A small foundation, in a national network.

The Nick of Time Foundation was founded in Washington State by Darla and Steve Varrenti after their sixteen-year-old son Nick collapsed and died of an undiagnosed heart condition. Their story is, in its essential shape, our story. Their loss happened first, and the work they built became a template for ours.

Nick of Time was the foundation that trained the Chase Morris Foundation in the months between Chase's death and the foundation's first screening event. The October 2014 video on the foundation's YouTube channel, "Chase Morris Foundation Heart Screenings," documents the partnership: a Chase Morris Foundation team in Seattle alongside Nick of Time, learning the screening protocol that the foundation has applied at every event since. The relationship has continued for more than a decade. Dr. Jonathan Drezner — the lead author of the international screening criteria the foundation follows — is the medical director of Nick of Time.

Two grieving families, both of whom lost sixteen-year-old sons to undiagnosed heart conditions, on opposite ends of the country, doing the same work in their sons' names. The Chase Morris Foundation owes Nick of Time more than we can readily put into words.

Parent Heart Watch is the national umbrella organization for sudden cardiac arrest prevention in young people, founded in 2005 by four mothers who had lost children to SCA. The Chase Morris Foundation is a member organization. Parent Heart Watch maintains the largest national database of youth SCA prevention resources, advocates for state and federal legislation (including the federal HEARTS Act signed in December 2024), and serves as the convening body for foundations like ours.

The foundation's January 2015 YouTube upload of the Parent Heart Watch awareness video — captioned "Which one of these students looks like you? Like your child? Friend?" — is one of the foundation's earliest public-facing pieces of educational content. Parent Heart Watch is also the policy voice that has shaped the careful balance the Chase Morris Act strikes between education and mandate: PHW's published position is that screening should be voluntary, well-informed, and properly resourced — not federally or state mandated. The Chase Morris Act of 2015 reflects exactly that position.

Tulsa Public Schools partnered with the Chase Morris Foundation in January 2015 to host the foundation's second screening event at Booker T. Washington High School. The event screened approximately three hundred Tulsa Public Schools student athletes. The district publicized the event through its official communications channels and invited Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner John Doak to attend and speak.

The relationship with Tulsa Public Schools — Oklahoma's largest school district — established the model for foundation events in subsequent years and gave the foundation a public-school footprint to complement its private-school work at Metro Christian Academy.

Metro Christian Academy in Tulsa hosted the Chase Morris Foundation's first heart screening event in the fall of 2014. The choice of venue was deeply personal: the foundation's lead pediatric cardiologist, Dr. Matthew Kimberling, is a Metro Christian alumnus. He returned to his own high school to apply the international screening protocol he had spent his career studying, and approximately two hundred Metro students were screened that day.

The Metro Christian event remains the template for everything the foundation has done since. The protocol established there — intake, vitals, auscultation, ECG, echocardiogram, on-site cardiologist consultation — has been the foundation's protocol at every event in the decade that has followed.