HER PLEASURE IS IN HEALING THE PAIN : When There Is Agony in Defeat, Rhonda Lowry Helps Northridge Athletes Beat the Wrap

They come alone and they come in masses, sometimes 100 or more a day, to be healed in the tiny, windowless room on the Cal State Northridge campus. In that room, the weak are made strong, the sick are restored to health and the lame are made to walk again.

Welcome to Our Lady of the Knee Brace.

Actually, the room is not a church at all. It is the athletic training room, but the work that is performed there by head trainer Rhonda Lowry and her assistants has the CSUN athletes seeking its healing powers as if it were Lourdes.

Lowry, 26, is in her second year as the athletic trainer at CSUN. She took the job fresh out of the University of Arizona, where she obtained her master’s degree in athletic training while also serving as the head trainer for a local high school. She had done her undergraduate work at Nevada Las Vegas, under head trainer Del Rudd. When Lowry began hunting for a job, Rudd was CSUN’s curriculum director and Phil Stone had just quit as the school’s athletic trainer.

“Del had kept me in mind, and they were looking for someone young with a lot of new ideas,” Lowry said.

“I wasn’t surprised to get the job, but I was glad to get it. It was the type of job I was looking for. A lot of women in this profession come out of graduate school and get stuck as assistants or in jobs working just with women athletes. I wanted something that would keep me in the teaching side and also give me the chance to work with both men’s and women’s athletics.”

Lowry can think of at least one advantage to being a female trainer for male athletes.

“If you’re a 240-pound linebacker, you are much less likely to come up to a big, hulking male trainer and whine, ‘Oh, my shoulder hurts.’ They are more willing to tell me when they’re hurting than they would a male trainer,” she said. “If you have to tell a male trainer about a little boo-boo and it turns out not to be such a big deal, you’d feel funny. But they feel they can confide more in me, I think.”

What she sees is a steady flow of the walking wounded filing into the 30-foot square, cement-block training room that has seven padded treatment tables.

Some of the people limp. Others hope the door is already open, because their damaged arms, shoulders or hands can’t perform the task. Others fear they will drop something, because if they do, their aching backs won’t allow them to bend over and pick it up.

And some are as healthy as Richard Simmons--if you consider Richard Simmons healthy--but desperately want to be excused from a practice session.

“I have a cure for them, too,” Lowry said. “I kick them out the door.”

But most have a legitimate reason for seeking out Lowry and her staff, which includes assistant trainer Maury Hanks and as many as 22 student volunteers who earn credit for their work through the school’s nationally certified athletic training program.

“Since I’ve been here, we haven’t had any real bad accidents or injuries,” Lowry said. “I saw more severe injuries--things like spinal injuries and broken bones, the really nasty injuries that require expert, immediate care--at the high school in Tucson while I was at the University of Arizona.

“Part of that, we like to think, is our preventive program. Right now, for spring football, we’re doing orthopedic evaluations and physicals for all the new recruits. I want to find out who is, potentially, the most likely to get hurt in football. I want to know if they are ready for football practice. We look for a history of injury. We look at the joints, the knees and elbows and shoulders, to see if they are stable or if they show any sign of muscle atrophy around them. I want to know, ‘Is this guy potentially going to go out and blow out his knee?’ ”

Lowry said the low incidence of severe injury for CSUN athletes is common among Division II schools.

“At this level, the sports aren’t so intense,” she said. “We don’t screen out a lot of people for medical reasons. Ninety percent of the injuries we deal with are caused by overuse and bio-mechanical problems, not acute trauma-type injuries. That’s characteristic of this level of sports program.

“In Division I sports, the players have the mechanics down and have the correct technique down. That’s what made them the elite athletes. It’s the acute injury that cripples you at that level. Here, it’s mostly poor technique that causes the problems.”

Certainly, Scott Colvin would agree. The CSUN wide receiver showed poor technique during Christmas vacation when he lifted his body out of a car and slammed the door shut. Unfortunately, Colvin’s left hand had not yet made its way out of the car. Colvin sustained severe bruises and a slightly damaged tendon in the accident. Lowry is nursing him back to health.

There was also a CSUN soccer player last season whose left kneecap apparently resembled a soccer ball. An opposing player kicked the knee, fracturing the patella. The CSUN player wore a cast for several weeks before Lowry put him on a program to strengthen and rehabilitate the knee.

