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West Virginia AT Program provides local flood-damaged high schools with donations

Article reposted from Jackson Newspapers
Author: Brian Harper

With last week’s announcement that Herbert Hoover High School would be permanently closed due to damage from the June 23 flood, the entire Hoover community was forced to endure yet another loss. The Huskies’ athletic training program, not unlike the school itself, lost everything in the flood.

But thanks to Ripley High Athletic Trainer Steve Lough and the Ripley athletic training program, the road back will be made slightly easier.

On behalf of the Ripley AT program, Lough presented Hoover athletic trainer Stephanie Clark with a donation of training materials last Friday which included a training table, several Gatorade coolers, gauze, gloves and a host of other related training materials.

Lough and his staff have also secured donations of equipment and funds to both Clay County and Richwood High Schools, two of the other area communities affected by the flood.

While Hoover certainly has a long way to go in terms of getting back onto the playing fields, Ripley’s donations are a wonderful first step.

“[The donated equipment] will tremendously help us,” Clark said on Friday after receiving the donation, “Everything was completely wiped out. We have absolutely no athletic training supplies. It takes a lot, at least for a football season to get through. Then, I also cover basketball home games, soccer and volleyball, too. So, all that stuff was gone and now we have stuff to replace it, so that’s awesome.”

Lough and his staff have been proactive since the flood hit in terms of gathering and distributing donations. They began with a car wash to raise funds–close to $500 in about half a day–for the three high schools, and then progressed onto raising monetary donations from the City of Ripley, as well as other local businesses, medical vendors and citizens to purchase other equipment for the high schools, in addition to providing them with funding to purchase larger equipment.

Lough was in contact with a few members of the Ripley community, as well as those in the medical field to acquire some donations of medical goods and different items that the three programs could use.

All three high schools lost all of their training and medical equipment, so the Ripley program was able to come up with the replacement items to facilitate getting them back to their sporting activities.

For Clark, the lone trainer of Hoover athletics while also working through Elk Valley Physical Therapy, the donations are especially meaningful coming from another athletic training program.

“It means a lot,” Clark said, of Ripley’s donations, “Having the help from other athletic training programs around the state has been awesome.”

For Lough and his staff, these donations were just the latest opportunity to help out the community.

“Our training program has done this going on almost seven years,” Lough said, “Each group of young ladies and men we’ve had in the program are committed to helping the community out. They spend a lot of time and put in a tremendous number of hours. I think it just shows a great deal of opportunity for them to help out the community.”