The sound of tape torn off fills the sidelines as the sports med students apply it to the athlete’s ankles, wrists, and knees. Filling water bottles and prepping first aid kits, so many things are happening as these students run from place to place trying to get the team ready for the upcoming game. These forgotten heroes are so important to not just the athletics department but the school itself.
Sports Medicine is a program where students can get first hand experience helping injured athletes on and off the field.
Tara Humphrey, Sports Medicine Head Coach, and Matt Wiggins as the assistant.Their roles is to manage the more complex forms of sports med and they are there to help aid and teach the current student trainers. The student trainers participate in a variety of sports such as football and soccer. They focus on rehabilitation and make sure that the athletes are hydrated and ready to go for their games.
“We have amazing student trainers who are providing water and Gatorade,” Humphrey said. They also tape any of our athletes that need ankle tape for preventative measures, and they help administer first aid.”
This will be Tessa Northam’s second year in sports med as a student trainer, and she is in the Certified Nurses Assistant program as well.
“I think that while the coaches help them on the field with things like endurance, we can help them feel ready to go back to their sport with no fear after rehabilitation and treatments,” Northam said.
In the sports med program, many types of equipment and tools are used such as Thermex, stem ultrasound, cupping, Kinesio tape application, scraping, and general first aid. Making sure the athlete is physically healed is important, but making sure that the athlete’s mental health is OK is a job in itself.
“Talking to the athletes is good for helping their mentality,” Northam said. “For example, telling them that it’s gonna be okay, and talking them through their injury, is crucial for the recovery process.”
The healing process after an injury is one of the main things the sports med program focuses on. This process is important for an injured athlete, and things like stretching your muscles and icing them are crucial.
“If you don’t stretch your muscles, they’re not ever going to grow. And they need to be able to grow if you’re going to keep working them out,” student trainer Ali Mego said. “If you’re going to keep destroying your muscles to rebuild them, they’ll need
time to heal so you can’t rush it.”
Some trainers’ favorite part about the program is after the healing and rehabilitation portion, one can see the progress they made.
“One of my favorite things about this program is being able to see the injured athletes go back and play the game that they love,” student trainer Chloe Moore said.
Trainers need to be ready to go in high stress situations, and it is important for them to have hands-on experience in real case scenarios. This is so they know what to do and expect when times like those come up.
“The important thing is that we’re athletic trainers. We are supposed to be the calm in the chaos,” Humphrey said. “So when something happens, an injury or a medical emergency occurs, having that hands-on experience of knowing when to get the AED, knowing when to start CPR, knowing when to go get the splint bags or get crutches are vital.”
Student trainers do so much, so it is a challenge to have that level of responsibility and time management down. However, great life skills come out of those hard things, and they will learn to utilize them.
“They’ve got to be able to essentially have a full time job with practices and games, as well as their schoolwork, their personal life, and if they do have a job outside of school,” Humphrey said. “However, we have great student athletic trainers who have amazing communication skills that will carry them far in their life, because they’re going to be able to understand and prioritize what needs to be done.”
Sports medicine is important to not just athletics, but the whole school also. The home staff trainer will administer the aid, but there is something different about having a student be the trainer.
“We are an extension of the school. The primary care will be administered by the home staff trainer, but our student trainers know the kids,” Humphrey said. “They know if something is off, and so having that extension, even in settings like the classroom, is amazing to have if something were to happen that’s unexpected.
Athletic trainers help out at so many events and are necessary to the foundation of a school.
“Athletic trainers work with every single sport. It takes a lot of work and responsibility, and a lot of hands are involved,” Humphrey said. “But the most important thing is that we take care of everyone.”