Jan 29, 2015
Tales of the Tapers

By R.J. Anderson

We searched near and far for headlines spotlighting the athletic training profession. Check out what your peers at colleges and high schools across the country are up to this fall.
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Cooper (Tex.) High School and Abilene (Tex.) High School are each fortunate enough to have two certified athletic trainers watching over their athletes. Wendy Svoboda, ATC, Athletic Trainer at Cooper knows that her school is lucky.

“A majority of the high schools across the country do not have an athletic trainer,” she told the Abilene Reporter-News. “They may have a part-time person who comes out in the afternoon or somebody who is contracted to come out once or twice a week. Many of the small schools around here are like that.”

Svoboda also has 20 athletic training students under her tutelage, and they provide very important services.

“They’re obviously students, so they’re considered student workers or student aides, not student athletic trainers,” she said. “The athletic training world doesn’t like that term — student athletic trainer. They do a lot for us. They help with the taping and the treatment. They obviously do all of our water at practice. They set up for all the games. We couldn’t do it without them. There’s way too much to do.”

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Lake View High School and Central High School–both in San Angelo, Texas–are also among the lucky. At Lake View, Randall “Doc” Parker has been Head Athletic Trainer for 20 years while Central Head Athletic Trainer Jenny Corbett has treated athletes at her school for the past 19 years.

Because of the extensive travel required in West Texas, schools often can’t send their own athletic trainer to road contests, so they rely on the host school to take care of their athletes.

“We have a great working relationship with our athletic district to where we cover each other,” Corbett told the San Angelo Standard-Times. “If my team is at Permian, then Permian’s trainer is taking care of my team. And if their team is here, I’m taking care of their team. The only time you really can’t do that is in football because of the numbers.”

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Bob Cable, ATC, Head Athletic Trainer at Fairmont State University, was recently named the 2010 NATA Division II Head Athletic Trainer of the Year. In this article, a sportscaster thanks Cable for helping save his life.

A few years ago, while doing a story about athletic training, WBOY sports reporter Ralph “Gooch” Gaston asked Cable to examine a lump on his tongue.

“He said, ‘Bob, would you mind taking a look at something for me?'” Cable recalled. “I’m like ‘no not at all’ … [then] I said ‘Man, Gooch you’ve got to have that looked at right away.’ They took him straight in, he had to have surgery, they removed half of his tongue, it was cancer.”

The story still has a happy ending as Gaston has been cancer-free for five years. And Cable received some much-deserved recognition.

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Congratulations go out to Heath Townsend, Athletic Trainer for the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, who was recently named the Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Society (PBATS) Athletic Trainer of the Year for the Pacific Coast League. According to BallParkDigest.com. Townsend previously won the South Atlantic League Athletic Trainer of the Year in 2001 and is now in his fifth season in Colorado Springs.

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Roger Williams University recently promoted Josh King to Head Athletic Trainer and Louise Humphrey-Arruda to Assistant Athletic Trainer.

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Phil Hossler, Athletic trainer at East Brunswick (N.J.) High School and member of the NATA Hall of Fame, recently published a book titled: Concussion Policy Construction Guide for Schools, which discusses the study of concussions, the athletes who suffer them and when they can safely return to play. The book is co-authored by Mickey Collins, who’s been instrumental in the development of ImPACT, (Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing), a computerized concussion evaluation system being used by many high schools, colleges and NFL teams.

The book, which costs $20, can be purchased online at lapublishing.com.

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The Orlando Magic have promoted longtime assistant athletic trainer and performance enhancement specialist Keon Weise to the Head Athletic Trainer position. Weise, who joined the Magic as an athletic training intern for the 2002-03 season and was hired full-time the following year, will be responsible for all aspects of Magic players’ medical care, including injury prevention and rehabilitation.

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This article provides a nice remembrance of former Duke University Head Athletic Trainer Max Crowder, who served as a member of the Duke athletic training staff from 1962 to 1992. Crowder was Head Athletic Trainer from 1978-88 and the men’s basketball athletic trainer from 1966-92.

Crowder worked with players from nine NCAA Tournament Final Four teams, his last coming in 1991 when Duke won its first NCAA title. He passed away a year later at 62 after a brief battle with lung cancer.

Mike Gminski, who played at Duke from 1977-80, remembers a Crowder as someone who filled a lot of roles for Blue Devil players.

“He was a combination of your father, your mother, your brother, your father confessor,” Gminski told the Gaston Gazette. “He just had a great way with the guys on the team. He would never let you get too full of yourself and he’d never let you bottom out. He had a great sense of where you were mentally.”


R.J. Anderson is the Online Editor at
Training & Conditioning. Send him your tips and story ideas at: [email protected].




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