Athletes at Niles West High School seek treatment for their injuries and tips on how to prevent them from two athletic trainers who, while fulfilling their day-to-day duties, are also educating and inspiring a cohort of high school students interested in following in their footsteps.
Laura Gorski said she was thrilled to land a job as an athletic trainer at Niles West so she could “focus primarily on the kids.” She said she was hired by the Skokie school in 2008 after serving as the head athletic trainer at Benedictine University in Lisle.
Dave Smetana, a former intern athletic trainer for the Chicago Cubs, began working at Niles West through a private company until he was offered a full-time position as a staff member of the school’s athletic department in 2012.
“I originally got started in this [field] just because of the fact that I was an athlete myself in high school and I got injured a lot and I was always in the training room,” he said.
Smetana said the athletic trainer at his high school was a mentor to him, someone he said he could look to for advice.
“He was the one who pushed me to pursue this,” he said. “He gave me guidance in college and recommendations on what I should do once I got out of grad school.”
Gorski said that while she didn’t have someone she could call a mentor, she was inspired to follow her chosen career path after receiving treatment in high school for a sports related injury.
While assisting injured student-athletes with rehabilitation across a spectrum of 26 different sports, setting up and managing sports equipment and taking it down when the games are over, Gorski and Smetana have welcomed students in all high school grades to observe them at work and learn what it means to be an athletic trainer at a high school.
Gorski said a student trainer program existed when she was first hired by Niles West, but as the lone full-time trainer at the school, it was too much for her to keep it going. When Smetana joined the team, he said it was important to him to restart what is now known as the high school’s Sports Medicine Career Club.
Between five and seven students participate in the club each sports season, he said. As part of the club, students have had the opportunity to shadow visiting doctors, receive certification in both CPR and first aid and assist Smetana and Gorski both in the training room and on the field.
Several Niles West graduates who participated in the club have gone on to pursue careers in athletic training, other areas of sports medicine and medicine in general, Smetana said.
A 17-year-old senior at Niles West and member of the club, Karolina Gacek, said that although she’s not an athlete, she’d like to someday become an athletic trainer and work with either college or high school aged students.
Smetana and Gorski explain to the club’s participants step-by-step the processes involved in treating student athletes with injuries, in addition to how the injuries are caused, she said.
Students involved in the club are often asked to provide their own input based on what they’ve learned, Gacek said.
“We are different than teachers because we don’t give them grades,” Gorski said. “But we hold them accountable in different ways.”
Though she came to the club already equipped with an interest in sports medicine, Gacek said her experience working with and learning from Smetana and Gorski has cemented her future ambitions.
“After I learned more about it, and I got the hang of the different things they do here, I am positive it’s the career choice for me,” she said.
Both Gorski and Smetana said inspiring and educating students like Gacek is one of the most fulfilling aspects of their job.
“They want to do what we do, and I think that’s awesome,” Gorski said.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/niles/news/ct-nhs-niles-west-trainers-tl-0827-20150824-story.html