Wander into the athletic training room, on any day, at any time, and there are a few things you probably expect to see. You expect to see rolls of tape unspooling, winding around athletes’ ankles. You expect to see bags of ice resting carefully on injured or sore body parts. You expect to see a stream of athletes flowing in, flowing out, toting gigantic orange Gatorade coolers laden with water and ice.
You might see those things. Probably will, if you show up at the right moment.
But wait. There’s more to see.
To see it is to comprehend the centrality of Westfield’s athletic training duo, to understand their position as the anchor of the school’s teams and athletes.
Steve Barandica and Nicole Castellano are Westfield’s two full-time athletic trainers. Their duties are manifold and essential. Their work is often unheralded, taken for granted. But this is March. This is National Athletic Training Month.
“Kids don’t just go in there to get taped and walk out,” says Jim DeSarno, the head football coach. He calls the training room a “safe haven.”
This is what you have to see, have to understand. This is the bowel of the athletic training apparatus.
The training room (there are two, one at WHS and one at Gary Kehler Stadium) can be a buzzing anthill, Barandica and Castellano shepherding athletes to practices and games. It can be a relaxed hangout spot, with four or five or more athletes engaged in conversation and banter. It can be a place for more intimate conversations about injuries, sports, life.
“The trainers keep our kids healthy,” says Jim McKeon, the head boys basketball coach. “They keep our kids comfortable. The athletes can go in there and make snacks, hang out, go see them in their offices. It’s a camaraderie, too, in that room.”
Barandica and Castellano care deeply about the teams, about the health of their players, about the wins and the losses. Barandica’s face tenses during close games, his eyes fastened on the action. Castellano clasps her hands together in worry at pivotal moments, cheering loudly, looking exactly like the “team mom” she says she is.
“The best days are when I go home and everyone won,” Castellano says, her voice softening, warming. “I get so upset when they’re all out there and we’re doing terribly. I like being part of this, with you all.”
“We don’t just show up and do our job,” she adds. “We like it here. We are invested.”
They’ve forged relationships with players. They’ve personally ensured teams are as healthy as possible. They care. Deeply.
Maybe that’s why they’re so good.
An Athletic Training Life
Tucked halfway up a staircase, the training room at WHS is inconspicuous. That’s where the athletic trainers start their day. By 12 p.m., one of them has unlocked the heavy door and opened the room for business. They stay in the room until the end of school, available for athletes who require treatment or evaluation—or simply a friendly face. That’s also when they typically accomplish administrative work.
At 2:45 p.m., school ends, and, as Castellano says, “a mad rush” ensues. Athletes inundate the training room, searching for tape, searching for treatment. Barandica and Castellano, aided by a rotating cast of college interns, help the athletes and ferry them to practices or games. Then they cover practices and games, sitting on the turf or touring practice venues to check on different teams.
Barandica started at WHS in 2016. He graduated from Kean University in 2013 and honed his skills for two years as a graduate assistant at Auburn University. He worked at Woodbridge High School for two years. He spent five years as an EMT. On top of his present athletic training responsibilities, he’s an adjunct professor at Kean and the president-elect of the Athletic Trainers’ Society of New Jersey. He and Castellano also serve as clinical preceptors for the college interns passing through WHS.
Castellano started at WHS in 2014, working in a part-time role before assuming a full-time position in 2018. She arrived at WHS after stints at Pace University, for three years as a graduate assistant, and Stevens Institute of Technology, for seven years, five as an assistant and two as the head trainer. She graduated from Quinnipiac University in 2004 and, while working at Stevens, collected a master’s of nutrition from Montclair State University.
But Castellano launched her athletic training career years before, as a high school student.
A high school student at WHS.
A Night Last November
Noah Fischer limped off the field, pain radiating through his leg, momentarily sidelined. Hundreds and hundreds of people watched on.
The site: Gary Kehler Stadium.
The occasion: The North 2, Group 4 soccer sectional championship.
The magnitude: the biggest game of Fischer’s career.
Fischer was a team captain, a stalwart defender, a Hobart College commit, an indispensable piece of a team vying for its first sectional crown in 21 years. Now he had a dead leg.
“It hurt so bad,” he says, “and I didn’t know what to do.”
Barandica and Castellano did. “They ended up wrapping it,” Fischer says, “which surprised me because I didn’t think that helped.” But then the leg, for a moment a crippling source of pain, felt “100 percent.” Fischer returned to the field.
The indelible image of that game is a picture of a shirtless Fischer, sprinting toward a baying student section, trailed by euphoric teammates. He has just leaped to meet a cross, has just headed it past the opposing goalie in double overtime, has just delivered glorious pandemonium to Kehler in the form of a long-awaited sectional championship.
Clearly visible in that picture, if you tear your eyes from the hundreds of beaming fans and delirious players, is a strip of black poking out from beneath Fischer’s blue shorts. It is the wrap.
