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Caring for Student Athletes at Pacific University Oregon

Article reposted from Pacific University Oregon
Author: Anna Robaton-Winthrop, Video by Robbie Bourland

In August, members Pacific University’s Boxer football team arrived on campus fired up for the fall season and new academic year.

But before any of them stepped onto Ledbetter Field for practices, they first paid a visit to Pacific’s Dental Hygiene Clinic, where their peers in the dental hygiene program took impressions of their mouths.

Under the watchful eye of faculty members, the dental hygiene students used the molds to make custom-fitted mouth guards onsite.

A few days later, freshman football players filed into the basement of the Stoller Center athletic complex. There, they got free, pre-participation eye exams from students in the doctor of optometry program, who were supervised by Dr. Fraser Horn ’00, OD ’04, the College of Optometry’s associate dean of academic programs and an expert in sports vision.

At Pacific, caring for student-athletes is a community affair.

The university has 24 intercollegiate athletics programs, which compete as members of NCAA Division III. It also has the only college of optometry in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, and its College of Health Professions prepares students to work in a variety of fields, from dental hygiene to physical therapy and psychology.

“We have all these resources at Pacific, so why not use them to our advantage?” said Head Athletic Trainer Eric Pitkanen, who has worked to ramp up the level of care that student-athletes receive through internal and external partnerships.

Among college athletes, sports-related injuries are fairly common. Each year, thousands of college athletes sustain injuries, whether concussions or sprained ankles, that lead to missed practices, competitions and in some cases classes. During recovery, some struggle with anxiety and a loss of identity.

“We are trying to provide a level of care that is equivalent to Division I schools and better than what other Division III schools offer,” said Pitkanen, who was an athletic training intern at Vanderbilt University, a Division I school, before he joined Pacific in 2010. He also spent six months as a training intern with the Denver Broncos.

The mouth guard clinic for football players was the result of a new partnership between Athletics and the School of Dental Hygiene Studies. The idea for the clinic — which may be offered to other Boxer teams in the future — grew out of a senior capstone project by dental hygiene student Zachery Young ’17. The project focused on mouth guards and sports safety.

Custom-fitted mouth guards are a big step up from the inexpensive, plastic mouth guards used by many young athletes. That’s partly because they provide more cushion and fit snugly, making them more likely to stay in place. They’re also more comfortable, so players tend to wear them longer.

“In terms of straight-up protection, it’s the best you can get,” said Associate Professor of Dental Hygiene Kathryn Bell, one of several faculty members who supervised the mouth guard clinic.

The pre-participation eye exams for football players were also intended to reduce the risk of sports injuries by identifying players who need vision care before the start of the 2017 season. Players who needed additional evaluation and/or treatment were referred to Pacific’s EyeClinics for comprehensive exams.

Some players who wear glasses — and tend to take them off during games — might get prescriptions for contact lenses. Others might be candidates for vision therapy or sports vision training.

Vision therapy is an effective treatment for many common eye disorders, such as lazy eye and blurry vision. Meanwhile, sports vision training can improve depth perception, peripheral awareness and other visual abilities.

“One of the things we pride ourselves on at the College of Optometry is maximizing visual performance,” said Fraser Horn, who co-founded Pacific’s Sports Vision Club for optometry students when he was a student himself. The club provides screenings to Boxer athletic teams throughout the academic year.

“The better players can see, the better they can perform. And, we may also reduce their risk of injury,” Horn said. As head athletic trainer, Pitkanen has also leveraged his relationships within Pacific and the surrounding community to assemble a larger and more well-rounded sports medicine team than the one he inherited.

Horn is the newest member of the 12-person team, which also has three physicians (including an orthopedic surgeon and two sports medicine experts), two chiropractors and a physical therapist. With the exception of Pitkanen and four other athletic trainers, team members are volunteers.

See related story on safety tips for young athletes from members of the sports medicine team.

“We ask ourselves: how do we take care of students, make their lives better and enrich their collegiate experience? That’s what we are trying to do here,” Pitkanen said, adding that he aims for a holistic approach to caring for student-athletes.

It’s not just student-athletes who benefit from the growing number of partnerships between Athletics and other programs. The 2017 mouth guard clinic for football players provided dental hygiene students with an opportunity for service learning. Optometry students also gained valuable, hands-on experience by participating in the preseason screening program for football players.

“Having the hands-on, experience of making mouth guards is great. It’s something I will use in my practice after I graduate,” said dental hygiene student Anh “Justin” Mai ’18.

“I will be taking this knowledge [about mouth guards and sports safety] and bringing it to my patients in the future.”

Zachery Willits ’14, OD ’20, who played football for Pacific as an undergraduate, was among the optometry students who took part in the vision screening program. He saw it as an opportunity to gain experience and impress upon football players the importance of vision care.

“When I was playing football, I didn’t realize the importance of having an eye exam,” Willits said. “But now that I’m an optometry student, I recognize how important my vision was to both success in the classroom and on the field.”

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Pacific’s Pitkanen Named Newsmaker of the Year for Life Saving Efforts

KATU News and the Royal Rosarians recognized Pacific University athletics trainer Eric Pitkanen as a Newsmaker of the Year on March 16 at the DoubleTree Lloyd Center Hotel in Portland. Pitkanen received the honor from KATU Chief Meteorologist and rosarian Dave Salesky.

