Athletic trainers
All high schools need them If your local high school doesn’t have a full-time professional athletic trainer, it should, but barely a third of America’s high schools do.
Qualified trainers can prevent athletic mishaps – heat exhaustion, injuries to the head and spine – from escalating to something far worse. When senior Tommy Mallon broke his neck in a lacrosse game at his San Diego high school, quick intervention by trainer Riki Kirchoff, who prevented the young athlete from getting to his feet and instead immobilized him on a backboard, saved Mallon from paralysis or worse.
But a survey by Lee Bowman of Scripps Howard News Service found that two out of three high schools rely on a stitched together patchwork of part-timers, who may not be certified; coaches trained in first aid; school nurses, and on game days, EMTs or a doctor on standby.
With approximately 7 million high school athletes, who collectively suffer 2 million injuries each year, the need for professional trainers is there.
And as the anti-obesity drive kicks into gear, with more and more students urged to be active, the need is likely to become greater.
The advantage of a full-time position is that the trainer is always there and knows the students. Trainer Tanya Dargusch has been a fixture at Sewell, N.J.’s Washington Township High School for 22 years. “I’m here for all the kids, not just the athletes,” she says. “I’ve treated dancers, ROTC cadets, marching band kids – I even had to deal with a student who had been stabbed.”
In some communities, the high school athletic trainer becomes an informal part of the local health care network. There is a cost associated with employing one. Nationally the average salary is about $42,400.
But there are savings that are not always readily apparent.
Trainers hold down medical costs by knowing when a student should be taken to the emergency room or referred to a sports medicine specialist and when the injury can be treated on the field.
And trainers can oversee physical therapy and rehabilitation at the school. Brian Robinson, athletic trainer at Glenbrook South in Glenview, Ill., estimates that the rehab treatments done at the school last year would have cost parents or insurers $3.7 million if done at private clinics.
The presence of a professional athletic trainer is a perfect example of that hoary but nonetheless true medical cliche, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Scripps Howard News Service