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CSUF Athletic Training awards endowed scholarships

Article reposted from The Orange County Register
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Cal State Fullerton’s Athletic Training Program hosted its eighth annual Golf Tournament Scholarship Fundraiser at Coyote Hills Golf Course in Fullerton on July 15.

Dr. Robert Kersey, professor of Kinesiology and Director of the Athletic Training Program, said that over the last four to five years, the event has netted between $10,000 to $15,000. He hopes that same figure stands for this past event, which helps endow scholarships for promising Fullerton athletic-training students.

CSUF awarded its third Julie Max endowed scholarship to student Andee Monterone. This is the third Julie Max ’79 endowed scholarship to be awarded to a student, as it honors the school’s legendary head-athletic trainer.

Fullerton also awarded its first-ever Andy Paulin ’78 endowed scholarship to student Jacqueline Miller. Paulin was the second CSUF alum to be inducted into the National Athletic Trainers’ Association Hall of Fame.

“He was very instrumental in moving the profession of athletic training forward,” Kersey said.

Kersey said that Fullerton has had an athletic-training program since the mid to late 1970s. The school obtained its first accreditation in 2001, but before that accreditation wasn’t required, Kersey said.

Roughly 100 to 120 people were involved throughout the golf fundraiser with about 65 golfers participating in the 18-hole match. There was also a dinner afterwards, plus a silent auction and raffle.

“It was a fun afternoon and evening and I think most people had a good time,” Kersey said.

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Julie Max Retiring after 37 Years at Fullerton

Article reposted from Cal State Fullerton Athletics
Author: Cal State Fullerton Athletics

Thirty-Seven years. For many, that may seem like an eternity, but when you love what you do, every day feels like you’ve won the national championship. While Cal State Fullerton has seen legendary coaches and athletes come and go, no one has made a bigger impact in the athletic training world than Julie Max.

“It’s amazing in all my years here my relationship with student-athletes hasn’t changed much,” says Max. “It’s really special. In fact, I was on the field when Demian Brown (current head coach for the Titans’ women’s soccer program) injured himself as a player. I helped him with his rehab and his recovery and now I’m saying the exact same things to his players that I said to him. The impact has really been a blessing. My entire job is a blessing. I truly don’t take this place or what I do for granted.”

 

For many, nearly four decades doing anything might seem like a hard thing to imagine, but for Max, doing anything else was unimaginable. From being a three-sport athlete at Fullerton College to then eventually transferring to Cal State Fullerton and graduating with her undergraduate degree in Kinesiology in 1979, she was destined to be a Titan for life.

“When I was a student, I really only had two loves professionally: sports and medicine,” Max says. “I quickly realized in school there was a great opportunity to blend those two. That’s when I knew this profession was truly a calling for me.”

Shortly after graduation in 1979, Max caught the break of a lifetime.

“I think it was literally less than a month after I graduated,” recalls Max. “I got a call from Cal State Fullerton asking if I wanted to work there full-time. I really don’t think I chose athletic training, the profession really chose me.”

From women’s basketball to women’s tennis, Max worked with them all, as she was named Head Athletic Trainer for Women’s Sports straight out of college.

“I had an annual salary of $8,000, but I was truly having the time of my life,” Max beams. “I got to travel with all of our teams and there was certainly never a dull moment.”

Through the years, Max has gone from a bright-eyed college graduate to a mentor and eventually earning one of the top honors the profession has to offer, as she was named the first female president of the National Athletics Trainers’ Association in 2000 and later permanently inducted into the National Athletic Trainers’ Hall of Fame.

 

“Julie means everything to me,” says current Cal State Fullerton Assistant Athletic Trainer Kyle Burnett. She is a mentor, a mother-figure and most of all a friend. Her passion, leadership and genuine love for the profession and people is contagious. Because of her I’m truly a better clinician and a better person.”

While she’s won numerous awards, gained tremendous experience through the years, her secret to success boils down to three simple things.

“I think it’s important to establish a philosophy,” Max says. “The most important things to me in my life are my integrity, my faith and that people know me as a woman of character. Those three things set the tone for how I lead, but those three things have never failed me. I take those three things in to everyday life with me.”

From coaches, players and her current staff, Max has left a legacy that will last a lifetime.

“She’s been a part of my life for a long time,” says head women’s soccer coach Damien Brown. “Whether it was me or our current student-athletes, Julie has always been there for the student-athletes. She has certainly left her legacy at Cal State Fullerton.”

