'It Will Never Be The Same': Lake Travis continues to mourn – and honor – Odin Hensley

Odin Hensley’s morning alarm blared for the last time somewhere around 5 a.m. on August 10.

Lake Travis’ first football practice didn’t start until 6:30 a.m., but Odin wanted to be there early to set the tone for his senior season. And his mother, Christina, says her son was never a morning person. He needed an hour, unbothered, to wake up. Like a 6-foot-3, 285-pound bear coming out of hibernation, he groggily shuffled from brushing his teeth at the bathroom sink to the kitchen, where he made the same breakfast every morning: oatmeal mixed with protein powder, topped with berries, and a glass of water full of creatine and electrolyte powder.

The more he ate, the more amped he became. The food warmed his stomach, adding fuel to the fire that was already burning in his belly on the first day of fall camp. Odin was already a two-time state qualifying wrestler. This past year, he’d finished seventh at the UIL State meet despite a sprained ankle that had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. But wrestling, while fun, was meant to prepare him for this moment.

If Texas high school football is really a religion, then Lake Travis High School has a chapter in its Bible. The Cavaliers are the only team in state history to ever win five state championships in a row. And, this year, Odin would get his first chance to start on the offensive line for that dynasty.

Odin swallowed his last bit of oatmeal, rinsed his plate in the sink, and headed toward the door. His mother followed him out, wanting to savor the moment.

“Let me take your picture for your last first day of practice,” Christina teased.

“Mommm,” Odin sighed. “It’s still dark outside.”

“Fine,” Christina said. “But I will get a picture on Wednesday for the last first day of school.”

“Ok, I’ll let you take a picture then,” Odin conceded.

With that, he peeled out of the driveway and drove toward the first day of his senior year, the pinnacle of his young life, a world of endless possibility and opportunity ahead of him.

He never came back home.

Now, nearly two months later, Christina doesn’t know whether or not she wishes she had that picture. Either way, the last time she spoke to her son will forever be burned in her memory.

For all the excitement of the first day of football practice, the first part of that first day is pretty boring. At a program as massive as Lake Travis, hundreds of kids line up to turn in their physical forms, collect their pads, and set up their lockers one by one. The team didn’t get onto the practice field until about 7:15 a.m. The day was almost unnaturally cool for August. Within the hour, the temperature would only crawl to 79 degrees, and the sky was mostly cloudy. But even as the team walked up the hill to the practice field, Odin’s friends on the offensive line noticed he was already out of breath.

Since the varsity, JV A, and JV B teams all practice together, Lake Travis offensive line coach Erick Wren oversaw about 50 linemen through warm-ups. As a senior starter, Odin was on the front line while the Cavaliers went through high knees and lunges. After the warm-up, Coach Wren led the offensive linemen through the first period of individual drills – a simple step progression. 

Day 1 of fall camp, especially in 2026, isn’t like the stereotypical Navy SEAL Hell Week shown in the Friday Night Lights movie and TV show. Frankly, the first day is elementary and process based. This is how we line up. This is how we step off the line. This is where we put our hands to engage the defender. But within the first couple of reps, Wren noticed Odin was dripping sweat and staggering. He looked like he’d run wind sprints in 100-degree heat for an hour instead of warming up in 70-something-degree weather.

It didn’t make sense that anyone, much less Odin Hensley, would be this gassed.

Odin was the consummate worker. Growing up, his mother held him back from football as a safety precaution until the 7th grade. In an area where most kids put on the pads in elementary school, dreaming of the day they’ll become Cavaliers, Odin was far behind his peers. He started on the C-team. But slowly, he worked his way into a college prospect. Odin made the 8th grade B-team, then the freshman A-team. He loved lifting weights and doing footwork drills outside of practice with his friends. He was built like an Army tank: young, strong, seemingly invincible.

“Hensley, go see the trainer,” Coach Wren ordered.

Odin initially refused, lining up for another rep.

“Hensley, trainer,” Wren repeated.

At Lake Travis practice, every position group has at least one student trainer assigned. Three licensed athletic trainers are also at every practice: head trainer Cameron Flanders, Aimee Zapata, and Alana Whitfield. On Wren’s order, Odin trotted up to the student trainer assigned to the linemen and grabbed some Gatorade. 