Pitkanen was on the strip with the Boxer men’s wrestling team in town for a tournament on the early evening of Dec. 20, 2015 when a car struck numerous pedestrians, sending nearly 40 to local hospitals, including three students.

Pitkanen was among the first responders who provided medical aid to injured pedestrians in addition to fellow Pacific community members.

The Royal Rosarians annually honor heroes and heroines in the greater Portland community who have performed exceptional acts of heroism or benevolent service without regard for personal safety, public recognition, or personal gain. The newsrooms of prominent Portland area media select the Newsmaker honorees.

CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL ARTICLE

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Oregon Athletic Trainer Helps Injured Pedestrians

 

Eric Pitkanen had been in Las Vegas for less than nine hours, and he already missed his 15-month-old son back home in Oregon.

As the athletic trainer and his team of college wrestlers walked past the famous hotels lining the Strip, he called his wife and explained that as much as he wanted to see his son on video, the teeming sidewalk wasn’t the best place to do it.

“It’s not safe to FaceTime while we walk the Strip,” he said.

The words had barely left his mouth when a 1996 Oldsmobile jumped the curb 30 feet in front of him and plunged into the crowd.

Time seemed to slow down, Pitkanen recalled. He heard a muffled thump-thump-thump as the sedan hit three or four people.

It was the beginning of a trail of havoc that would end with one person dead, at least 35 others injured and authorities struggling to explain the driver’s motive for what they say was an intentional act.

Pitkanen, 32, watched one man flip over the vehicle as it sped past Planet Hollywood.

As far as he could tell, the Oldsmobile’s brake lights never came on, he said: “It was gas the whole way, unfortunately, for the people who got hit.”

Pitkanen, who had come to Las Vegas for a wrestling tournament, had long wondered what he would do in a real-life crisis situation, whether he would “run the right way and help some people.”

His medical training kicked in. He rushed over to a man in his early 50s and stabilized his dislocated knee. He also helped calm the man’s 29-year-old son, who seemed to have a concussion.

When the first paramedic arrived, Pitkanen told him to help the more seriously injured. A woman with a bloodied head needed aid. Soon officials shut down the Strip.

Pitkanen still didn’t know that the crime was far larger than he could see, and that four of his Pacific University wrestlers were among the injured, along with victims from all over North America.

He never saw the driver, only the car, and only for a few seconds.

On Tuesday, Lakeisha N. Holloway, 24, of Portland, Ore., was charged with one count of murder, one count of leaving the scene of an accident and one count of child neglect for having her 3-year-old daughter in the car during what authorities say amounted to an attack.

“This is a horrendous and inexcusable act that has needlessly and tragically impacted countless lives,” Clark County Dist. Atty. Steven B. Wolfson said in a statement, adding that he was confident “we will be filing many more charges against Ms. Holloway.”

Holloway, who was arrested after parking her car at a casino and telling an employee to call 911, was set to make her first court appearance Wednesday. Police said that she admitted driving the vehicle and that video showed her act was intentional.

But investigators have not offered a motive, and she denied being under the influence of alcohol or drugs, according to police records.

“We can all agree this is a shocking and tragic event,” Holloway’s public defender, Joe Abood, said in a statement, expressing “great sympathy” for the victims. “At the same time, we simply don’t have enough information to piece together how or why this event took place.”

On Monday, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said investigators thought Holloway had been in Las Vegas for a week, homeless and sleeping in her car, and possibly headed to Dallas to see her daughter’s estranged father.

Holloway told investigators that Sunday had been a stressful day in which she had tried to sleep in her car at various places in Las Vegas but kept getting chased away by security guards, according to a police report.

But on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Holloway’s family offered a new possible version of events. LaShay Hardaway, a cousin, said Holloway, a women’s clothing designer, had stopped in Las Vegas twice as part of a long road trip: once last week and once on Sunday.

Hardaway declined to say where else Holloway had been on her trip.

Hardaway said she was still collecting information from family members about what Holloway was doing before Sunday night.

“I do want the public to know that she has a loving family [and] she is a loving person,” Hardaway said, asking for “prayers for the victims, prayers for Keisha.”

The family of the person who was killed, Jessica Valenzuela of Buckeye, Ariz., a 32-year-old mother of three young girls, has raised more than $33,000 on the GoFundMe website for transportation and funeral costs.

On her Facebook profile page, Valenzuela recently wrote that she and her husband had just celebrated their 10-year anniversary.

Her brother, Bryan Roessler, told an Arizona TV station that “her husband surprised her with a Vegas trip.”

“She was just wonderful, you know,” Roessler said.

He called her “a good mother, a good sister, a good wife — just an all-around good person.”

Roessler said that “the outpouring from people she knew and didn’t know has been amazing to me” and that Holloway “deserves to be put away for a very long time.”

The last of the four Pacific University wrestlers injured in the incident was released from a hospital Monday.

The team returned home Monday, skipping the Desert Duals wrestling tournament.

“All in all, everyone made it out OK,” said Pitkanen, who returned to his family knowing that he was the kind of guy who had run the right way.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-1223-vegas-strip-victims-20151223-story.html