Article reposted from Bainbridge Island Review
Author: Luciano Marano
Amanda Sageser is one of those islanders you know that you’ve seen before, but maybe can’t remember where.
If you see her at the grocery store or out running errands, moving at a normal speed, you’d be forgiven for being uncertain. Imagine her sprinting across the Bainbridge High School stadium though, jostling along with her trusty pack of life-saving supplies to attend to some downed athlete, and the recollection solidifies pretty quickly.
Oh, right! That’s where you’ve seen her before.
And you have seen her before. That is, if you’ve attended a high school sporting event in the last three years.
Sageser is the BHS athletic trainer, and she supports nearly every sport on the schedule. She’ll be found on the sidelines, ready to come running to tend to any injuries during home games — and also many away and even some practices, too. She’s constantly icing, wrapping, taping and checking up on the healthy and harmed bodies of some 600 Spartan athletes. She’s also a full-time teacher in the school’s Career & Technical Education Department, overseeing three athletic medicine classes.
It’s not a schedule for the faint of heart.
“It’s insane,” Sageser said with a laugh. “I teach all day and then right after school, all the sports start. So from 3 to 3:30, I’m just slammed. People need tape, evaluations, rehab — all that stuff.”
Work often doesn’t end until 6:30 or 7 p.m., after practice, or even later if there’s a game at home. That’s an awful lot of time to spend either on the field or in the gym for a lady who readily admits to never being “a sports person” herself.
A graduate of North Kitsap High, Sageser said her own high school athletic interests were confined to ballet and a work study term with the athletic training office. That sparked an interest, and left her with a set of skills she hoped to use to avoid a more drudging part-time gig while working toward her psychology degree at Pacific Lutheran University. Instead, she quickly began to question her major.
“I just loved it,” she said. “I loved being a part of all the different teams and traveling with them and just the relationships you get to develop with the athletes and helping people at the same time.
“My senior year before I graduated I was like, ‘Shoot. This is what I want to do.’ So I took a year off and I researched entry-level masters programs for athletic training.”
She ended up at California Baptist University in Riverside, California. Encouraged by her mentor there, she discovered a love of teaching — yet another career choice her past self would have highly doubted — before ultimately returning to the Pacific Northwest as the first full-time athletic trainer at BHS in 2013. It was the only Kitsap County high school without one.
“I said I would never work in a high school, but I love it,” she said.
“There was a girl who was here for one year before me and she was just the athletic trainer. But the old principal, Jake Haley, and Andy Grimm as well, really wanted to have an actual athletic medicine program.”
It quickly became like Sageser had always been there, said BHS Athletic Director Kaycee Taylor, leaving school officials to wonder how they ever made do before.
“It is hard to believe that there ever was a time when we did not have Amanda as a trainer at BHS,” Taylor said. “Her presence at every home event, plus all of the traveling she does with some of the teams — football, basketball, soccer -—ensures that our players have the best care. Amanda is a complete professional. She knows the science behind injury prevention and care, how to deal with athletes and their parents when an injury does occur and Amanda makes sure that the athlete is fully prepared before he or she returns to participation.
“Amanda has such a positive attitude and rapport with all of the people she works with it only makes the entire athletic program stronger,” he added, saying she further bettered the school with her implementation and administration of a comprehensive concussion management protocol, establishment of a school-wide Emergency Action Plan, and her ground-up development of the sports medicine classes.
To get the students in those classes some actual experience, Sageser requires that they shadow a medical professional. Some of them have gone to work with nurses and doctors, another recently shadowed a paramedic, and one once studied under a veterinarian. Most, though, can be found on the sidelines with Sageser herself, a revolving cast of assistants all interested in medical science in some form or another — and nearly all of them girls.
“That’s the case with the career of athletic trainers, it’s mostly women now,” Sageser said. “It used to be mostly men, but now it’s kind of being taken over by women.
“I don’t know if it’s the motherly instinct — we just want to protect them and keep them safe and help — but it has definitely taken a shift.”
Protect being the operative word, as Sageser often finds herself playing the role of the heavy in deciding whether or not a student is fit enough to play, which can sometimes put her at odds with athletes, coaches and even a few parents.
“There is a very heavy sense of responsibility,” she said. “You just have to think about their future, which the kids, and sometimes the parents, aren’t thinking about right at that moment.
“I feel like I treat them like they were my children. I’m straight with them like they were my children. I always think, ‘If this was my kid, what would I do with them?’”
It’s an approach that obviously works, Taylor said. It shows through in her every interaction with the students.
“She is known as ‘Ms. Amanda’ to most of the kids,” he said. “Which I think is a tribute to the relationship she sets with all of the student-athletes she interacts with. It is a show of respect, but also one that shows how she is working with them in a partnership that is different than a coach. The kids respect her, like her, and are eager to learn what she has to offer in the class and on the field.”
During rare moments of free time, and during the summer break, Sageser said she’s much less active and fills her time with things less intense, maybe even boring.
“Honestly, I’m such a homebody,” she said. “If I have a day when I don’t have any sports and I get to go home, I go home and clean my house and I love puzzles, like a thousand pieces. That’s my zen right there.”
What does get her away from her puzzles is nothing short of the happiest place on Earth — like any good pro leaving the field victoriously.
“My boyfriend and I love to go to Disneyland,” she said. “So if we have any extended time off, that’s where we’re going.”