“I feel like I can’t catch my breath,” Odin told the student.

After a couple swigs of Gatorade, Odin begged the student not to tell the adult trainers. He wanted to get back to practice as soon as possible.

Everyone who knew him described Odin as a gentle giant. But he was still physically intimidating to the student trainer. It would’ve been easier to let him return to practice than to step between the big man and his team. But the student trainer, like Coach Wren before him, sensed something was wrong. He called Flanders over, the head athletic trainer. 

As Flanders checked on Odin, the other trainers drove the golf cart to the other side of the field to grab Lake Travis head coach Hank Carter. At this point, Carter wasn’t too alarmed. Frankly, he was annoyed. He’s sickened to admit that now, but he also couldn’t have possibly foreseen what he’d find on the other side of his 70-yard jog to the trainers’ area. 

“I jog over there thinking somebody might have stepped in a hole,” Carter said. “It’s so early in practice, I’m like, ‘What the heck? Can we not even freaking warm up? One of our guys is already hurt?’”

He’s spent every day since wishing that’s all it was. The next moments happened in a blur, but they’re clear in his memory. They’ll probably always be there.

When Carter arrived, Odin stood with his hands on his hips, complaining to Flanders about shortness of breath. Soon, he plopped down on the golf cart, saying how bad his stomach hurt in between gasps for air. Moments later, Odin had his first seizure. Flanders dialed 911 at 7:51 a.m.

As Fletcher talked to the dispatcher, the other trainers moved Odin, in-and-out of consciousness, onto his side on the ground. According to the released 911 call, Fletcher counted off Odin’s breaths every half second for the dispatcher. 

“Just let him rest in the most comfortable position and wait for help to arrive,” the dispatcher said.

But Odin stopped breathing moments after Fletcher hung up. The Lake Travis trainers, led by Fletcher, immediately began CPR and administered an AED. The first responders took over when they arrived two minutes later. The ambulance, fire truck, and Star Flight helicopter arrived seemingly all at once, transforming Lake Travis’ first fall practice into a life-or-death emergency within minutes, with whistles and clapping hands replaced by sirens and flashing lights.

Back at home, Christina was getting dressed and grabbing her dog’s harness for a hike. When she grabbed her phone to leave, she saw double-digit missed calls on the home screen. Before she could process what the calls might mean, her phone rang again. It was Coach Carter. They believed Odin had a seizure, and she needed to get up to the school right away. When she arrived at the parking lot, a coach was there to pick her up in a golf cart. They drove up toward every parent’s worst nightmare: Christina’s son in the ambulance, the first responders attempting to stabilize him long enough to make it to the helicopter.

They transported Odin to Dell Children’s Hospital for emergency surgery. By the time Christina met him there, the doctors were already performing CPR. It’s weird what your brain fixates on in life’s most horrible moments. For Christina, it was the way the doctors worked together. She’s still in awe of how efficient they were, rotating in and out without missing a beat, almost like they shared one mind.

But Christina also remembers how the Lake Travis team showed up for Odin during his surgery, and how they didn’t leave until the doctors told them they had to.

“When we were at the hospital, literally every single coach was there,” Christina said. “A bunch of the guys from the team came up. At this point, he was in surgery. Hours and hours went by, and all of his coaches were there. They had the quarterbacks and the O-Line guys up there.”

Christina doesn’t love football like Odin did. After all, she didn’t let him play until seventh grade. And while that’s entirely understandable – many would say even smart – she saw in that moment why her son was always drawn to the sport. Above the violence, the pancakes, and the wins, Odin loved the camaraderie.

“He loved the team aspect of it,” Christina said. “He loved being part of the team. He loved all the lifts. He didn’t love the running. But he was one of the faster linemen for sure. He always told me he wanted to play football as long as he could, so he was really looking forward to playing football in college.”

He would never get the chance.

Odin Hensley passed away two days after that first fall practice, on August 13. He was just 17 years old.