Baseball player Jim Vatcher is another. Vatcher slid into second base earlier this year. He was safe, but he was out. Knocked out. His jaw was fractured when it collided with the shoulder of the second baseman. Vatcher spent several weeks with his jaws wired shut.

Lowry also serves as sort of an injury soothsayer at CSUN. When she learned that Tom Keele, the former head football coach, was preparing to install a run-and-shoot offense last season, she knew her training room would be filled with guys moaning about hand and finger injuries.

“We could predict it because we knew there would be more contact between the ball and the hands and fingers of receivers,” she said. “And, sure enough, we had a great increase in that type of injury. We had jammed fingers, dislocated fingers, sprained wrists, sprained thumbs--just about everything related to the hand area.”

Lowry predicts injuries will shift to a different part of the anatomy in the coming season.

“This year, the team is returning to more of a running offense, so we anticipate fewer hand and wrist and finger injuries. But more sprained knees and ankles.”

Injuries are not confined, however, to sports such as football, basketball and baseball. Lowry deals with swimmers, volleyball players, track and field athletes and even golfers and tennis players.

“Swimmers are excellent athletes,” Lowry said. “Their injuries tend to be more along the lines of strained shoulder muscles that we can treat fairly easily. Golfers hurt themselves by trying to change their swing or to over-swing, and they develop elbow, knee and shoulder problems. The same with tennis players. We’ve had just about everybody in here at one time or another.”

Fortunately, CSUN has neither an archery team nor a rifle club.

With the prodding of Lowry, the athletic training student-assistant program--one of the few in California approved by the National Athletic Trainers Assn., the sanctioning body of the profession--has nearly tripled since 1983. The 22 students work closely with Lowry, learning how to apply classroom knowledge to the real world of torn muscles and strained ligaments. The best of the bunch are assigned to a campus team.

“If I had to do it all myself, I just couldn’t follow up with everybody,” Lowry said. “The student trainers report back to me, and in that way I can follow up on each case. When an injury occurs at an event I’m not attending, they take care of it and then come to me. I evaluate the injury and then we discuss it. They learn in the classroom and then I show them the practical application of what they’ve learned.”

With all of the bodies hurtling about the campus in pursuit of footballs, baseballs, soccer balls or volleyballs, you couldn’t blame Lowry for sitting in her office each day dreading the sound of a ringing phone. But she said that no matter who calls, she is ready.

“If I sit here and think, ‘Oh boy, I sure hope this doesn’t happen today or that doesn’t happen today,’ that tells me I haven’t covered something and that I’m not prepared,” she said. “Last year it nagged at me that if a diver hit his head on the diving board over the pool I would have no way to take care of him immediately. So I found the funds and we bought a floating backboard to remove injured people from a pool. It nagged me, so I did something about it. Now I don’t worry about that anymore.

“Someday, I’ll make a mistake, I’m sure, and I’ll learn from it. But so far I think I’ve made all the right calls.”

Lowry also takes satisfaction in knowing she is making the calls in what traditionally has been a man’s profession.

“There are always uncomfortable situations, but I approach them not as a female but as a professional,” she said. “I am your athletic trainer. If I have to treat a groin injury, it doesn’t matter. I’ll do an examination or perform a treatment the same whether it’s a male or female. But if a male athlete resists in that type of situation, then I’ll get one of the male assistants to examine him or treat him.

“But it usually doesn’t matter to the male athlete. As long as they know that you know what you’re doing.”

Some athletes, however, see Lowry as an easy target when they would rather be somewhere other than at a practice session.

“You have to listen to all of them when they say they’re hurt, because they probably have a legitimate problem,” she said. “But you just cannot deal with the hypochondriac. I evaluate every complaint, and if there is no significant injury, I tell them so and I tell the coach, too. If you’re not hurt, get out of here. I have enough to do.”

Lowry can usually tell when an athlete is not honest about an injury complaint.

“Some of them will say their neck hurts right near the muscle and then say there’s a sharp, stabbing pain when they move a certain way,” she said. “Well, that’s not consistent with a muscle injury. Then he’ll say it doesn’t really feel that bad but he doesn’t want to practice until it gets better. They make up stories. There’s not that many athletes here who do that, but it does happen more than I thought it would.”