led him to take his own life in 2017 and be diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy postmortem, according to his younger sister, Jodi Klostreich. She said her brother was diagnosed with stage 2 CTE, which according to the National Library of Medicine, is the second of four stages of the disease.

Klostreich said her brother was in recovery for alcohol and drug abuse when he passed away. Klostreich said she wants to clear up the rumor that her brother died thanks to his addiction battles but instead attributes it to his suffering from CTE and the mental health problems that came along with that.

"There were times when Page would get hit on the ice and he'd walk off and he would look dazed," Klostreich said. "He'd just look dazed and when I would remember he would get back in the car after games and he'd say, 'God, I don't feel really right.' We would just think, 'Maybe it's something you ate, or maybe you weren't feeling good before the game' or he'd have a headache, a headache later on and we just wouldn't think anything of it. You know you didn't think concussion right away, you didn't think those things. Football, I remember one time when he was playing football, he got hit really really hard and I remember him going to the sideline and it looked like he was throwing up and after the game, he said he threw up whatever he was drinking, some water or something and he said, 'I knew I shouldn't have had that burger.' Because he used to go to Randy's and have burgers. ... I don't believe now that it was the burger, I think it was that huge hit he took because he got rocked pretty hard."

According to the Mayo Clinic, CTE is a brain disorder likely caused by repeated head injuries. It causes the death of nerve cells in the brain known as degeneration.

Klostreich recently left a job overseeing mental health services for Oneida County in New York and started teaching at Mohawk Valley Community College in New York. She said she travels around the East Coast speaking to athletes about the importance of mental health awareness and concussions and suicide prevention.

Klostreich said it's important to erase the stigma surrounding mental health that still exists especially among athletes

"Even last spring, within two months time, five NCAA student-athletes died by suicide, five, five," Klostreich said. "Then all of a sudden we had an epidemic, all of the sudden, now we start talking about suicide. Why did we have to wait until something happened? That's what this country is, we're a reactive country, why aren't we talking about it before something happens? That's my goal to be proactive instead of reactive. We don't want to wait until there's a suicide, we don't want to wait until there's something. We gotta be proactive and talk about mental health."

Inspired by her brother's death, Klostreich did her thesis in college on CTE and particularly its presence in the brains of former athletes. Klostreich said she was studying behavior analysis before her brother's death. She said she was deciding between the mental health impacts and head trauma in those who served in the U.S. armed forces and athletes. According to a February 2023 study from the Boston University CTE Center, researchers from the CTE center have diagnosed the brains of 345 former NFL players with CTE out of the 376 brains studied.

In recent years, many former athletes have spoken publicly and addressed their mental health struggles, including U.S. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and Miami Heat forward Kevin Love.

"Top athletes that are coming out and saying I'm talking to somebody, you should too, like a Michael Phelps," Klostreich said. "He comes out and says it, Michael Phelps comes out and says I have mental health issues, I talk to somebody. He's helping to lessen the stigma. But you know what helps lessen the stigma? Parents, parents help lessen the stigma, having parents talk to their kids and saying it's OK."

Page Klostreich played football, hockey and baseball and ran track and field during his career at Jamestown High School. During his hockey career, he played at the University of North Dakota and Ferris State University (Michigan) before playing professionally for the Toledo Storm in the East Coach Hockey League.

During his career, Jodi Klostreich said her brother developed an addiction to painkillers.

"But, you get injured, you become a liability, that starts impacting you, now what are you gonna do," Klostreich said. "You're gonna take more pills, you're gonna drink more to get back on the ice to play better, start suiting yourself up. The problem with him is that's what he did, just to be on the ice, just to be able to play, the concussions continue to happen, the protocol was not very good back then, not like it is now, the regulations of prescriptions pills weren't good like it is now.

"They didn't have the protocols so he continued to use, addictions started, the acute systems started to become chronic, that's when stage one of CTE started," she said. "He started to become unbalanced, his speech started to slur, he started having memory loss."

Despite her knowledge of head trauma, Klostreich said she let her son, Logan, play hockey and her daughter, Jensyn, play soccer but she was very strict about sitting out when they received blows to the head. Klostreich said Logan came one concussion away from having to retire from the sport. During her time coaching high school hockey in upstate New York, she said she was very careful with her athletes and had them sit out after a big hit while they figured out whether or not they are concussed.

Klostreich recalled a heartwrenching final conversation with her brother before his death in which he pleaded for help. Klostreich said he was suffering from balance issues, slurred speech and ringing in his ears, which he said only dissipated when he was drinking alcohol.

Klostreich said she learned after her brother's death about the impact that he made in other people's life. Klostreich estimates 1,000 people reached out to her to console her and reminisce about the impact that Page made on their lives.

"When he died I was floored how many coaches and former athletes alone reached out to me," Klostreich said. "I don't even know how they got my number, they got my email address, they reached out by Facebook, through high school athletes that played against him, played with him, college athletes, athletes over in Europe that played with him, players that played with him on the Toledo team, athletes that I didn't even meet, I've never met them in my life. His housing parents that housed him for junior hockey, I've never met them, they reached out."