Carter learned it was Odin’s last day on the way to a prayer vigil at a local church. He called that team meeting the hardest he’d ever had in his life, both because of what happened and because there were no answers as to why.

“He was just such a healthy, strong, mountain of a young man,” Carter said. “It was surreal that that could happen. I’ve been in this business 28 years, and I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

Carter says no playbook or college class can prepare you for this. It did help that he has a son, junior quarterback Jason Carter, and a senior nephew on the team. Carter has an unusual bond with this year’s crop of upperclassmen, which makes an unimaginable loss even more painful. But it also gave him a better read on what the team needed. He decided to open practice on a voluntary basis, so the players could join whenever they felt ready.

Lake Travis sleepwalked through those practices in the weeks after Odin’s death, going through the motions in a daze, grieving over the loss of their friend and terrified that it could happen again. Carter doesn’t think they got any better at football in that time, but it was an important part of the healing practice. 

“We were out there some, but everybody was so numb and just raw from what had happened,” Carter said. “It did feel good, though, for us to be together. Everybody deals with grief differently. I’m certainly not an expert at this. But it did kind of feel good for all of us to be together while we were going through that, even if we weren’t out there kicking butt and practicing football like we normally would have wanted to be if nothing had happened.”

After Odin's surgery, the cardiothoracic surgeon, whom Christina and the family could not be more complimentary of, explained what had happened. Odin had a pulmonary embolism, a sudden blood clot in the lung artery, which had led to cardiac arrest. He said that these things do happen, pointing out Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, who suffered cardiac arrest on Monday Night Football in 2023. But they were rare and random. He likened it to getting struck by lightning.

That day, the doctors ran some blood tests, searching for a reason why this strong young man was struck down so suddenly. But Christina hasn’t heard back, and she doubts she ever will. By the time doctors drew blood, her son was already infused with so much random blood from the surgery that she is skeptical there will ever be an answer.

“Sometimes things happen in life, and maybe we don’t get to know the reason why all the time,” Christina said. “I think that’s something I’m still dealing with. I think I’ll probably question that forever.”

But for a lot of people, that answer – or lack thereof – is not good enough.

For as much of a blur as the first hours after Odin’s collapse were, the next two days until his death were excruciatingly slow. Christina found herself scrolling social media, looking at people's comments and speculation about what happened to her son. She knew it wasn’t healthy, but she couldn’t stop. Here were all these people with no connection to Lake Travis, who didn’t even live in Austin, arguing over who was at fault. And they were all wrong.

“The Lake Travis trainers were amazing; they were right there on it,” Christina said. “The cardiothoracic surgeon at Dell Children’s, he spent a lot of time explaining what was going on in ways that we could understand. He said – and I thought this was important to share – he told me, ‘From the moment this happened, everything went as well as it could’ve. And this is still the result.’”

Everyone involved in this story performed perfectly under pressure. Odin’s cardiac arrest – as terrible as it is – also happened at the best school and at the best time for a better result. He was in the heart of Austin, an affluent area near a ton of hospitals, on a Monday morning when all the doctors were in.

In the weeks after, Christina has been hesitant to talk to reporters, including the one writing this article. She doesn’t know their intentions. And, frankly, she’s been spooked. Days after burying her son, Christina opened her mailbox to a request from a national reporter trying to dig up a story.

“It sounded like she had already had what she was going to say in mind,” Christina said. “It was about heat stuff, and how linemen are more susceptible because they’re big. You could tell that she was sort of seeking to blame somebody, and I hate that. Because that’s not the case at all.”

Christina doesn’t want anyone to shoulder blame for Odin’s death. That goes for Odin, too. Christina felt the reporter implied her son was out of shape after spending the summer playing video games, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Odin wrestled all summer, a cardio-forward sport. He wasn’t some chubby kid, but a lineman at a blue-blood high school football program who was dense and muscular and relatively lean given his size. He tried to make all the right choices, refusing to smoke, vape, or drink.

“I know that when people are blamey, that gets more clicks, so I do get it,” Christina said. “But I would hate for somebody to use Odin in that way. I’m sure there are plenty of stories out there where something neglectful did happen. But this isn’t that.”