Barandica is discernible in the background, raising his arms in obvious elation, a wide smile illuminating his face. But Castellano is absent from the picture. She, at that point, was no longer at Kehler. She was 10 miles away, at Watchung Hills Regional High School, watching the girls soccer team as it warmed up for its sectional championship.
Two Westfield teams, both competing for sectional titles, that night stood on fields separated by 10 miles of winding road. No matter. Barandica and Castellano diverged, Barandica covering the boys and Castellano the girls. Westfield employs two full-time athletic trainers, so it wasn’t a problem. No team lacked attention.
It wasn’t always that way.
A Trajectory of Training
The office sits in WHS’s front hallway. It has cozy furnishings: a bulky desk, stacks of cabinets, walls full of mementos from Westfield’s athletic successes. The office belongs to Sandy Mamary, the school’s athletic director.
Thirty-six years ago Mamary didn’t have the office. She didn’t have the furnishings. She didn’t have the comfort. She was an athletic trainer back then. All she had was a seat at her desk in the training room and a responsibility to care for hundreds of athletes. Alone.
Mamary was Westfield’s first full-time athletic trainer. She joined the school in 1987.
“Times were very different in 1987, for sure,” Mamary says now, with a laugh. There were less teams, for one thing. No ice hockey, no girls lacrosse, no boys volleyball. There were, though, middle school teams, which have since grown nearly extinct (EIS and RIS still field a combined baseball team).
The demand threatened to swamp Mamary. So she turned to an unlikely, now-familiar source.
“I would tape any of the field hockey and softball girls who needed to be taped before we got on the bus, just to try and lighten her load a little,” says Castellano, who graduated WHS in 2000 and who first dallied with athletic training as a high school student. Castellano helped out with the teams she played on—field hockey and softball—and assisted Mamary at football games.
Castellano still remembers the moment athletic training transformed from a hobby into a possible career. It was the 1999 state football tournament. One of Castellano’s friends, a player, had dislocated his shoulder. Onto the field went Mamary and the team doctor, and back into its socket went the shoulder. The player re-entered the game. The team won. Made it all the way to Giants Stadium.
“I just thought that was so inspirational,” Castellano says, “and I was like, okay, wow, I totally want to do this.”
But before Castellano migrated to Quinnipiac to earn a bachelor of science in athletic training, she practiced under Mamary’s tutelage, learning the trade while lending an extra hand.
“I just couldn’t handle the volume,” Mamary says. “If it was a kid that was already evaluated and just needed their ankle taped, go to Nicole, go to the other people.”
Mamary also enlisted college students as assistants, in a mutually beneficial program that still exists. Eventually, Westfield added a part-time athletic trainer, then upgraded to two full-timers, completing the trajectory that has left the school with such a robust training department.
Having two full-time athletic trainers is essential.
The teams are scattered throughout Westfield. Look at the upcoming spring season. Volleyball and softball at WHS. Lacrosse and track at Gary Kehler Stadium. Tennis at Tamaques Park. Too much ground to cover for a solo trainer.
“Having two athletic trainers here full time gives us the ability to cover everything,” Barandica says.
“It has dramatically helped every program because you can be able to help every program evenly,” McKeon says. He says something else, too.
“It is a necessity.”
Bonds Forged and Relationships Molded
Sutton Factor remembers the moment she met Barandica. She was at a soccer captain’s practice the summer before her freshman year. Barandica showed up, introduced himself.
“And of course, the upperclassmen loved him,” says Factor, who has spent three years playing varsity soccer and four playing varsity basketball. “They were like, oh, Steve’s here! And I was like, who’s Steve? And now, fast forward four years, he’s like my best friend and so is Nicole.”
The training room, Factor says, is “like a second home. We’re in there before practice, before games, after games.” They eat food. They talk. They nap. They watch Netflix (Criminal Minds is a favorite). They chill with Castellano and Barandica.
“I’ll go in there during free periods to talk to them,” Factor adds. “We don’t just go there for the room, but also because Steve and Nicole are in there.”
Fischer, who also played basketball this season, describes hanging out in the training room during basketball season, talking with the athletic trainers. The hoopers and the trainers watched the World Cup together. The games entranced Barandica, according to Fischer.
Fischer and Barandica shared a pregame soccer ritual. Airpods shoved into his ears, Fischer always grew quiet and withdrawn in the whirling locker room. Barandica sometimes entered the locker room, often to communicate with the coaches. When he saw Fischer they would fist bump. It would help Fischer “get locked in.”
“It grew to a bond this year that we actually talked,” Fischer says. “They learned stuff about me. I learned stuff about them. On a personal level.”
The coaches notice these bonds. They notice the training room and its significance.
McKeon says, “They’re in there talking, hanging out, and just being kids. They have a sense of comfort when they go in there.”
