Cleats clicking. Faces sweating. Loud voices echoing within a tiny environment.
For Center Grove, this is what an average day can look like within the trainer’s room. Hundreds of students pass by these couple rooms without ever even knowing what goes on in there. However, there is a big issue with the whole place: space. As the community continues to grow, specifically in our sports department, there seems to be less and less space for the rehabilitation facilities. Just in the last year, our school has taken on two new sports: boys volleyball and girls wrestling. They will also take on both boys and girls lacrosse next year. This causes huge issues for our athletic trainers.
“Our lack of space has given us a lot of challenges,” athletic trainer Jacob Leachman said. “When treating an athlete, you kind of want privacy, especially if it’s an injury like to their chest or to their groin area, something like that. Sometimes we don’t get that privacy because we don’t really have the space for it.”
Privacy can be a really big concern, and small spaces counteract the ability to give athletes just that. Another big issue is the ‘chain effect’ that having a small space can cause.
“Everyone typically gets some sort of heat treatment before they do their either stretches or their exercises or whatever, and then at a certain point, I run out of heat packs to give people and I still have a line of 10 people who are waiting. That delays care for them, which delays time for them to get out to practice, which then in turn frustrates coaches because their practice is starting right away,” head athletic trainer Azizi Chambers said.
There have been a few schools around the area that have already figured out this problem and have gotten new trainers’ rooms.
“They were able to get more trainers, specifically Whiteland, Brownsburg and Mooresville. Brownsburg is on the way. Whiteland is on the way. A lot of them have gotten bigger spaces, new spaces or more trainers,” Chambers said.
With all these concerns and challenges faced, the trainers have offered a couple solutions, which can help them get more room, not only to gain more space, but also treat their athletes better.
“Ideally, I feel like [in-between the boys’ and girls’ outdoor locker rooms] is the best because the football fields are right here, and the baseball field is not that far,” Chambers said. “If there is a way of expanding it in this, but still keeping this essential location, I feel like it would be good. Also, in the future, like when lacrosse officially becomes a sport and with softball already being over [at the elementary schools] and soccer over there in the fall, I definitely think we need some type of training room over there. Right now we only have one table in the garage, which is really, really hard. We treat soccer alone, so I can only imagine lacrosse coming in the future, what that’s going to look like, trying to treat everybody. It’s not even a full table; it’s half a table packed away in the garage on the soccer field.”
In the end, expansion of the trainer’s room can be beneficial for both athletes and trainers alike. Being able to have more space would add multiple benefits for our athletic department.
