Dave Ross dutifully patrolled the sideline for the Queen’s Golden Gaels for 36 years
In 1980, when he was hired as an athletic therapist at Queen’s University, Dave Ross was already well familiar with football as a hard-nosed sport — and sometimes a cold, calculating business where victory was paramount and injuries, the ones that players chose to disclose anyway, were tended to efficiently but with due haste,
That’s because Ross started his workaday life at the top — pro football. Soon after earning a master’s degree in athletic injuries from Indiana State University, he commenced a two-year stint as head therapist with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League.
“My career sort of took a reverse, top-to-bottom path,” said Ross, who started in professional football before moving “down” to the amateur collegiate sport, then “descended” even further assisting his son’s minor hockey team.
“I experienced the culture and mentality of pro football,” he said of the early years. “To players it was a profession, to owners it was money, to coaches it was wins.”
The middle of these three chapters was always the long-term goal for the Scarborough native. “Even when I was with the Tiger-Cats, I was always thinking about [working at the] university level.”
His standpoint on sport, particularly the pigskin pastime, changed once Ross joined the Tricolour troupe. “At Queen’s, playing football,” he explained, “was a game, not the end all, be all.”
For 36 seasons, Ross dutifully patrolled the sideline at Golden Gaels games, responding decisively to injuries that ranged from contusions to concussions, muscle rips to fat lips, broken bones to, yes, broken spirits. He also worked with the men’s and women’s varsity soccer teams.
“He’s larger than life,” lauded Vicky Wiltshire, who took over as co-ordinator of physical therapy when Ross semi-retired in 2009.
“Dave was very dedicated and very experienced and was greatly respected for his work at Queen’s.”
Note the past tense, which is fitting: Ross will not return for a 37th campaign. He won’t get to ring in the Golden Gaels’ new, $20 million playhouse.
What a shame.
Even more shameful, it wasn’t his choice. He wasn’t invited back. Evidently, the university that “greatly respected” him opted not to welcome back its most recent inductee in the school’s football hall of fame. No last, and clearly warranted, hurrah.
The decision, he said, was one of “restructuring.” We’ll take his word on it, because Queen’s has more or less clammed up. When contacted for the official reason, the office of Leslie Dal Cin, the school’s chair of athletics, referred a caller to a sports information officer, who dutifully issued this response: “Queen’s does not comment on human resources matters.”
Ross, who still teaches a half-course in the kinesiology department, took the high road when asked about his unplanned departure from the three varsity teams. Try as he might, though, he could not completely mask his disappointment.
“I would’ve come back for a 37th season, if only to be part of the first year in the new facility,” he said of Richardson Stadium III. “That would’ve been a nice way to leave.
“I wasn’t totally surprised,” Ross, 64, added. “I just hoped [the move] would’ve been done differently.”
His time at Queen’s began with a nine-month contract to head an athletic therapy unit that, in 1980, was in the embryonic stage. “When I came here, the university had one student trainer,” he said, adding that Queen’s sweetened the job offer by “throwing in a teaching position as well.”
Under Ross, the program grew in stature and size.
“We have over 50 student trainers now,” Wiltshire pointed out. “That’s all due to the groundwork Dave laid.”
Ross took over from Tabby Gow, the last of the old-school trainers whose prime pieces of paraphernalia were a clean towel, a water bucket and maybe a pocket knife. Ross, on the other hand, was part of the new breed of trainer who came with certification credentials, in-depth training and a new title — athletic therapist.
He did, however, inherit a few traits from the likes of Gow, Stu Langdon and Billy Hughes — namely a capacity to work long hours and have the wherewithal to keep pace with changing techniques and procedures.
Most notably among the latter is the now-heedful treatment accorded athletes with suspected concussions. The “bell rung” diagnosis of yesteryear went out with tuning-fork uprights and the drop-kick.
“In the 1980s and ’90s, there were no medical criteria for concussions, other than to grade them 1, 2 or 3, with No. 1 being a headache that goes away in 15, 20 minutes,” Ross reflected. “A concussed player only had to say his headache was gone and he could go back in.
“Today, of course, it’s a much changed environment on the sideline with respect to head injuries. You err on the side of caution. Players are immediately put through a series of tests … and from there it’s a step progression.”
Once was a time when a trainer, to prevent a suspected concussed athlete from re-entering a game, hid the player’s helmet. Many’s the time Ross, while “keeping an eye” on an injured player, watched from a distance as the player searched for his helmet.
Friend and former Queen’s colleague Bill Sparrow called Ross an “outstanding therapist who always had the best interests of the athletes in mind.”
Ross, who worked three Summer Games (1976, 1980 and 1992) with the Canadian Olympic program, has a few things on his bucket list, including son Andrew’s upcoming nuptials in Scotland and autumn Saturdays spent at the cottage instead of the gridiron.
More time with two young grandchildren is high on the list, although that will require Dave and wife Kathy to journey halfway around the world. Heather, the couple’s other child, who like her brother is a teacher, lives and works with her husband in Bangkok.
She’s Heather Trainor now, a surname that once prompted gramps to suggest an unusual but “perfect” front name for a grandchild, a unisex handle at that.
“I said: ‘How about Athlete?'”
pkennedy@postmedia.com