Westfield, like many high schools, retains three seasons of athletics. In those three seasons there are 30 varsity sports teams and between all these teams there are more than 1,000 athletes. Each one of these athletes deals with aches, pains and bothers that result from their sport and may threaten their performance. The only way these athletes can treat their afflictions is with the help of the school’s athletic trainers, Steve Barandica and Nicole Castellano. The only problem is that it is extremely difficult for two people to treat hundreds and hundreds of athletes, and thus extra help is needed. Westfield enlists this help through student trainers.
Currently some of WHS’s student athletic trainers include second-year masters student Sage Wallace from Seton Hall and junior Tayla O’Brien from Kean. The two students each work with the school for about a semester. Wallace was given the option of choosing between a college, professional or high school athletic program, while O’Brien was assigned to work with Westfield.
“[Seton Hall] gives [student athletic trainers] options of where we would like to go. We can go to either a high school or a college or [a professional team] and I was assigned here based on my [teacher],” said Wallace. “[The internship] gives us a lot of experience outside of the classroom. In the classroom we learn about different injuries and different situations, but this gives us the opportunity to put those learning topics in top place.”
“In this major you don’t learn unless you’re hands on doing [athletic training] and you make your mistakes, but that’s how you learn, you don’t learn [real experiences] from tests and textbooks,” said O’Brien.
How it works is that Westfield affiliates itself with the athletic training programs at Seton Hall, Kean and Montclair State. The three universities send WHS their students to do their clinical rotations, the same way doctors do residencies in a hospital, and in return receive college credits as well as experience. Barandica and Castellano act as clinical preceptors, guiding O’Brien, Wallace and others through their clinical rotations.
“It helps us out a lot. We provide them an opportunity to learn, but at the same time they’re helping us tape, they’re helping us set up, they’re helping us provide better care, it’s a pretty good experience,” said Barandica. “Athletic training is very much so a hands-on kind of field, so they need to get some kind of experience working with athletes one-on-one to prepare them for the real world.”
“The more times they tape, the better they get at it. If you’re just taping fake injuries in college it’s not as [effective]. The more kids they touch, the more tape they do, the more comfortable they feel, the better their skills get as they proceed through their programs,” said Castellano.
The program began around 1993 with then-head athletic trainer, and current athletic director, Sandy Mamary. At the time Mamary was the lone athletic trainer at WHS. At the same time it was the responsibility of the athletic trainer to handle more than just WHS athletes, but Edison and Roosevelt Intermediate School athletes as well. “Back then we had full complements of Edison teams and full complements of Roosevelt teams, there was a lot going on and I was the only trainer,” said Mamary. There was no money in the district’s budget to hire more trainers and Mamary alone could not handle the hundreds of athletes she received each season. This was a demanding task, a difficult one for a single person to handle alone. Thus Mamary got creative.
Kean University at the time had an athletic training program, but it was not yet a degree, instead it was umbrellaed under a physical education degree. With a friend and fellow athletic trainer, Mamary ventured to Kean where she and her colleague became adjunct professors. She then taught two morning courses on top of her duties as a trainer for WHS.
“A friend of mine, who was the athletic trainer at Union High School, she’s like, ‘come on we’re gonna go to Kean University and let’s see what we can do,’ and we became adjunct professors in their athletic training program,” said Mamary. “Once we started to get immersed in their education of athletic trainers, then part of that was they had all these students who needed to go out into the field and learn the craft.”
As an adjunct professor, Mamary and her friend established the connection between Kean, Westfield and Union High School that allowed students studying athletic training to come to the two high schools and gain real-world experience in their field.
The program’s results have been indisputable. The program has grown beyond Kean and has spread to Seton Hall and Montclair State as well. With the work Westfield is doing, working with Westfield athletics has become a coveted opportunity for students at any of the aforementioned universities. Barandica, Westfield’s very own head athletic trainer, went through Westfield as an intern before he was later called back for his current position. Castellano, the current assistant athletic trainer, also went through Westfield as a student trainer before returning.
“It was very time consuming,” said Mamary of her time working with student trainers. “But that was during the day. After school it was fantastic because there were more of me. Kids got to get tape faster, kids were out to practice faster, it was all about getting the kids to practice faster and safer, that’s what it was all about and that worked and it still works today.”
In a job that may go overlooked by those that rely on them, the student athletic trainer has been an important position at the high school for almost 30 years. Through the help of various universities, hundreds of students have been given an opportunity to learn in the real world and create for themselves the connections and experience necessary to thrive in a future of athletic training. Without these student trainers it is easy to imagine the athletic office could become overwhelmed and incapable of giving all athletes the care and treatment they need and deserve. The student trainer has been and continues to be a pillar in Westfield’s athletic community.
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