While the world of sports medicine is rapidly evolving, there are still the old standbys.
By Tim Etchells '74
On a warm Wednesday afternoon in late September, the combination MASH unit and office suite that serves as the headquarters for Middlebury's sports medicine department is filling up with football and rugby players. The men's soccer team swept through an hour ago, as the team prepared for a home game with Colby-Sawyer. The women's soccer players swarmed in before that, on their way out of town for a game at Keene State.
Dave Matthews, head of the sports medicine department is taping both ankles for Phil Ford, a senior cornerback on the Panther football team. Matthews applies small pads
of synthetic gauze at the front and back of the ankle, then wraps foot and ankle, up about nine inches from the bottom of the foot, with similar material before applying the intricate windings of white athletic tape that, for some athletes, can mean the difference between a sprained ankle and a healthy one at the end of a vigorous two-hour practice.
"We go through about 150 cases of white athletic tape each year," Matthews says. A case contains 32 rolls, and each roll is 10 yards of tape. That adds up to about 27 miles of tape. When told that sounds like a lot of tape, Matthews points out that, as recently as 1987, the training room used 375 cases, or 68 miles. Because taping healthy ankles is no longer considered mandatory, they use far less tape today.
About five minutes after he's begun, Matthews has Ford's ankles fully taped, and the defensive back bounces off the training table and heads for practice, to be replaced by the next student in need of attention. This time it's a female rugby player with a sore wrist. For the next several seconds, Matthews whips a roll of tape around the affected joint. Next up is a football player with a recently separated shoulder. Matthews wraps a huge ACE bandage around and over the shoulder, around the torso, and back around the shoulder again until it is snug. Another player has turf toe, a painful sprain of the joint between the foot and the big toe. Yet another has patellar tendonitis, and Matthews applies two pieces of tape to tweak the tendon just below each kneecap.
Another football player has an ugly blister on his big toe. Matthews picks a clear blob out of a small plastic tub, tapes it onto the blister. The label describes this as Spenco's Second Skin. ("This stuff is 80 percent water, and it costs $30 a jar," Matthews says. "Some-times I think I'm in the wrong business.")
In another corner of the room, men's soccer player Derek Cece '06 pedals steadily on an exercise bike, a large bandage above his left eye covering a nasty cut received in the team's last game. Unsure about whether Cece may have received a minor concussion in the collision that caused the gash, the training staff is testing his reaction to exercise.
There was a time—not so very long ago—when the role of an athletic trainer was essentially limited to supplying ice and taping an ankle. Not anymore. Matthews, who began working at Middlebury in 1981, says that the training room staff now performs up to 17,000 procedures during a given academic year, ranging from applying ice packs to helping with rehab exercises to hooking up a student-athlete to an electrical muscle stimulator or an ultrasound machine. And that number does not include taping ankles.
In addition to Matthews, the College's sports medicine staff includes Sue Murphy, a University of Vermont grad who is the physical therapist, now in her 30th year at Middlebury; Kelly Cray, associate athletic trainer, who joined the staff in 1992 after graduating from Castleton State College; and Rachel Eldredge, an athletic trainer with a master's in health management who arrived in January 2003. Also working with the department are Dr. Mark Peluso, team physician and director of the College's Parton Health Center, and Dr. Ben Rosen-berg, an orthopedic surgeon who does a weekly session with athletes.
Parents are also paying more attention to the role of the training room staff, Matthews says, and tours of the field house for prospective student-athletes now typically include a stop in the training room. "Both students and their parents are better informed, more knowledgeable," Matthews says, "though that can work both ways. A kid gets hurt, and he and his parents will go out on the Internet and find information that tells them what's wrong and how to treat it. Then they come in here; we end up having to dispel some of the myths and preconceptions."
Some things haven't changed, Matthews points out. "Every kid is different," he says. "Some of them need us to hold their hands; some of them need a little kick in the butt, an attitude adjustment. Our job is to get them back in shape and out on the field. We don't have as much time for one-to-one interaction as we used to, but that's still a big part of the job.
"We have great relationships with alums. ... We don't play favorites, but there are some students with whom you develop a special bond, and it lasts a lifetime. That's precious, and it's obviously one of the reasons we do this job."
It's clearly not the hours. During the fall, winter, and spring sports seasons, it's not uncommon for training room staff to put in 60 or 70 hours a week. A typical day for Matthews, for example, starts at 8:30, when he answers e-mail and returns phone calls. From about 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., roughly 40–50 students come in for rehab work. Then it's time to start getting teams ready for practice. Matthews works with the football team—which has 75 players—and once practice is over and he's seen the last student in need of post-practice treatment, it can be 7:30 or 8 p.m. before he's ready to head home. (As for away games, a football road trip can begin at 4 p.m. on Friday and not end until 11 p.m. Saturday.)
The work seems to agree with Sue Murphy. To see her on the sideline during a men's soccer practice, you wouldn't guess she'd been at Middlebury for nearly 30 years. She wears a baseball cap, a dark-blue Panther windbreaker, shorts, and sandals. She's tall and obviously fit, with an athlete's posture; only the touch of gray in her dark hair gives her away.
"It's a fast-paced job, and it's always changing. One day is never the same as the one before," Murphy says, "and it's never boring. It can be frustrating at times, when a kid doesn't make the kind of progress you expect. ... But they're young, and they typically do get better quickly.
"It can also be very rewarding. A kid gets hurt, you help him get better, and you watch him go back out on the field. He scores a goal, and comes over and says, 'That's for you.' That's hard to beat."
As a lacrosse player at Middlebury, Tim Etchells '74 learned that a tape job on your ankle will always extend one half inch above the area you shaved.