When it comes to Julie Max, the theme is constant. She’s had an impact, not only on the profession, but the people in it. Whether it’s been rehabbing a bad knee or just simply lending an ear to a young professional looking for advice, Max has touched just about everyone at Cal State Fullerton.

It’s often said that it takes others to really solidify one’s legacy, so maybe that’s why current CSF Assistant Athletic Trainer Jamie Potter really sums it up best.

“Julie has been a mentor, a mother, a leader, a teacher, a legend, but most of all, an inspiration.”

Make sure to come out and celebrate Julie’s legendary career at her retirement party, Saturday from 3-6 pm at the George G. Golleher Alumni House on campus. To register please CLICK HERE and make a $37 donation to the Julie Max Scholarship Fund.

From all of us at Cal State Fullerton, Thank you Julie Max.

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Is There A Glass Ceiling For Female Athletic Trainers?

Some of the hardest-working people in sports are often unseen, behind the scenes: in the locker rooms and on the sidelines of the world’s biggest sporting events.

They’re in charge of keeping teams’ most valuable assets — their players — healthy. Yet despite being pivotal to the sport, athletic trainers go virtually unnoticed; at least, that was the case until a 20-year-old lawsuit against Peyton Manning resurfaced last week, in which Tennessee’s former head athletic trainer alleged that Manning sexually assaulted her as she attended to his injury.

The number of women in coaching roles and in athletic director positions has increased in recent years, but men still overwhelmingly dominate the field in the top athletic training jobs. In the years since Manning’s alleged incident, the number of women holding head athletic trainer positions at Division I schools grew only 2.6 percent. At present, women hold roughly 17.5 percent of Division I head athletic trainer positions, according to a 2014 study conducted by the group Women in Collegiate Sport (WCS).

So what is keeping women out of these roles? Is it systemic gender discrimination, or something else? More importantly, do women in athletic training roles have a glass ceiling?

To understand, it makes sense to first evaluate where women are represented in the athletic training industry as a whole. National Athletic Trainers’ Association president Scott Sailor told Sporting News that he estimates about 54 percent of the 43,000 members of the NATA organization are female.

“We, like the rest of sport, are probably working to catch up,” said Sailor, mentioning the 1972 Title IX push for women’s sports plays into those numbers, which are on the upswing. “We’re an evolving profession. We’re fairly young. 1950 is really where we count the beginning of our professional association. So we’re continuing to improve and we see more and more women moving into roles that were, traditionally in the early days, male roles.”

Julie Max, former NATA president and head athletic trainer and undergraduate professor at Cal State Fullerton, says the number of female undergraduate enrollees has “doubled” in the last 20 years.

Sailor’s numbers support Max’s experience.

“We look at the graduates from colleges and universities today with accredited programs in athletic training and nearly two-thirds of those people are females coming out with degrees in athletic training,” he said.

But according to the WCS report, more than two thirds of the head athletic training jobs at universities are occupied by men.

Lori Sweeney, who was the head athletic trainer at Saint Joseph’s (Pa.) University for more than 20 years, said she didn’t feel women were underrepresented in the industry overall, “but definitely in head positions or director positions, absolutely.”

“I remember when I was only one of 13 percent of women in the country who had (a head athletic training job).”

Does ladder go up?

How does one account for imbalance in the number of women who hold entry-to-mid-level athletic training jobs compared to head roles?

Part of it has to do with the weight traditional gender roles still carry, say women who have held the top roles in their sports.

Ariko Iso, the head athletic trainer for Oregon State’s football team, told SN that sports culture in general can be a barrier. Iso became the first female head athletic trainer in the NFL in 2002, when the Steelers hired her following the completion of an internship with the team.

“Maybe there’s a football coaching staff who maybe isn’t receptive to having a female working with his players — the old-school mentality, 20, 30 years ago,” Iso said. “I would say that’s old-school thinking — and some coaches are still in that old-school mentality — but I would say more and more people are thinking of team medical staff as medical staff and not the female/male dynamic.”

Iso had an overwhelmingly positive experience with the Steelers, noting that while Pittsburgh’s front office was progressive in its hiring practices, other clubs and owners presented a certain degree of pushback.

“The Steelers — you’d think one of the oldest organizations would be the old-school boys club — but they were really, from the coach down, neutral. They were OK with having a female,” she said. “After I’d been in the league a few years, I did realize that there were some people — they were all nice to me, don’t get me wrong — that were like ‘Oh, who is she? What is she doing here?’”

