Article reposted from Index Journal
Author: Monte Dutton
When Barry Atkinson began his career as an athletic trainer, hardly anyone ever got a concussion. He got his bell rung.
A dazed left tackle would stagger off the field, and a doctor would ask how many fingers he was holding up, and if he could count that high and walk in a line, he trotted back out there.
Some said the odds favored “two.”
Those were dangerous times, but no one really knew how great the danger was.
“There is no getting your bell rung anymore,” Atkinson says.
The beginning of Laurens District High School football practice marked the start of Atkinson’s 36th year keeping the Raiders healthy. The head of the South Carolina Athletic Trainers Association, Craig Clark, calls him “the dean of athletic trainers in our state.”
Laurens head football coach Chris Liner stops by the training room and asks where Coach Atkinson by the way, an argument could be made that he really does coach student trainers ? is. A feminine voice from inside the office says, ‘He’ll be back in a minute. I think he went to get some gas.’
“He is extremely supportive of our program and does an excellent job ensuring the health of all LDHS athletes comes first,” Liner said. “Coach Atkinson loves Laurens, and that’s what makes him truly special.”
The coach excuses himself and goes back to overseeing players in the weight room.
A young man points at his ankle and tells a couple of young women sitting on padded tables nearby, ‘It’s not broken. It’s fractured.’
The feminine voice in the office yells, ‘They’re the same thing!’
‘Oh,’ he says.
When Atkinson joined its athletics department, Laurens was the only school in the upstate with a full-time trainer. He knows the stress involved between a trainer who wants an athlete healthy and a coach who wants him (or her) on the field (or the court, or the floor, or the diamond, etc.).
“It does vary person to person,” Atkinson says. “Chris (Liner), whom I work with now, is really, really good about that. Most of the coaches I’ve worked with have been pretty good.
“There are some ‘kill the messenger’ folks. They didn’t necessarily mean anything by it, but they’d erupt when you were the bearer of bad news. Particularly here, I’ve had good people to work with.”
Atkinson grew up in Mt. Croghan, “a large metropolitan area of about 60 people,” in Chesterfield County. He and two other Pageland High alums, Robbie Caldwell and Red Smith, matriculated at Furman University. Caldwell, now the highly regarded offensive line coach at Clemson, played center for the Paladins. His little buddy, Atkinson, initially was a student equipment manager. They remain close friends today.
“I had an interest in medical things,” he recalls. “No offense to what managers do, but it was less interesting to me. When you’re that age, it seems like a more glorious area than fixing helmets.
“I love sports. When I graduated from high school, I was 135 pounds soaking wet, so playing was not going to be in the future, and being a manager was not something I could do for a career, in most cases, so I thought being an athletic trainer might be something I could do for a career, where I could be around sports all my life, or, as I like to say, be a kid all my life. There are some very adult things you have to do with this, but it helps keep that kid feeling to you.”
En route to Laurens were stops at East Tennessee State University, Hanahan High School and Chester High School.
“Laurens has become home,” Atkinson says. “I’ve been here a long time. It’s where my children’s home was.
“We have a lot more things to work with than we did at one time. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve always felt what I did was important to the administrators and the coaches, and they’ve invested in things to look after the kids. We’re as well-equipped, training room-wise, as any school in the state. It’s important to have that support from above. We can do a certain amount, but you need to have the things to do it with.”
Atkinson is beloved and appreciated. Raider coaches and athletes value his sense of humor and practical approach, but an inordinate number cite his encyclopedic knowledge of sports trivia.
What was his greatest crisis?
“When (son) Dan was in the sixth-grade, he was standing on the sideline. He was paying attention and knew what to do, but he got hemmed in and run over by a 280-pound tackle, so I thought his mother would probably have me shot,” Atkinson recalls.
Dan Atkinson followed his father to Furman and is now an attorney.
“Barry has been consistent for over 30 years,” Laurens athletics director Mark Freeze says. “He is a ‘routine’ guy. He has his rules for his training room and has his method. I like it that way because we know what to expect.
“He has treated me for a hundred injuries through the years, in everything from pulling fish fins out of my fingers, removing stitches, treating joint injuries and other such stuff, and he’s always a good conversation on college and high school teams and players over the 40 years he’s been in the business.”
As good as Atkinson is at training, sometimes training is not enough.