He also says, “It’s another extension of your locker room. It’s another area for camaraderie to be built within your team.”
And, “They’re not just there for physical support, but mental support if you need it.”
Things were similar back when Mamary occupied the room.
“The athletes in general had a good relationship with Sandy,” says Greg O’Brien, a soccer goalkeeper who graduated WHS in 2008. “It was a welcome relationship. No one felt like they were scared to go in there, but also people knew that they shouldn’t mess around in there, either.”
This other side of the job—this unteachable, frequently unrecognized binding—is an immovable component of Westfield’s athletic training department, just the same way taping ankles is.
“We love having an open door,” Castellano says. “You don’t have to schedule an appointment with us. Just come and tell me what’s going on and if we can help in any way we can. And not just for muscles.
“For anything.”
‘Constant Communication’
It is rather handy, for Westfield’s legion of coaches, to have athletic trainers so attuned to athletes’ needs. The communication between coaches and athletic trainers is constant, a channel swinging open before the season starts and closing only after it finishes.
The communication persists “throughout the day, throughout the night, throughout injuries that athletes have at the school,” DeSarno says. “It’s the communication piece that I think is so valuable that we have here.”
If an athlete twists his ankle playing gym volleyball, a trainer will inform the coach. If an athlete mentions an injury has deteriorated, a trainer will inform the coach. But it extends further.
“They’re not always just treating physical injuries and things physically,” DeSarno says. “They’re communicating with the kids, they talk with them, they develop relationships that they can keep a coach in the loop.”
Coaches, of course, speak with their players when injuries or other snags arise. But athletic trainers often coax out more details. They can paint a more detailed picture of a situation.
“We get to build really good relationships with them,” Barandica says. “A lot of times they feel comfortable with us.”
When the athletic trainers glean information from athletes, they instantly relay it to coaches. “We’re in constant communication,” McKeon says, “and we’re always on the same page.”
Ice Pops and Gadgets
To the annoyance of many athletes, the oblong white freezer in Kehler’s training room is locked. It didn’t used to be. It is now.
The treasure buried within? Electrolyte ice pops. Chris Flores, a former trainer, discovered them years ago and began stocking them as a heat-illness prevention tool. Barandica and Castellano distribute them to athletes on blistering days or at halftime of intense games. But the athletes search for them at other times too, rattling the freezer’s cover, frustrated at the barrier separating them from their pops.
“We have people taking them right from the freezer, even when it’s cold outside,” Castellano says. “We had to lock that puppy down at the field house, hide those keys.”
The ice pops are just one item in Westfield’s stocked arsenal of gadgets and oddities.
Recent additions include NormaTec compression boots (of which Westfield has three, a whopping and almost certainly unmatched number for a New Jersey high school) and a NormaTec compression arm. Mamary dispatches Barandica and Castellano to the national athletic training convention, directing them to hunt for cool stuff in the enormous exhibit hall.
“Sandy’s very cutting-edge,” Castellano says. “She wants to have the best stuff. She wants to find the best equipment.”
But no gadget can mitigate the risk athletes encounter every time they step onto the field, the nightmare scenario that athletic trainers prepare for.
“It’s really just preparing for the worst and hoping that you never have to do it,” Barandica says. The athletic trainers certify coaches in CPR and first aid, position AEDs on the sidelines and otherwise ensure they’re equipped for action.
And when something happens, they’re ready. DeSarno once witnessed an athlete suffer a seizure in the locker room during preseason. He froze, he says. But Flores, the trainer at the time, acted calmly and immediately.
DeSarno lauds the athletic trainers’ “ability to stay calm in those types of situations.”
Look at it Like a Tree
Every student presently at WHS has existed in the two-trainer era, accustomed to quality care from Barandica and Castellano.
“Sometimes kids in Westfield can be kind of jaded,” says O’Brien, the former goalkeeper who played collegiately at Fordham and UConn and, as a local club coach, has worked with Barandica. “What I mean by that is not recognizing how good they have it. Right now you guys have Steve, who is an unbelievable trainer.”
The superlatives gush in, from every corner, for Barandica and Castellano and for the athletic training foundation Westfield has built. For all they do. It’s more than taping and giving water. It’s covering games. Building relationships. Keeping medical records. Communicating with healthcare professionals. Dealing with physicals. Facilitating rehab. Overseeing hydration and nutrition. The list goes on.
“It’s the little things that you don’t think about that they really do,” McKeon says.
So maybe now you see.
Look at it like a tree.
Mamary is the roots, tethering the apparatus to the ground. Barandica and Castellano are the trunk, the base, the robust center. The college interns are the branches, shooting out from that sturdy trunk.
And the athletes? They’re the leaves, drawing sustenance from the rest of the tree, flourishing because of it. If they break off the tree, they’ll stay green and leafy and bright for a little while. But not for long.
Not without the tree. Not without the athletic trainers.
