Game Night: The trainers
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Article RatingTrinity High School’s homecoming football game against Middletown on Oct. 16 may have started at 7 p.m., but by 4 p.m., Casey Graham was waiting for the inevitable rush of athletes to come her way.
“It’s the calm before the storm,” Graham jokes, glancing at the clock.
It didn’t take long before a stream of football players put their names on the sign-up sheet, with four players taking a seat at each of the benches. For the next 60 minutes, Graham tends to taping (or wrapping) ankles, wrists, knees and shoulders, applying heat pads and adjusting shoulder braces.
As the school’s only athletic trainer, Graham has her job cut out for her as she tries to get everyone taped and ready for warm-ups right before the start of the game.
“By the end of the hour, it gets pretty tiring,” Graham says, collapsing on a nearby chair after the last football player leaves. “You need to tape everything tightly so it doesn’t fall off during the game and that takes some effort.”
Graham is one of the athletic trainers Central Pennsylvania Rehabilitation Services provides to area school districts, including Carlisle Area, Cumberland Valley, Camp Hill and East Pennsboro. CPRS has an independent contract with each school for its athletic trainers, and the company has 19 contracts in the area.
The pay for each athletic trainer is on par with the market, but CPRS director of athletic training services Jeff Shields couldn’t give an exact number because of the number of variables from one contract to the next, which includes the length of stay for the trainer and the needs of the school for a full-time or part-time trainer.
Unlike some of the other schools, which receive multiple athletic trainers depending on what the school has asked for, Graham is the only one at Trinity High School.
That means a lot of work for her, especially since there are six sports in the fall, some of which feature both boys and girls teams.
By the homecoming game on Oct. 16, Graham was glad that her schedule wasn’t as full as it could have been, given that both the golf and tennis teams were off site at districts.
“Everybody is sort of winding down,” she says. “I have to see where the biggest need for my attention is.”
Lots of work
And the biggest need, without a doubt, is football.
Graham says she deals with more students on the football team than any other sport at the high school.
“I don’t see all of the kids,” she says. “I only see the ones that have had some sort of injury. Football is important (for me) because it’s a full contact sport.”
Severe injuries aren’t too common, at least not at Trinity High School, although the week prior to the homecoming game, one of the football players dislocated his elbow. It’s those kinds of injuries that gives athletic director Tim O’Leary an appreciation for what Graham does for the team.
“She’s my other eyes and ears,” O’Leary says after stopping by Graham’s office to check on her progress.
And once Graham reaches the field, her eyes are always on the game.
Walking up and down the sidelines as the team progresses down the field, Graham keeps a close watch on the players, even helping out the opposing team’s athletic trainer when a Middletown player gets hurt.
The rain on this Friday night actually lessened the possibility of injuries, though Graham says muscle strains are more likely in wet conditions.
Making sure the players have access to salt water, which helps unclench cramped muscles, Graham also gets some help from sophomore Skylar Spitz of Carlisle, who shadows the athletic trainer.
“I want to be a physical therapist,” Skylar says. “I just want to know how to help with this.”
It was a nice change for Graham, who has been the athletic trainer at Trinity High School for three years but hasn’t had the time for a student trainee until this year.
“I want to be able to teach her something, and Skylar is really dedicated to this,” Graham says about the 15-year-old who is attending the homecoming game in the rain and in 40-degree weather.
“At my high school up near Erie, it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere,” Graham adds. “We had one athletic trainer for the entire county. I saw her probably once while I played two sports (basketball and softball) for four years.”
Never complaining, even when she has to take over the water boy’s duty for the game, Skylar makes sure Graham has everything she needs when bandaging a player’s bleeding arm.
“I go to every game, and I was even at the freshman and junior varsity games – I got soaked,” Skylar laughs. “But I want to keep doing this.”
