The trainer olympics
Freshman Bri Vargas takes sophomore Caroline Hunt’s pulse from the carotid artery during the blood pressure lab.
April 14, 2014
Recently the campus’ student athletic trainers competed in the trainer olympics, where they competed in four relay tasks including: an ankle taping job, immobilizing a knee, Ace wrapping a thigh, and finally running a ten-gallon cooler across the gym, all time based. View these events in the video above.
A day full of training, taping, and teaching, the school’s athletic trainers recently attended the North Texas Athletic Training Society (NTATS) injury symposium at UT Arlington.
“It is a great opportunity for the students,” athletic trainer and health teacher Jonathan Stinson said. “It is also a great opportunity for the professional athletic trainers to network a little bit get it to know colleagues and just find out what’s going on around the metroplex.”
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Arlington Orthopedic Poster Contests finalists:
- Lauren Payne
- Meg Fuentes
- Brooke Poe
- Levi Casteele
- Sydney Marshburn
- Max Gresham
- Rebecca Sipes
Arlington Orthopedic Video Contest 2nd place winners:
- Tyler Or
- David Sinacola
- Matt Ringler
- Colby Countryman
Academic Allstate:
Presented by the Texas State Athletic Trainer Association, Chase Martin was awarded academic all state during her time as a varsity trainer.
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The student athletic trainers, along with others from many north Texas schools, went through rotations including anatomy, rehab and spica wrapping, spine boarding, blood pressure, college training programs, special tests, Jeopardy and christian sports medicine.
“I liked Jeopardy,” sophomore Deirdre Crowley said. “I’ve never taken a medical class, but I still knew the answers from what I’ve picked up in the training room.”
Along with new and refreshing knowledge of anatomy, trainers learned techniques to different realistic tasks, such as how to spine board and where to take the different pulses.
“I enjoyed learning how to spine board,” freshman Bri Vargas said. “We got to take control and actually put a student on one. We learned the different techniques and instances you would have to use one. It was something we might actually use and it was practical.”
Every year there are two contests during the symposium, the taping contest and trainer olympics. Senior Bree Fagan was entered in the taping contest and advanced to the finals from the preliminary and semifinal rounds and took third.
At the symposium, scholarships were also awarded, and Fagan was presented with the Ben Buck memorial scholarship from NTATS, one of only two students to receive the award.
“[The] athletic training scholarship is for high school seniors who are going to college and majoring in athletic training,” Fagan said.
For the first time in NTATS history there was a unanimous decision for first place, and Fagan was rewarded with a $500 scholarship, going towards Baylor University this fall.
“It felt amazing getting it,” Fagan said. “I know there were a bunch of impressive people who applied and so being chosen just makes me feel like I am heading in the right direction.”
The keynote of the symposium includes a cadaver dissection of this year’s main topic: the shoulder. The cadaver shoulder, which included the shoulder blade, arm, and hand, was donated by Biomed and was dissected by an area orthopedic surgeon.
“I liked the dissection because it showed things we had only imagined and never seen in real life before,” freshman Meg Fuentes said. “It was easier to understand the anatomy once we were shown it and saw what the tendons, ligaments, muscles, and bones actually did and what they looked like.”
