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Community rallies behind SA youth soccer star battling rare, life-threatening infection

Maddie Moreno, 13, has been hospitalized in Dallas since Saturday

Classics Elite soccer player Maddie Moreno, during a game earlier this year. (Jason Andrews , KSAT)

DALLAS – A San Antonio youth soccer player remains hospitalized in Dallas nearly a week after contracting a rare, life-threatening infection.

Maddie Moreno, 13, was in St. Louis, Missouri, for a national soccer event last week when she developed a dangerous fever.

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Her condition got worse as she and her family attempted to return home to San Antonio on Saturday, causing Maddie to be hospitalized in the intensive care unit at Children’s Medical Center Dallas on her 13th birthday.

Maddie, a tenacious fullback and midfielder and a top youth soccer player in South Texas, remains in the hospital and “faces a long road to recovery,” according to a message sent Thursday by her club, Classics Elite Soccer Academy.

Supporters from Maddie’s school and soccer communities have rallied behind her and her family, starting a GoFundMe page and organizing the sale of T-shirts containing the slogan #MADDIESTRONG.

As of Thursday morning, the GoFundMe page had raised slightly over $7,600.

September, coincidentally, is Sepsis Awareness Month, which attempts to bring attention to the life-threatening condition in which the body attacks its own tissues and organs while fighting infection.


About the Author
Dillon Collier headshot

Emmy-award winning reporter Dillon Collier joined KSAT Investigates in September 2016. Dillon's investigative stories air weeknights on the Nightbeat and on the Six O'Clock News. Dillon is a two-time Houston Press Club Journalist of the Year and a Texas Associated Press Broadcasters Reporter of the Year.

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