To Christina, these stories people want to write aren’t about Odin, but about using Odin as a means to an end: to push a narrative, point a finger, or get more views. Which would be the ultimate tragedy, because that’s not how her son lived his life.

Odin was always the biggest kid amongst his friends. He was in the 99th percentile of infants when he was born. When Carter first saw him as an eighth grader playing free safety on the middle school 7-on-7 team, he said it looked like there was an adult in a child’s uniform.

Odin could’ve used his size and power to bully other kids, to take what he wanted by force. But he never did. Christina remembers getting a voicemail from the assistant principal at Bee Cave Middle School when Odin was in 7th grade. The voice on the other end was stern, saying there had been an incident and Odin was involved. She called back in a panic.

“Is everything OK?” she asked.

A couple of boys had been fighting, and a kid had been shoved down. Odin swooped in out of nowhere, picked the boy up, set him on his feet, and made sure he was OK. The principals had watched it all on camera.

Christina told the principal how much his voicemail scared her.

“I’m sorry, I was just joking,” the assistant principal laughed. “I had to.”

Odin displayed that kindness until the very end. In fact, he's continued to help people even though he's not here anymore. The family donated Odin's kidneys and liver, and he's already saved three lives. It was a perfect tribute for the way Odin lived his life. Christina was always in awe of how he snapped between the force he was on the wrestling mat and football field and the goofy kid he was off of it. She used to watch him and another boy tear and claw at each other in wrestling like their sole mission in life was to eviscerate the other kid, then hug and dap each other up 10 minutes later like long-lost buddies.

“When you grow up so much bigger than a lot of your classmates, I think his gentle giant trait comes along with the territory,” Carter said. “He probably had to be careful playing and wrestling around with his buddies, because he was so much bigger and more powerful.”

Odin’s death has hit the Austin community hard for multiple reasons. For starters, he was so young and undeserving. But he was also one of the good ones. And he had an outsized impact as a year-round club wrestler, a teammate to kids from Austin Vandegrift to Austin Westlake to Dripping Springs. And as happens all too often, Christina didn’t even realize her son’s impact on this area until he was gone.

“I knew that he was a friendly and social kid,” Christina said. “But I had people reaching out to me, and I didn’t even know who they were. They’d be like, ‘Hey, you don’t know me, but I knew Odin.’ I got a lot of sweet, kind messages from people all over.”

Christina says she’ll attend her first game of the season this Thursday, Lake Travis’s home opener against Round Rock Cedar Ridge. Whereas most teams have played six games, Lake Travis is only 2-1 this season. The team cancelled its season-opener against Dripping Springs in the wake of Odin’s death. Then, the Cavaliers’ September 11 game against Cibolo Steele was cancelled due to weather after halftime, resulting in a no-contest. The bye week also came early, creating a choppy start to the season.

All these pauses have opened ample time for thoughts to fester in the Lake Travis team’s heads on whether or not they should even be playing right now. But they know the best way to honor their fallen teammate is by playing for him, not by cancelling the season for him. No one was looking more forward to this year than Odin Hensley.

“It's as normal as it can get right now, but it will never be the same,” Coach Carter said. “Our team is different without him. We’ve dealt with a traumatic experience emotionally, too. But Odin would want us back at it.”

Lake Travis’s locker room has so many reminders of Odin. His locker still has all his equipment in it. A group of team moms swaps out the flowers every week. The team wears a No. 75 pin, and they all got matching shirts, courtesy of Under Armour and Game One, that say ‘Odin Strong’ on the front and have his last name and number on the back.

Christina has watched every game thus far online. Every Friday is a flurry of bittersweet emotions. She’s honored by how Lake Travis is honoring her son, but she’s also devastated that her son’s death has to be such a large part of this team’s story.

But maybe this team isn’t doing it because they have to, but because they choose to. And that’s a testament to the type of young man Odin was. It’s also the story that needs to be told.

“He was such a sweet kid, and he had the biggest heart,” Christina said. “He really did care about people. I think there’s not enough good news. Even though this is tragic and awful, there’s still some good in it, you know? Maybe not from what happened, but Odin was such a good kid, and funny.”