It’s very common for athlete’s to get injured because of all the intense training in practice and the adrenaline during the game. An athlete’s recovery takes time and patience but the athletic trainers are there to help. One of our athletic trainers at SHS is Brett Piper, and he has athletes come to his office everyday. In an interview with the Courier he talks about different things he looks for in athletes recovery.
Q: How many athletes would you say you see per day?
A: It varies depending on the season. Winter and spring are much slower than the fall season. If it’s a busy day, usually around 30 athletes.
Q: How do you evaluate when an athlete can play again after they get injured?
A: It’s not like a complete system in place, it’s very much about evaluating how functional they are. When someone’s hurt we take them through rehab step by step and what they do depends on what they’re capable of doing after the injury and once we go through rehab, build them back up.
Then, we start thinking about doing some functional testing, things like jumping, running, hopping, sprinting, things like that. Then when they are able to do those sport related things then we start gradually working on putting them back into practice little by little. It’s almost never you’re hurt and all of a sudden you recover and can go back to practice full go. In the case of a football player, once they can jump, run, sprint we say you can go to practice, but no contact. Then once they get through that, we say go do some of the contact drills until eventually their back to normal.
Q: So the time depends on how bad the injury is?
A: Yes, for sure.
Q: Is there any way to prevent an injury from happening or does it just happen by accidents?
A: I mean there are things you can do to prevent it. Building up muscles that are often used, building up stabilizer muscles is the biggest thing, meaning like your core, upper back, and lower back muscles. But there’s always the injuries that are from freaky things and nothing you can do to stop it like broken legs, dislocated joints–most of the time there’s nothing you can do to prevent it, it just happens and that’s the danger of sports you just have to deal with it. That’s the risk you take when you play sports.
Q: Once an athlete is able to play again do they still have to come see you?
A: We try to say once they go back just to pop in and tell us I’m okay and nothing was bad at practice today, everything is great. We prefer that though just the mindset of high school kids once we kinda let them go back and do their normal routine, they kinda just forget about us. Again, we prefer for them to come say hello, but more often than not they don’t.
Q: What type of questions do you ask athletes when they get injured?
A: Taking in history is what we call that. It’s when someone comes in with an injury and says their knee hurts– or whatever It happens to be there’s a litany of questions that we ask. First is like the mechanism of imagery meaning how did you hurt it? Did you twist? Did you fall? Was there no mechanism– meaning you didn’t do anything, it just started hurting one day? Another thing we ask is how long has it been hurting you, that establishes how you hurt it as well as a time frame. We ask if there’s certain motions or actions you do that cause it to hurt. Then we start looking for things that can give us a clue based on certain sensations like do you feel a numbness, do you feel a tingling, is anything popping, is it cracking? If it’s a joint we ask if it locks, if there’s something stuck in there? Tons and tons of questions that can come out. We asked about their pain on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the worst thing you ever felt. Also, how would you describe the pain, is it burning, throbbing, sharp? I could go on and on. These are also specific injury questions where if I suspect a certain injury from what they told me already, I start narrowing down and asking specific questions based on what I think the injury is. We could be here all day talking about it.
There are some injuries you can prevent and some you can’t.
Athletes recovery is taken very seriously by our athletic trainers at SHS as Piper explained. Athlete recovery takes time and patience which a lot of athletes don’t have, they just want to get back to playing as soon as possible. But our athletic trainers are there to make sure they take it slow and only start playing again once the athlete is ready.
If you want to know more about athletes’ recovery from the athletes perspective watch this video below with one of our athletes here at SHS, Mia Dauria, to learn more.
