Jun 1, 2018High School Spotters
With the success of the NFL’s Eye in the Sky program and college teams increasingly adding injury spotters to their press boxes, high school athletic trainers may wonder about the cost to implement the idea at their level. At Atkins High School in Winston-Salem, N.C., the price tag was just $76.
Jonathan Reidy, LAT, ATC, who is contracted as Head Athletic Trainer at Atkins through Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center (WFBMC), spearheaded the program. Reidy started at Atkins in 2016, and after his first year on the sidelines for the Camels, he began to talk to others about ways to improve coverage of varsity football games.
“In the offseason, we threw around a lot of different ideas, and adding spotters was the top priority that came out,” he says. “Our motivation was to try to get ahead of the curve and to see if this works at the high school level.”
From there, athletic and district administrators came together to talk through the benefits and concerns. After consulting with Jeremy Stevens, MS, LAT, ATC, an independent spotter for the Atlantic Coast Conference, the school granted official approval.
We found that the spotters helped us limit over-diagnosing… Our top priority is our kids’ safety