More than a decade later, the Steelers remain the only NFL team to employ a woman in a head athletic training role. Layla McCall Stafford, who interned in Pittsburgh with Iso, echoed how ownership’s move to hire a woman continues to be a ground-breaking action in the NFL.

“I think it has to do a lot with ownership as well as how receptive the players and the staff are to a female being there,” Stafford said. She also broke ground as the first woman promoted to the head athletic trainer role with Georgia football.

Not deterred

Most of the women interviewed for this story agreed that coaches who employ the “old-school” thinking of traditional gender roles remain, but their attitudes are not necessarily prevalent.

“I think it’s just a misogynistic attitude that a woman can’t do the same job a man can,” said Sweeney, whose work is primarily in the college sports sector. “I’ve had fellow athletic trainers say that the coach doesn’t want women there because they think that the women are going to distract the guys.”

“A distraction. … Why wouldn’t a guy be a distraction any more than a woman?”

MORE: Female NBA pioneers

Not every player or coach considers women a distraction.

Sue Falsone can attest to that. Falsone became the first — and currently, only — woman to hold a head athletic trainer title in Major League Baseball, when the Dodgers hired her in 2012. She has since left the organization to open her own practice.

“I think our society really is getting open to more different lifestyles,” she said.

As society’s views on women in the workplace evolve, so too does the perception of women in sports — albeit more slowly. The flood of women in athletic training roles at the high school and collegiate level is a tidal wave helping change attitudes from the amateur level up.

“We do see so many women at the high school level and the collegiate level that, at the professional level, it never becomes an issue with the athletes. They were so many in high school and college that it was never any different (at the professional level),” Falsone said.

Max, for example, has more women than men on her athletic training staff at Cal State Fullerton.

“The younger and up-and-coming professional athletes don’t really have an issue with (female ATs) because at this point, they’ve grown up with it. If it’s not that big of a deal to them, then it becomes less of a big deal for the organization.”

That jives with NATA president Sailor’s evaluation of how the athletic training landscape’s evolution reflects the rest of society’s: “Society seems to be more open and finally acknowledging that it’s important that we have good people in important roles and that person may be a male or may be a female, but the most important thing is the person and not their gender.”

Tipping the work-life balance scales

Even though the attitude toward women in athletic training appears to be shifting positively — all the women SN spoke to noted that they had overwhelmingly positive experiences as groundbreakers in their field — there are still some latent challenges in the job description that make it difficult for women to advance, or feel comfortable.

Extensive travel, in addition to long and unusual hours, is not conducive to maintaining a work-life balance, which often negatively burdens women. Especially women who intend to have children.

“As a female (the athletic training field) is very competitive and then you get married, you have a family, you get time off… sometimes it’s hard to accommodate those changes while you’re in charge of football,” Iso said. “Unless you’re going to take a year off from your job, it could be difficult to juggle with games and that work-life balance.

“I think for those people who want to have a family, I think there may be a glass ceiling.”

Even those women who achieve the coveted work-life balance in a top role are sometimes met with resistance.

“I think that if you try to have life balance, there’s push-back from higher-ups and I think it’s easier for men not to have a life balance,” Sweeney said.

Women who intend to ascend to the top echelon of athletic training positions often have to sacrifice marriage and the decision to have children to do so.

“I think sometimes women just get underrepresented at the professional level for a variety of reasons but some of it is definitely family choice,” Falsone said, citing MLB and its long schedule as one of the most difficult jobs to balance.

“I’m not married. I don’t have children. I’ve definitely made certain choices in my career, that if I did have a husband and children, I probably wouldn’t have made.”

Need for change

But even the smallest of logistics have a greater impact on women trying to navigate this male-dominated field — the layout of stadiums, for example, often forces trainers to walk through locker rooms to reach training rooms.

“The locker room is typically where the athletes change clothes, so it can be a problem to have a female walking through the locker room at any point in time — and you find that setup in typically all NFL locker rooms,” Stafford said, referring to the perceived invasion of privacy.

Separately, Sweeney echoed that same complaint: “It’s just not set up to be conducive to privacy. Why isn’t there a separate space for (training rooms)?”

Often, because there are so few women in the top athletic training positions, there’s not a separate space for them to change or shower after finishing up their duties. It makes women consider the day-to-day logistics of simple tasks that men in similar roles don’t necessarily have to.

