What can happen in 1 year

 Nearly 1 year ago I left the college athletic training setting and changed lanes in my career. I had spent most of my career working at a college, so this was a change. That decision was what best served me at the time. For most of the 2022-23 school year, I was very burnt out with what I was doing. I was going through the motions, was full of animosity, was very cynical about the future of athletic training, and even lost 20 pounds despite eating normally. I know for a fact I was not at my best and certainly was an energy vampire. After moving on, I had written an article about it that I had titled “Why I left college athletics.” I can assure you that I meant everything that I had written in that piece. On the other, I can also assure you that I don’t feel the exact same way today. My perception and perspectives have changed.

The college, and even the traditional athletic training, setting has been changing since the pandemic; as did nearly everything in our lives of course. I had gone from being on the road with a baseball team, to working at home for “2 weeks until we flatten the curve,’ to working at home indefinitely, to planning what return to campus in fall 2020 would look like, and then was furloughed. That was my experience from March to June 2020.  I thought I would never work at a college again because I was now on the outside. I wasn’t rethinking if I wanted to work in a college or anything like that, I thought I was screwed. I was fortunate to work at a gym for a few months prior to rejoining the college setting in March of 2021. The whole time I kept thinking to myself “this sucks.” I wanted to be at a college, but I was on the outside. The moment I got an opportunity to return, I jumped on it. I needed to make the change because I had tied a lot of my identity to being a college athletic trainer, which I now know is not healthy for anyone to do.

So, what changed in the 9 months I was out of the game?

·      Covid polices that changed seemingly every hour.

·      Contact tracing.

·      Pre-game testing.

·      Monitoring testing.

·      Rapid testing.

·      Testing officials.

·      Being the covid police.

Yes, a lot of what were doing involved testing…

That is a slightly dramatized list of the extra, unofficial job duties athletic trainers had during the height of the pandemic. Every sport was in-season and nearly everyone was chomping at the bit to get back to normal if we could even call it that. Being athletic trainer at a college is a challenge: we work long hours, manage the healthcare of many student athletes, are responsible for all their safety while they play their sport, and have a responsibility to evaluate, treat, and return an injured person back to their sport. We then had to be the covid police on top of that, while trying to navigate a surge in injuries. I’m not going to get into the data on the post-pandemic injury boom, many more qualified people have done that. Simply put we came back too fast and athletes overall weren’t prepared for that physically and even mentally. If that wasn’t enough, most college staffs were understaffed. Where I worked, we were only ‘fully staffed’ for ¼ of the time I worked there. Most of our colleagues in the area were hiring just like we were: everyone needed more staff. We all had the same problems: way more work, way more injuries, less staff, and commonly had to deal with working even longer hours for the same low pay.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved working at a college, but this was insane. The pandemic exacerbated the traditional athletic trainers’ problems: working a lot for not very much money. We all know what we signed up for, but to do it for $60,000 or less is a tough sell, particularly if you live in an expensive city.

All these factors pushed me over the edge. I loved working at a college, but I needed a change. So, I left and wrote about my experience. I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling so frustrated with the traditional athletic training setting. Many of my friends felt the same way. I was shocked at how many people read “why I left college athletics” it’s mind boggling to me that it reached over 10,000 people. At the time that’s how I felt. How do I feel now?

If you’re still reading, you may think me a hypocrite for saying this: I miss working at a college. I really miss working in sports. I’ve changed my mind from a year ago. A lot of things in my life have improved: more balance, better pay, self-improvement like making this website, and so much more. 2 things can be true at once: the traditional setting needs a lot of things to improve for the people that work in it and it can be a great place to work. The main thing we need to imbrace as athletic trainers, I think, is that we have such a unique skill set and unique work environments. We can make them better but maybe we also need to embrace it too. Like so many people who become athletic trainers, sports has been, is, and always will be, a huge part of my life. Even though I left, I do hope to return to the traditional setting sometime soon.