During the public outpouring of grief for Phil O'Donnell, the Motherwell captain who died on the field of play four weeks ago, few could feel more intensely about the events as they unfolded than Gordon and Hazel Murch.

It was 10 short months earlier that Andrew, 21, the eldest of their three sons and a keen and fit sportsman, died suddenly from an unexplained heart condition six weeks before he was due to sit his engineering final examinations at Glasgow University.

"My heart sank when I read about Phil O'Donnell," said Hazel, and as a result, with her family's full support, she has taken the big step to talk publicly about her own experience for the first time.

While O'Donnell's death produced calls for compulsory screening of all Scottish Premier League players and beyond to elite athletes in all sports, in the view of the Murch family screening for heart disease should be freely available to everyone who does even so much as take physical education at school.

That's what they do in the Venetia region of northern Italy, where everyone involved in sport between the ages of 12 and 35 is screened, and they claim to have reduced sudden deaths from heart conditions by 89% since the programme was introduced in 1982.

"I am no medical expert. I am speaking as a mother who lost her son," said Hazel at the family home in Luncarty, near Perth, where she and her husband both work as music teachers. "There may be medics who say school may not be the best time for screening for heart disease, but I do think that the Italian case shows what improvements can be made.

"There are also statistics that show that eight apparently fit and healthy young people die every week in the UK from undiagnosed heart conditions. If that was to improve by the same level as Italy then it would mean that there are seven families each week that this won't happen to.

"We are a very ordinary family to whom the extraordinary has happened. There is no high profile, and I don't need there to be profile, but without profile I don't know how things change, how wider screening will come about.

"I don't know if I am banging my head against a brick wall but, if just one family doesn't have to go through what we have, then I believe that telling our story is worth doing."

Andrew Murch played football, he went climbing, skiing and surfing, and he played tennis, squash and golf. He went to the gym regularly and, at university, he would often rise before dawn to go running.

"He wasn't trying to make it to a higher level in any way. He just had a real love of sport which he lived out," said Hazel. "He supported Rangers but he didn't just follow them. He had a broad knowledge, he knew all about the latest transfers, and the World Cup was just the best thing there could be."

He died in his sleep in his Glasgow flat, having gone to bed early the night before with cold symptoms. An alert was raised the next morning when he failed to appear for training as a defender with the football team connected with Trinity Possil and Henry Drummond Church. A post-mortem examination failed to identify a precise cause.

The loss turned the Murch family's lives upside down. "It has utterly shaken us as a family and why would I expect it to be otherwise? We have lost a son," said Hazel, who reckoned it could take years for younger sons Peter, 19, and Iain, 17, to adjust.

"We did not want any publicity. We were in severe shock for months, but talking about it now is the family's next step and the boys were very much in favour."

The family were referred to a charity called CRY (Cardiac Risk in the Young), the organisation that claims eight young people die of unexplained heart disorders every week and whose website is full of stories similar to that of the Murch family.

"There was a weird kind of relief in discovering we weren't the only people in the world that this had happened to," Hazel continued. "There was also a feeling of devastation that it had happened to so many others."

Two years before he died, Andrew did complain of an irregular heartbeat after playing squash with his father. He was referred for an electrocardiogram (ECG). "He was told he was absolutely fine, not to change his behaviour, and he didn't," said his mother who, along with her husband and sons, has been to the Heart Hospital in London to look for possible genetic reasons. She discovered that she has an irregular heartbeat, an arrhythmia, and is due for further tests.

"Andrew wasn't ill and he was never a sickly child," she said. "We have looked and looked and looked retrospectively for illnesses and there haven't been any."

While it is true that Andrew was actually screened, his mother points out that it wasn't as part of a young persons' programme. "My understanding is that what CRY are looking for is people with greater experience of reading young people's ECGs. The more often it is done the better they will be at understanding them," said Hazel.

There would be, of course, a financial cost to making widespread screening available. In northern Italy it has been calculated at £20,000 per diagnosis.

"I am a mother who will be screened regularly for breast cancer when I am 50," she said. "If they can do it for me, then surely it is worth doing for young people because they are the ones who are on the edge of contributing to the wealth of the nation.

"Andrew has been awarded his B.Eng posthumously by Glasgow University. He was about to become an engineer and will not now make a contribution, so there is a loss. I don't know how you weigh one up against the other but, for me, making screening for heart disorders for all young people involved in sport is worth doing."