BITTER MEDICINE : Doctors Fear Plan to Cure JC Fiscal Ills by Cutting Trainers Will Invite Serious Injuries

‘They are just making a terrible mistake in doing this. They’re asking for big trouble in a serious injury situation.’ Dan Bailey Long Beach State trainer

The announcement came Oct. 2, and in these days of tight budgets, it was not all that startling. Forty-seven employees of the L. A. Community College District would lose their jobs Jan. 1, saving the district $600,000 from the $216-million budget. Gone would be some truck drivers, cashiers, office aides and window washers, always the people hit hardest by financial cutbacks.

In addition, the district was doing away with the position of athletic trainer at Pierce College, Valley College and West Los Angeles College. Big deal, right? It shouldn’t be all that tough to find someone else to wrap a kid’s ankle in tape so that he can chase a ball around after school. Or someone to waddle onto the football field during a timeout and shoot a stream of drinking water through the kid’s facemask.

Somehow, you figure, the sun will still rise in the East and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will still be real tall if there are no athletic trainers at three junior colleges.

But within days after the school district made the announcement, the voices of trainers, coaches, athletic directors and orthopedic surgeons cried out sharply in protest. The decision to eliminate three athletic trainers’ jobs is, in their opinion, about as poor a case of judgment as a decision to market venison-flavored yogurt.

As athletes have evolved over the years into bigger, faster and stronger machines capable of inflicting great damage upon each other, so has the need for top-notch medical care for the athletes risen dramatically. More and more often come the stories of high school, college and professional athletes being severely injured, sometimes dying, on the playing field. They collapse during workouts from exhaustion or rare heart ailments. They sustain broken necks and backs in 50-decibel collisions.

With the dramatic rise in the numberand severity of injuries comes the need for a dramatic increase in the knowledge and medical training of the people who oversee the sports. The athletic trainer is often the first person to reach a fallen athlete. What that trainer does--or doesn’t do--in the first few seconds can mean the difference between life and death.

Mike Norris, now in his fifth year at Valley College and his 10th as a nationally certified athletic trainer, understands perfectly the responsibility that rests on his shoulders when an athlete goes down.

And Royce Green is pretty glad that Norris was attending a summer football practice at Valley College when a teammate drove his helmet up under Green’s shoulder pads from the front, breaking some ribs, lacerating and collapsing a lung and bruising his heart.

“Fortunately I was there,” Norris said, “and I recognized the collapsed lung and other problems almost immediately. I maintained life support on him and checked the vital signs and, maybe more importantly, didn’t do anything that would have caused further damage. Because of my experience, I realized what was going on.”

Green was rushed to a hospital and has since recovered nicely. He is back on the football field these days, very grateful that the decision to abolish Norris’s job was not made last year.

Under the district’s plan, the three full-time, certified trainers will be replaced by part-time employees or the coaches. Those in the profession say that replacing a full-time, certified athletic trainer with a coach or a part-time, uncertified trainer is akin to replacing Secretariat with Francis the Talking Mule in the Kentucky Derby.

“Coaches will be the first to admit they don’t want that responsibility,” said Tom Byrne, the trainer at Pepperdine University. “Along with not being qualified to perform our job, there are not enough hours in a day for them to provide adequate rehabilitation after an injury or adequate care to prevent injuries.”

“The district says to replace our trainers with part-time or hourly rate people,” said West Los Angeles College Athletic Director Jim Raack. “That’s ridiculous. Our answer is that if these people who are available or willing to work part-time were any good, if they were fully qualified, they’d be working full-time somewhere.

“What we’re going to end up with are students who are trying to become trainers. There’s a helluva lot more to the job than taping ankles, and the bottom line is they won’t be fully qualified to handle emergency, life-threatening situations.”

In the early ‘70s, a football player named Gregg Sheppard was severely injured during a practice at L. A. Harbor College. The injury left him paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair. He brought the case to court, claiming adequate medical care and preparation that might have prevented the injury or lessened the severity of it in the minutes following the accident were not available.

As part of the settlement, the court strongly advised Harbor--and all junior colleges--to hire a full-time, certified trainer to oversee all athletic competition. A decade ago, when the community college district was not being crushed by the same budget squeeze it now is trying to endure, compliance with the court was easy enough.

Today, it isn’t.

In justifying its decision, the district pointed out that only Pierce, Valley and West L.A. Colleges had full-time athletic trainers. The other six schools in the district do not, relying on part-time trainers or coaches. East L.A. College has gotten along with no major problems in that situation, despite having varsity football and basketball programs.

