Her drive to train athletes

Seven-thirty a.m. at UCLA, the football team is sweating -- hopping over hurdles, barreling through agility drills and running sprints. In the middle of this brawny, testosterone-heavy group stands one petite woman, Debbie Iwasaki.

She takes players aside and huddles with them, listening to updates on their ACL-surgery recovery and watching closely as they dash across the grass. “Do the hurdles like this,” she instructs a player, demonstrating a sideways hopping motion. “Open up your hips. Thaaaat’s it.”

Iwasaki, 39, is head athletic trainer for UCLA football -- the first female to hold the post at the school.

As a certified athletic trainer (not to be confused with a personal trainer) she treats sports injuries, including sprains, strains, torn ligaments and concussions. She acts as liaison between players and coaches, performing treatments or urging a rehabbed athlete back into play.

Hers was once a completely male-dominated profession -- but today, women make up 48% of the membership of the National Athletic Trainers’ Assn., working in physical therapy clinics, in medical offices and with high school and college athletes.

This gender parity comes to an abrupt halt when it comes to professional male sports.

Only 23 female members of NATA work with male professional teams -- as opposed to 590 men. And, as far as NATA knows, Major League Baseball has no female certified athletic trainers, and no female head trainers are in any of the major league sports. In the National Hockey League, American teams in the majors have no women trainers, period.

So ingrained is the gender gap that former Mets star Keith Hernandez, recently co-hosting a broadcast, was flummoxed by the sight of San Diego Padres player Mike Piazza high-fiving a woman in the dugout during a game.

Hernandez sputtered, “I won’t say that women belong in the kitchen, but they don’t belong in the dugout.” The high-fivee turned out to be Kelly Calabrese, the Padres’ massage therapist.

Hernandez apologized for his statement -- but the incident hints that at the pro level, it’s still a boys’ club.

“Without a doubt, that mentality continues,” says Julie Max, head athletic trainer at Cal State Fullerton and former (and first female) NATA president. “It’s one of the sad realities of our job that until we are viewed as the best and reviewed as individuals with the same skills -- not as a gender -- we will not advance into the professional areas we deserve to be.”

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Pros, cons, locker rooms

Max and others cite a variety of reasons for the gap. Many players and coaches are uncomfortable with having females in the training room, long considered an athlete’s sanctuary.

In some cases, the proximity of the locker room and training room might prove problematic for teams, if trainers have to walk through the former to get to the latter. “It could be something as simple as that,” says Chuck Kimmel, current NATA president. “I’m not making excuses, but none of us want to put anyone in a position of feeling uncomfortable.”

The complexity of the issue deepens.

“I would never want to work in the pros,” Iwasaki says emphatically. At the collegiate level, she adds, an athlete’s treatment and his attitude can be discussed with a coach who will hear her out. Plus, she says, “At this level, they’re still learning and you can teach them.”

Not so at the pro level. “The players are making the money, they’re driving the team, it’s all about them,” Iwasaki says.

There are personal issues as well. The life of an athletic trainer isn’t easy and often trumps everything else. Even at the collegiate level, days start before dawn, hours are long and trainers are often on call 24/7.

Traveling is a must. Many female trainers are single with no children.

“Things happen at the last minute,” says Ariko Iso, 35, assistant trainer with the Pittsburgh Steelers and one of the few women who have broken into big-league professional male sports. Someone gets hurt at an away game “and you’re the one in charge who has to stay in the city and take care of the player. If you’re a parent, I just don’t see how that would work out. As much as I enjoy my job, when I’m at a time when my priority is having a family, I don’t see doing both at the same time.”

Iso has heard secondhand that some in the NFL aren’t excited about hiring female trainers. “I can understand it in terms of, if they could avoid it they’d like to avoid it,” she says. “If there’s a male team and only one female, some people think of that as high risk, waiting for problems to happen, like sexual harassment. Or a player’s wife doesn’t like the fact that women are working in the area. It could be anything, and if you don’t hire females, that would never happen.”

