Perspective: The safety of student athletes

John Van Etten, a 16-year-old punter and running back at Countryside High School, has new cause to appreciate the importance of athletic trainers in high school sports. After being hit on his side at football practice a few months ago, he approached the trainer, Mary Connors Gorniak, who quickly diagnosed a spleen injury and had him rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. Says his father: "If she wasn't here . . . John could be dead."

Gorniak, it should be noted, is a certified trainer who works for the Morton Plant Mease Sports Medicine Center just north of the high school, and she was on the job as a community service. The hospital provides trainers, for free, to three of the surrounding high schools.

"I'm glad she was there because we have a lot of kids out there practicing, not just in football," says Bob Hosack, director of extracurricular activities for Pinellas schools. "If there's a certified trainer in the vicinity, it's going to help all of the kids."

Hosack is right, and this story might end there, as an inspiring tale of one hospital's service to its community and one woman's astute medical heroics, if not for the nagging postscript: Countryside is one of only six Pinellas high schools with a certified trainer to safeguard students in sports activities. Ten others have none.

Does that mean that more than half the county's athletes are unworthy of additional medical supervision?

Though isolated shootings and stabbings lead to understandable concern about student safety in schools, more students are injured every day on the athletic field than in the classroom.

An estimated 2-million high school athletes across the nation are injured every year, with roughly 300,000 of them ending up in the hospital. A recent study by the National Athletic Trainers' Association shows that more than half of those injuries occur during practice and that boys' football and wrestling and girls' soccer lead the list.

Unfortunately, in Pinellas and far too many other school districts, the kind of medical supervision from which John Van Etten benefited has been left largely to the charitable instincts of local hospitals and treatment facilities such as Morton Plant Mease. The result is that some schools have trainers and some don't.

Hosack complains of a shortage of certified trainers, but the reality is that the school district has a shortage of financial commitment. The only money it makes available is a $2,000 stipend for any teacher who has the certification and is available to serve all the sports programs. That's $2,000 for covering practices and games for football, basketball, soccer, wrestling, softball, volleyball, swimming, track, cross country, golf, tennis and weightlifting.

"I think it's a responsibility of the school district that we have the safety of the child in mind every single minute," says Pinellas School Board member Jane Gallucci. "Coaches are not trained medical people, and they're not always inclined to believe a player may be hurt. . . . When we look at what we spend on athletics in this county, I would think that anything that would have to do with safety would be paramount in anybody's eyes."

That has not been the case, however. In its centralized approach to athletics, the county has seemed more concerned with assuring that no team wears too fancy a uniform than with making sure all athletes get the same level of medical attention. Shouldn't safety be a priority for all student athletes?

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