There have been no other serious problems at Harbor, either, since it did away with its full-time trainer. But at some of the other schools in the district, including Mission, L. A. Trade Tech and L. A. City, there are no football programs, which is the biggest source of athletic injury.

“I’m not certain what Pierce, Valley and West L.A. will do to take up the slack,” said district spokesman Norm Schneider. “Like the other schools, though, the trainers’ functions will be taken over by coaches or volunteers or someone like that. Obviously several colleges in the district have gotten along fine with no full-time trainer.

“I don’t think there will be any concern at all on our part that the replacements will be as qualified as the people who are the athletic trainers now. If we thought there would be a decline in the quality of the replacements, we wouldn’t have done it.

“At every school there are (physical education) instructors. We feel that if they are qualified to teach, they are qualified to do. We don’t feel there will be any lessening of the quality of the care and assistance the athletes are afforded. The care will be just as good as it’s been.”

Most trainers, coaches and doctors disagree, however.

“It is extremely dangerous to say that coaches can replace qualified athletic trainers,” said Dr. Richard Ferkel, a member of the Southern California Sports Medicine and Orthopedic Medical Group. “The vast majority of coaches have backgrounds in physical education, but mostly in coaching techniques. They are not trained to make critical decisions that a certified athletic trainer makes on the severity of an injury, or when or if a player should be allowed back onto the field after an injury.

“Look at football on the high school level. Most top programs have someone with a solid training background. They realize the importance of it. The quality of care is just not as good at schools where they have no one functioning as the full-time athletic trainer. And when you move to the college level, the velocity of impact and the intensity of the sport is magnified. From high school to college you go up a big jump. The players are bigger and stronger and the impact is much greater and the potential for severe injury is much greater.”

Dr. James Fox, who is also associated with the sports medicine group, is more emphatic.

“I’m very disappointed and very saddened and frustrated at the decision,” he said. “We’ve finally gotten to the point where we’ve educated people to the dire need to prevent injury and to care for injuries. Those are the athletic trainers. They’re no longer the guy with tape and a bottle of water hanging from his belt. Today they are well-trained and well-educated medical people. They are our first line of defense against catastrophic sports injuries.

“When they talk about coaches or part-time people or student-type trainers . . . well, I wouldn’t want to take that chance on having our kids hurt. I’d want the most qualified person I could get to oversee the medical part of an athletic program.”

The president of the board of trustees of the college district, and the man who ultimately made the decision to cut the athletic training positions from the three schools is Dr. Monroe Richman. Dr., as in medical doctor. He said the decision was a tough one, but no tougher than the restrictions his school district faces in the wake of governmental belt-tightening.

“While we would like to give support to the entire concept, given our restricted finances it’s a luxury we can ill afford,” he said. “The board felt that it was a move that, while not the best, is nevertheless appropriate within the climate that we now function.

“Cutting the training positions is what we had to do. We had no choice. I am sensitive to the problem and I don’t want to see any athlete, ever, get hurt. But with athletics the chances for injury are always there.”

Because that chance is always there, and because the funds to implement top-of-the-line sports programs are not, Richman said the elimination of the trainers’ positions may be the tip of the iceberg.

“My belief is that if you don’t have the money to do it right, to provide the best equipment and the best of everything to assure minimal injuries, then you shouldn’t do it at all. We are close, perhaps, to the day when all athletics will have to be removed from this district.

“If I have to make the choice between pouring money into a less than adequate sports program or using it for classroom instruction, I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute. I’d cut the athletic programs out and put what little money we have into the classroom.”

Those who object to the district’s decision to cut the three positions argued at a board hearing in September that the athletic programs shouldn’t be touched because they make money for the district, mainly because the student-athlete must take 12 units per semester to remain eligible for sports, and very few athletes are afforded any financial aid. Richman says he doubts that claim.

“I seriously question that report,” he said. “I question their point that the student-athlete brings in more money than we pay out.”

Richman’s prediction that all sports in the community college district will be put to sleep could come true as soon as a year or two from now. In the meantime, however, with the loss of the three trainers as the sports continue, many people believe the district is setting up a potentially disastrous situation.

One of those people is Long Beach State athletic trainer Dan Bailey, whose medical background and experience in dealing with injured athletes may well have saved the life of former 49er Todd Hart, who sustained a broken neck and was paralyzed in the Rose Bowl against UCLA three years ago and is still undergoing extensive rehabilitation.

“If a person is hurt on the field and no trainer, no qualified trainer, is immediately available, you’re just asking for big problems,” Bailey said.