Student athletic trainers: stress on the sidelines

Student athletic trainers, who assist with sideline injuries in sports, say their long hours cause them to feel less prepared when they work with local high school and college athletes.

With universities around the nation striving to better their athletic training programs, student athletic trainers are no longer being paid for their work at local high schools because of accredited program rules. Students in other majors such as business and journalism also are required to intern but are often paid. However, student athletic trainers aren’t allowed to be rewarded for their services.

When the director of the athletic training education program, Brian Farr, began teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, the students were paid hourly by the high schools where they worked.

“We had to get rid of the internship program,” Farr said. “When you move to the accredited program it’s against the rules to pay. It’s a national standard from our accrediting body that students can’t be paid for their clinical experience hours.”

The Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education accredited the program at UT-Austin eight years ago. Over the years since then the program has seen heightened requirements, according to the UT-Austin Athletic Training Program description.

The athletic training program at UT-Austin requires a pre-athletic training year, normally the student’s freshman year, which is spent in the directed observation program where they observe athletic trainers for various sports. Then they apply to the training program. If accepted, in the first year students must work four different college sports. During the second year of the program, students work one semester on a college sport and one semester at a local high school. The third year, students work on campus sports again and are expected to be the head student trainers helping to teach underclassmen.

“I think this is one of the most difficult undergraduate majors,” Farr said. “I don’t know many other majors where you have a full load, they’re not easy classes, they have practical exams, they have proficiencies that they have to do, they have in-services, then they do their clinical experience hours, and they have to study.”

According to US News article, 5 Reasons for Getting Involved in College—And How to Go About It, students should get involved in opportunities outside of their major to build community, discover strengths and build resumes. Student athletic trainers have a smaller chance to get involved because of their busy schedules.

“There were just a lot of time commitments that I couldn’t really commit to at the time,” Shelby Eckelkamp, a former athletic training major who is now a kinesiology major, said. “I wanted to be involved in other organizations. From talking to people in the program it didn’t seem like you would be able to be involved in anything else.” 

These students that say they feel exhausted from long hours and stress are distributed out to eight local Austin area high schools and put in charge of medically taking care of high school athletes.

“I don’t always have enough time to study or brush up on athletic training topics that I am weak on and therefore I feel less prepared in the clinical setting sometimes,” Katie Gilbert, junior athletic trainer, said. “I also get tired from working a lot and staying up late after working to get assignments done so I’m tired and off my A-game the next day, and it’s a struggle to stay present and not check out mentally.”

Their responsibilities and expectations on the job such as taping ankles and assessing injuries cause some like Ariel Atkins, a freshman basketball player at UT-Austin, to question why the trainers aren’t paid.

“I think they should. It’s just like learning the ropes,” Atkins said. “They get to shadow a professional and learn. In my opinion an internship is a job but it is also like school. You go to learn. But it is a job.”

But, this strenuous workload has been created for a purpose. It’s modeled after the realistic expectations of an athletic trainer.  The career that these students are striving toward isn’t a typical 9-to-5 job. Their heavy course load introduces them to the requirements of their future career, according to Farr.

“The money would certainly be nice, we work hard and don’t really have time for real jobs during the school year,” Gilbert said. “But not being paid enables us to count our clinical hours as part of our schoolwork, and…we are given the unique opportunity to sit for the National Board of Certification exam which enables us to practice anywhere upon graduation. So that’s a nice trade off.”

Farr said the experience, while difficult, is an essential part of athletic training.

“The cool thing about what they get to do is they learn something in class and they actually get to start applying it to real people,” Farr said. “It’s not reading a textbook, waiting until their senior year to do an internship; they’re doing things right off the bat.”