Michigan State University has 27 registered club sports teams and more than 25 intramural sports with over 12,000 student participants between the two. With that many student athletes and sports come injuries, but MSU only has three athletic trainers to cover every single one of them.
Those three athletic trainers consist of the assistant director of athletic training, Kyle Newood and certified athletic trainers, Alex Dailey and Katie Bigelow. All three have Master’s degrees in athletic training and came to MSU to help serve a wide variety of people and injuries.
“Working with these types of student athletes that just love what they do, helps drive what I do,” Bigelow said. “ I want to be helpful, I want to be supportive and help them through school, but also still be a healthy athlete.”
Those 27 club sports consist of about 1,300 students and the IM sports consist of roughly 11,000 students. Even with this amount of student athletes, there are still more club sports and teams that aren’t able to be seen by athletic training yet.
“Club ice hockey, club basketball, ROTC… marching band would love to work with us,” Newood said.
Along with MSU, other Big Ten schools such as Ohio State, Wisconsin and Nebraska provide multiple athletic trainers for club sports, but then other conference schools have nothing. MSU is one of the few that fully staff athletic trainers for their IM program.
“Our department is phenomenal in terms of support for us… from leadership [and] other professional staff members as well,” Newood said. “If we pitch an idea and think it will benefit students or provide more care, they’ve been on board.”
Together, they have to coordinate where and when to be at club games, as well as scheduling appointments to see patients.
“Thankfully now with three athletic trainers, we don’t run into that overlap where we can’t cover something,” Newood said. Years prior, or when it was just me, if we had overlapping events, we would classify it on the basis of risk and attend the most risky one.”
Ankle sprains are the most common injury with concussions and shoulder injuries closely behind. Team wise, sports such as club rugby, IM basketball, IM soccer and IM flag football compose most of those injuries.
The university also offers clinical rotations where master’s students can gain hands-on experience assisting at club sporting games, with opportunities to evaluate injuries on the athletes. Bigelow was once one of the students in the program.
Each of them says they receive emails at all times of the day, most being after hours. With that comes having to decide what injuries take priority over others.
“Not every case needs to be seen drop dead immediately, but we do our best to accommodate as many people as we can and with the addition of Katie… that has become much easier for us to accommodate pretty much everyone,” Dailey said.
Being an athletic trainer for multiple different sports means knowing all types of injuries. The three take pride in their ability to not only be able to support all different types of injuries, but also being able to help students save money in the process.
They consider themselves a great first resource to the students and are usually able to help treat almost all the injuries that come their way, but will also refer an individual if they need additional care they cannot offer.
“We see almost anything and everything… there’s a lot of people that need care and in a timely manner… and if we don’t know the answer, we do refer them to someone that, you know, could be better or more suited than we are,” Dailey said.
Next year MSU is opening a brand-new 293,000 square feet recreational center. It will replace the current one, IM West, which is set to be demolished in the next 10 years.
The three agree that this $200 million project will not only be an amazing facility, but it will be able to transform what they are able in terms of their department.
“That new rec center, specifically the athletic training room, is going to be top of the line,” Newood said. “We [currently] share an athletic training room over at IM West… the new rec center is going to be phenomenal, not just for us, but all the students.”
Working with so many student athletes comes seeing them in some of their darkest times and some of their highest highs. Being able to help these athletes come back stronger than they were before reminds Newood, Dailey and Bigelow why they love their job in the first place.
“You see them at their highs and at their lows… so you know from kind of catastrophic injury to… working with this individual for the last six months, and we’re seeing them step back out onto the field, and just be healthy is just extremely rewarding,” Dailey said.