Nov 2, 2016AT Room is the Place to Be
At the University of Nebraska, the football team’s athletic training room is more than a place to go for treatment. With members of the team coming and going throughout the day, the players fit treatment times in with their classes, practices, meetings, and schoolwork.
“No doubt. We probably spend as much time with them as anybody,” Mark Mayer, head athletic trainer at the University of Nebraska, told the Lincoln Journal Star. “And part of being able to get a guy back, they’ve got to trust what you’re doing. In order to have trust, you’ve got to have relationships. Yeah, we get to know these guys on a different level. We know what buttons to push, what buttons not to push.”
Mayer says the room also becomes a “kind of a sanctuary place for guys.” The football athletic training staff is comprised of three full-time athletic trainers, two graduate assistants, and 10 to 12 students. On most days, the room is open from six o’clock in the morning until eight at night.
“Typically you often find yourself juggling sometimes between guys,” Mayer told the Lincoln Journal Star. “Fortunately, we do have, for the most part, enough guys to help out so everyone can get that one-on-one attention that they need. It’s just a slow drip all day long.”
With a series of injuries partway through the season, quite a few Huskers have been getting treated lately. While recovering from a shoulder injury, senior wide receiver Alonzo Moore noticed many of his teammates trickling in to the athletic training room.
“I was thinking, ‘Dang, the whole team is going to be in here,” Moore told the Lincoln Journal Star.