Yet probably the biggest reason for this glass ceiling is tradition. Pro sports aren’t used to women trainers in large part because they were never required by law to close the gender gap, Kimmel says.

In 1972, Congress passed Title IX, groundbreaking legislation that banned sex discrimination in schools for academics and athletics. Creating more athletic teams in turn created a need for more athletic trainers -- many of them women. Though the early years saw women working in only women’s sports, eventually some pushed their way into the men’s arena.

Athletic training education programs that started in the early 1970s also brought more women into the profession, with a surge in the 1980s, Kimmel says. “Before that time it really was just guys with Q-Tips behind their ears,” he says.

Kimmel says pro sports don’t have women athletic trainers because “it wasn’t forced on them, where[as] Title IX required institutions to address those issues.”

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Breaking barriers

Female trainers who break into pro sports don’t always experience hostility. When the Steelers hired Iso as assistant trainer four years ago, making her the NFL’s first female athletic trainer, it made national news. Yet Iso says that if there was animosity about her post from the team or administration, she wasn’t aware of it. The Steelers, she adds, “are very open-minded about gender equity and see athletic trainers as a medical profession, the same as a physician.”

A thick skin is a must, Fullerton’s Max says. Fifteen years ago, when she worked at summer training camps for the then-L.A. Rams, “One of the players was directly in front of me and said, ‘Why does she have to be here?’ It didn’t bother me a single bit. Within a week of him seeing me do my job, it was never an issue.”

Trainers must also show backbone. While working with the Rams, Max treated derogatory comments and off-color jokes with zero tolerance. “They needed to know that I meant business,” she says. “I would simply not treat them until they came through with respect for me -- and they did.”

Female trainers are more likely to succeed if they view such incidents as challenges, not insurmountable obstacles. “I definitely hit some stopping points with some people at every level,” says 37-year-old Michelle Leget, coordinator of athletic training for the NBA’s Houston Rockets and the WNBA’s Houston Comets.

“You can choose to take them as discouraging or choose to do your job a little better and earn their respect. Once you do that, you’ll be pretty successful.”

A common theme among female athletic trainers who’ve succeeded at a high level is the pressure to be even better and as no-nonsense as a man in the same position. As Iso puts it, “I don’t want to be [the reason] why they’re not going to hire any more females.”

Adds Iwasaki: “I feel like I almost have to be a little bit tougher than the guys so that I’m not looked at by the coaching staff as being a softie.

“It’s an evolving process,” she adds. “You know the guys you have to be tougher on, because they always try to take advantage.”

It will take a little more time before more pro male athletes, coaches and team owners feel as open to female trainers as the Steelers. Pro sports “has been a male bastion forever,” says Jim Colletto, UCLA’s assistant head coach. Yet Colletto thinks that as change continues in high school and college athletics, so it will in the pros.

“I can never think why you’d be against having a female trainer.... I think, right now, the pros are behind,” he says.

Max, meanwhile, tells her female students that they’ll still have to stay a step ahead of men if pro sports is their goal.

“There’s still an edge to hiring men,” she says. “I think they’re going to have to be a little better prepared even to get a look..... Ariko [Iso] set a standard, and the owners see it can work. But we have very little margin of error -- and those who set the course have to know that.”

In UCLA’s co-ed training room (most collegiate training rooms today don’t separate men and women) it’s clear that Iwasaki has the players’ respect. She coaches 20-year-old Tony Lee, a junior on the offensive line, through a tough workout in the rehab pool for a dislocated kneecap. “Let’s go, let’s go!” she yells over the sounds of splashing, as Lee grimaces.

Junior Taylor, a 23-year-old senior and wide receiver, calls Iwasaki an “excellent trainer.”

“She lets you know if you’re working hard or not. We’re like a family. Football gets so rough sometimes, and it’s nice to have someone who really looks after you and wants the best for you.”

Taylor says he’s been through six long rehabs with Iwasaki, and, perhaps partly as a legacy of Title IX, was never put off by working with a female trainer.

“I had a female trainer in high school,” he says, “so it was no big deal for me.”