Published: August 27, 2006 12:02 am            

Sunday Special: Trainers put in long hours with sports teams

TERRE HAUTE — If you were at Memorial Stadium, at West Vigo or at Ellettsville you may have noticed them Friday night, perhaps stretching out a cramp or doing a hasty tape job.

You don’t want to see them on the field too often during a high school football game or any other athletic event, and they’d rather not get famous that way either.

But Jed Arseneau, Brad Crackel, Nicole Gonzales and Greg MacDonald are vital to the efforts of Terre Haute North’s Patriots, Terre Haute South’s Braves, Northview’s Knights and West Vigo’s Vikings respectively, even though you could almost say that the better they do their jobs, the less you see of them.

They are the school’s full-time athletic trainers, positions that haven’t existed for very long. To the credit of all four, their respective schools all wonder now how they ever got along without them.

Until approximately five years ago, Wabash Valley high schools used student trainers through the Indiana State University graduate and undergraduate programs. That was a good arrangement, but with a 100 percent turnover every year there was considerable orientation involved at the beginning of every school year.

Thus arrangements were worked out with hospitals in the community to supply the schools with one full-time staff member. In a best-of-both-worlds scenario, the ISU students are still involved too, but now with someone to supervise their work.

“I’m an approved clinical instructor for the ISU undergrads,” Crackel explained, for example. “We’ll have seniors [at ISU] who are with us the entire year, and sophomores and juniors who will do three- or four-week intervals.”

Crackel — who is an employee of Terre Haute Regional Hospital — has been at South since November of 2001, getting the job after the Braves’ first full-time trainer left the area after a stint of just a few months.

MacDonald, who is now employed by Union Hospital, is the longest-tenured of the four trainers. He was West Vigo’s first full-timer in the position.

Arseneau, also a Union Hospital employee, will celebrate his two-year anniversary on that hospital’s staff in January, making him the relative newcomer.

And Gonzales, in her third season at Northview and an employee of St. Vincent Clay Hospital, is a good example of how the current system works. She was a graduate assistant under Crackel at South for a year before taking the position at Northview.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to have our own trainer,” Athletic Director Charley Jackson of Northview said recently when asked about Gonzales. “The relationships she’s brought with the parents and the athletes … they feel more confident in her [than in a different trainer every year].”

Ron Clinkenbeard, athletic director at North, has a unique outlook on the position because he is a certified athletic trainer himself. “Sometimes I have to be careful, when somebody gets hurt, that I don’t run out there myself,” he joked recently.

“Jed does a tremendous job for us,” Clinkenbeard continued. “We’ve been blessed with a lot of good [trainers], but he goes above and beyond.

“South is blessed to, with Brad,” Clinkenbeard added, “and I got my master’s [degree] with Greg; we were athletic trainers together at Eastern Illinois.”

MacDonald, 40, is the most experienced of the group of trainers in addition to the one who’s been in his job the longest. He played high school and community college football in Arizona, graduated from Arizona State with a degree in exercise science and — like Clinkenbeard — got his master’s degree (in sports administration) from EIU.

Coach Jeff Cobb of the Viking football team especially appreciates MacDonald’s athletic background.

“It’s like having a coach on the field whose main job is to keep the kids healthy,” Cobb said. “He knows football, and he knows how to look out for things.

“He really looks at injuries and assesses them. He knows the difference between something serious and something [less serious] that arises in the heat of battle.”

Cobb also coaches West Vigo’s girls track team, and again finds himself relying on MacDonald.

“He’s kept a lot of our girls healthy,” Cobb said. “He deals with so many things in the course of the year. He introduced a stretching program to alleviate some shin splints, for example.”

During preseason football camps, MacDonald said, his work day could run from 12 to 14 hours. His day during the school year, like those of the other trainers, begins in the middle of the afternoon and ends when the last game or practice — or bus ride — has ended.

“I like it,” MacDonald said of his job. “It can be draining at time, dealing with all the injuries, but I love sports. I played all my life, and I like being around kids.”

Asked about future plans, MacDonald said, “I’ll be in athletic training, or maybe [athletic] performance enhancement. I’ll be working with athletes the rest of my life.”

Arseneau came to North after a two-season stint as trainer for the Evansville Otters of the Frontier League. He’s a native of Loda, Ill., who played baseball and football for Paxton-Buckley-Loda High School; the Panthers reached the state football semifinals during his sophomore year.

The 26-year-old is a 2003 graduate of Eastern Illinois, where he worked as a trainer with the football, baseball, wrestling and track teams and earned a degree in physical education with an emphasis on sports medicine; he also has a teaching degree for secondary physical education.

“I like pro baseball for the night life,” he joked recently, “but I like [being a trainer in a] high school because you can have an impact on guys’ lives.”

Arseneau’s experience at North so far has been nothing but positive, he said.

“The coaches are very open and receptive, and they make you feel you’re a part of the North family,” he said. “And having an athletic director who’s also a trainer really helps out when it comes to budgets.”

Drawbacks to his job, Arseneau continued, include “paperwork, and the long trips to Indy [for Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference games], but every job has its downfalls.

“The big perks,” he added, “are dealing with athletes every day — and the free clothing.”

If Coach Chris Barrett of the Patriot football team didn’t appreciate Arseneau before, he learned to this fall during the extremely hot two-a-days and football camp.

“He plays a huge role,” Barrett said, “and at a time when heat illnesses are in the forefront [of public consciousness], he plays an even more vital role.

“He double-checks and watches kids, and does a great job of keeping guys hydrated,” Barrett added. “He’s very receptive, he takes his job seriously and he does a great job.”

Gonzales worked as a trainer while she was a student at Noblesville High School, then went on to the University of Evansville, originally expecting to study physical therapy. She’s completed her course work toward a master’s degree at ISU, and feels she’s found a home with the Knights.

“I love it,” she said when asked about her job. “I get to work with high school kids every day, and it’s nice to be in a place where if [one of your athletes] gets hurt, you kind of get to go through it with them.”

The age group works best for her too, she added.

“At the high school level, the athletes are more appreciate,” Gonzales said. “I love my kids, I love my hospital and I love my coaches. And it’s nice being in a small community, where you get to know the parents as well as the athletes.”

Having a Saturday off once in a while might be nice, Gonzales said, but “[working on Saturday] comes with training.” And it didn’t take the Northview athletes long to adjust to having a female trainer, she added.

“My training room is right among all the lockerrooms [at Northview],” she said. “[The boys] are pretty professional about that, and pretty respectful.”

Crackel, who will be 29 next month, is the trainer who wound up closest to home. After starting as a high school student at North, he graduated from South in 1996 and received his undergraduate degree at ISU.

“It was pretty neat to come back here [to South as a trainer],” he said recently. “The reputation ISU has [for its training program] helped out quite a bit [with getting the job].”

Crackel is another trainer who feels he’s found a perfect niche.

“I like the high school setting,” he said recently. “I’ve met a lot of good people, and [working in a] high school seems more rewarding; you get to see a young, shy freshman develop into a young adult.”

Asked about Crackel’s work, Coach Jay Engle of the South football team described it as “awesome, and you can underline that and add a few exclamation points.

“I’ve never seen somebody as dedicated and passionate about what he does,” Engle continued. “I can’t imagine the amount of hours he puts in, and his ability to diagnose injuries is unbelievable. He works with the kids and the families well, and he really cares about his job, the kids and Terre Haute South.”

“The worst part [of the job] is when the kids leave,” Crackel noted. “When you get close to them and they trust you, then they’re on to college and other things.”

        

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