Here’s update to a story we posted a couple of days ago about a sportswriter and author with Bay Area ties who suffered a heart attack and lost consciousness during a trip to Milwaukee.

The Lahonthan Valley News in Fallon, Nev., reports that Chuck Hildebrand has regained consciousness in a Milwaukee hospital. The Nevada paper is interested in the story because Hildebrand operated NevadaPrep.com, a Web site that focused on high school sports in Northern Nevada from 1999 to 2007. The paper wrote:

Hildebrand’s childhood friend, Paul Balbas, said that Hildebrand came out of the coma on Wednesday morning.

Balbas said that Hildebrand was touring an animal park in Milwaukee on Monday morning when he collapsed from an apparent heart attack. Passerbys began CPR and called 911. Hildebrand was taken unconscious to Columbia-St. Mary’s Ozaukee hospital, where doctors used electroshock to re-establish his heartbeat. He then was put into a hypothermia-induced coma to allow his body to heal. Doctors warmed him up on Wednesday morning, whereupon he regained consciousness.

Hildebrand apparently was coherent and knew where he was, according to Balbas.

Hildebrand sold the Web site in 2007 and returned to his hometown, Campbell, Calif., to focus on his writing career. He’s authored three books.

Balbas said that, according to his doctors and nurses, Hildebrand would not have lived had it not been for the rescue efforts of the passerbys and emergency medical personnel.

A reader of the Press Club site noted that more than 100 people attended a book-signing event Hildebrand did in Campbell on June 20 to promote “The Last Baseball Town.” The book is about Campbell’s love affair with the game.

Another reader found this biography of Hildebrandt on the Amazon.com page where readers can order his profile of famed Santa Clara University basketball coach Dick Davey, titled “Dick Davey: A Basketball Life Richly Led.”

Chuck Hildebrand has been a professional journalist since 1979, when he was first hired by the Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto, Calif. He worked for that newspaper, now defunct, for 13 years, covering the NFL and Major League Baseball in addition to Santa Clara University and Stanford University sports. He later worked as a cityside reporter in Santa Cruz, Calif., before moving to Nevada in 1997 and founding NevadaPrep.com, a website that covers high school sports throughout the Silver State. Hildebrand in 1998 published his first book, Bronco Sundays, which chronicled the history of Santa Clara’s once-storied football program. He also was a youth baseball coach in the 1970s and 1980s, and was involved with the youth baseball program in Campbell, Calif., which won four national championships in the late 1970s. Hildebrand, a native of Mountain View, was raised in San Jose and is a graduate of San Jose State University.