“When I went to the original Wrigley Field, there was not even a bathroom in the manager’s office, so I’d have to stand with the fans in the concourse to use the bathroom. Or, there’d be no place for me to change so I’d change in the janitor’s closet and there’d be a broom and a mop and that whole thing,” Falsone said, noting that she ran into that same scenario several times throughout the season.

MORE: NFL open for more women in executive positions

Compensation, too, is an issue in both society and athletic training. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the wage gap between men and women in the U.S. remains virtually unchanged since 2001. In 2014, women earned 79 cents for every dollar that a male colleague made.

Sweeney even said she knew of women who were head athletic trainers, whose assistants made more money because they were men.

“There’s just no reason that they shouldn’t be making the same amount of money,” Sweeney said. “If you bring someone in and they have certain salary requirements that you’re willing to meet, then you need to make sure that the person who is in charge of them is making more than those people are.

“I think it’s just gender prejudice.”

Pointing out issues pertaining to the advancement of women in athletic training jobs is not meant to be an indictment on any one person or organization. But shining a light on some of the roadblocks that some successful women have in head athletic training roles faced creates an opportunity to do better moving forward.

“In recent years, we’ve been able to look at the women in our profession as some of those that are the real groundbreakers,” Sailor said. “We’ve seen them take positions in areas where only 20 years ago, society would have said ‘There will NEVER be a woman working with an NFL team.’”

Progress, however slow, is still progress.

CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL ARTICLE

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Titan athletes have a plethora of resources to recover from injuries

It’s not a secret that athletics at Cal State Fullerton are deeply rooted in Titan culture, but there’s a whole roster of off-the-field talent that devotes its days to keeping injured athletes on track to a healthy recovery.

CSUF is extremely proactive when it comes to assisting injured athletes with a team of faculty and staff to support their Titans, Director of Sports Medicine Julie Max said.
With eight athletic trainers beside her, Julie and her team coordinate an all-inclusive recovery program for student athletes.

“We are there to help prevent injuries, we’re there to diagnose injuries and we’re there to treat injuries, so this particular clinic is potentially open seven days a week … it is designed for exactly that purpose. It is to care for the health and safety of our student athletes,” Max said.
With 15 teams and nearly 400 athletes at CSUF, there are plenty of people to tend to through the seasons.

Max and her team of certified athletic trainers treat everything as small as blisters and abrasions to major concussions and appendicitis. They even cope with any psychological or sociological problems that athletes might have.

“Anything that does not allow the athlete to compete (at) 100% comes into this clinic,” Max said.
The team of athletic trainers at CSUF is constantly utilizing their health center resources to diagnose injuries and provide for athletes’ needs.

“We see (athletes) first, we assess them, we make a diagnosis and if we need to move on and get further health care assistance, then that’s what we do,” Max said. “Everything starts here and then we triage to figure out, ‘What do we need to be in the best interest of the student athlete?’”

Last fall, women’s soccer player Ali White geared up for Big West Conference play, but a season-ending injury forced her to hang up her cleats. She received firsthand experience with the team of athletic trainers.

After tearing her ACL and meniscus, White’s trainer immediately scheduled her for doctor appointments, including one with CSUF’s orthopedic surgeon, Miguel Prietto, who started White on physical therapy right away.

“They were just very involved … it was cool,” White said.

But dealing with an injury brings on more than just physical strain for players.

“You definitely tell yourself … ’was this meant to happen? Am I not supposed to play soccer anymore?’ … You just beat yourself down,” said White.

In her kinesiology class, Max poses the question, “How do we deal with the psychological and sociological effect of student athletes that get hurt?”

“Physically I know what to do with them. I know how to take care of them, I know how to treat them, I know how to rehab them,” explained Max.

Providing a service to psychologically help students get through the injury phase is another element that they incorporate.

With this being her first major injury since she began playing soccer at 5 years old, White experienced mental strain firsthand following her accident last fall.

“I feel like I became kind of disconnected,” White said.

With the team practicing five days a week and White away at physical therapy, the mental aspect of recovery began to set in.

With the encouragement of her physical therapists and fellow players, White quickly realized that the soccer field is where she is meant to be, and she will be returning this season as a junior.

“I’m so excited. I’m really pumped,” White said. “I’m just going to go out there — I’m really proud of myself — I’m gonna be out there accomplishing something that wasn’t possible five months ago.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

Titan athletes have a plethora of resources to recover from injuries