Posted on

Ripley High School athletic director and athletic trainer works with students

Article reposted from The Parkersburg News and Sentinel
Author: JEFF BAUGHAN

 

Photo by Jeff Baughan
Ripley High School Athletic Director and Athletic Trainer Steve Lough MS, ATC/R, AR,  right, awaits players to come to his office/training room for pre-game taping.

Photo by Jeff Baughan Ripley High School Athletic Director and Athletic Trainer Steve Lough MS, ATC/R, AR, right, awaits players to come to his office/training room for pre-game taping.

RIPLEY — It’s a Friday morning for Steve Lough at Ripley High School. His watch says 7:15 a.m. By the time he leaves, it’s anywhere from 16 to 18 hours later.

It’s game night; Ripley hosts Riverside this night. As athletic director, Lough sees to it the athletic facilities are ready for the Warriors. He wears the AD cap from 3 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. That’s when the Ripley football team makes its way into his office to begin taping for the game. AD cap off, trainer cap on.

The letters following Lough’s last name are more letters than his last name. Officially, he is Steve Lough, MS, ATC/R, AR. That indicates a master’s degree in athletic training, athletic trainer certified and registered and athletic director.

Lough arrived in Ripley in 1997. He has served as the athletic trainer since and has been in the profession since 1994.

Around the room are plaques designating him as West Virginia Athletic Trainer of the Year for 2012 and 2015. The Mountain State Athletic Conference Athletic Director of the Year for 2015 and Jackson County Teacher of the Year for 2016. There is an article from Training and Conditioning Magazine featuring a story where Lough and staff had car washes and used the money to purchase athletic training equipment for Herbert Hoover, Richwood and Clay County high schools.

Photo by Jeff Baughan
Ripley High School Athletic Trainer Steve Lough, right, retapes the ankle of J.T. Kemp during the fourth period of the game against Riverside after he had sprained the ankle in the first half.

Photo by Jeff Baughan Ripley High School Athletic Trainer Steve Lough, right, retapes the ankle of J.T. Kemp during the fourth period of the game against Riverside after he had sprained the ankle in the first half.

Three schools which lost literally everything in the 2016 flooding.

Ripley has also received the National Athletic Trainers Association Safer Sports School Award, which is valid from 2017-2020. The school also had the award for 2014-2017. That banner hangs on a set of cabinets.

Lough’s athletic director’s office is unlike most. His office is also the training room. Students in his athletic training classes took the assignment of turning his office into a training room. The football locker room had been previously used for the players. There are two taping tables and three training tables in the room, along with supplies.

“They did quite a nice job with it actually,” he said. “It’s very functional.”

The students had incentive as well.

Photo by Jeff Baughan
Ripley quarterback Braden Campbell, left, speaks with Ripley High School Athletic Trainer Steve Lough, center, and Lexi Price after coming to the sidelines after a play against Riverside.

Photo by Jeff Baughan Ripley quarterback Braden Campbell, left, speaks with Ripley High School Athletic Trainer Steve Lough, center, and Lexi Price after coming to the sidelines after a play against Riverside.

“The locker room smelled, well, like a locker room. It didn’t have air conditioning either. My office,” he started to laugh, “it’s clean, doesn’t smell like a locker room and has air conditioning.”

There are 28 students in the athletic training I class he teaches. Juniors get classes I and II while III is for seniors only. In his white, bright and clean training room sits Lexi Price, a junior at the University of Charleston who is spending a semester working with the Ripley athletes.

She is from Ravenswood. She assists Lough in the pregame wrap jobs.

There are five high school assistants on hand, four females and one male who are assigned by Price to different duties throughout the game. They’re not hard to spot. They wear shirts which say “I like to run with scissors. It make me feel dangerous.” They really don’t run with scissors. They don’t carry scissors. Only Lough and Price carry scissors.

The students are: Kristen Yost, Anna Kimble, Kiersten Templin, Jami Crawford and Griffin Durst.

Photo by Jeff Baughan
While cheerleaders and band members celebrate a first period Ripley touchdown, athletic training student assistant Anna Kimble fills water bottles for players.

Photo by Jeff Baughan While cheerleaders and band members celebrate a first period Ripley touchdown, athletic training student assistant Anna Kimble fills water bottles for players.

The assistants receive polos, sweat shirts and t-shirts to wear on the sidelines. Not so much for them to be well dressed “but it makes them stand out to the coaches and easily identifiable,” Lough said. “Before the game, we all meet with the other team’s medical staff so they can recognize what we’re wearing that night.

“From 5:15 p.m. until after the game, I’m the trainer,” Lough said. “After I check on the injuries and getting things cleaned up, then I become the athletic director again. I have to make sure the soccer goals are in place and ready for Saturday when the football field becomes the soccer field.”

Riverside arrives shortly before 5 p.m. and the Warriors begin taping. A Riverside assistant coach walks to the office to inform Lough of a problem in the locker room. Trainer hat off; AD hat on. Lough takes care of the problem. Riverside coaches are happy and Lough comes back to his office. AD hat off and trainer hat on.

He waits for the Ripley players. A time schedule for Ripley players and pregame activities is written on the board so all know. His assistants check supplies. The players begin to trickle in. Most are needing ankles wrapped. Some are talking, some bouncing their heads to the tunes playing in their ears.

“We’ll tape about 700 ankles over the course of the school year in all sports,”Lough says. “We’ll go through 20-25 cases of tape a year, 32 rolls per case.”

Photo by Jeff Baughan
Ripley High School athletic training student assistants, from left, Kristen Yost, Anna Kimble, Kiersten Templin, Jami Crawford and Griffin Durst watch players during warmups.

Photo by Jeff Baughan Ripley High School athletic training student assistants, from left, Kristen Yost, Anna Kimble, Kiersten Templin, Jami Crawford and Griffin Durst watch players during warmups.

That’s somewhere between 5.45 to 6.81 miles of athletic tape. That’s a lot of taping and tearing. Lough said Ripley supports 19 teams in 12 sports. The tape is blue and white in Ripley colors.

Two Ripley players enter the room with casts. Cast wrap is not on the supply list for Lough. Stadium seats are plentiful. Lough pulls a pair of scissors from the back of his pants. In a matter of seconds, he pulls the seat’s foam interior out of the casing. Now he has cast wrap.

“Part of the job is adapting to what is available to you,” he said as he wraps the player’s cast in the foam. Some white tape holds the wrap in place and blue tape goes over that. The player is good to go.

The night’s officials are informed of the players with the casts; so is Riverside. They will meet with local EMS workers and Riverside’s medical team. The players’ cast wraps are approved.

The staff gathers water bottles and other supplies and begin their walk to Memorial Stadium, otherwise known as “Death Valley.” Their main function during pre-game is to hydrate players. It’s a warm night in Death Valley. Muscle cramps are preventable with lots of water. The shout of “water”during a timeout will have staff scrambling to provide water bottles for the players. Right now, they are scanning warmups for players gesturing for a drink.

Photo by Jeff Baughan
Ripley High School football player Rocky Ford, left, awaits taping of his hand to begin by Lexi Price while Ripley High School Athletic Trainer Steve Lough puts a pre-wrap spray on the ankle of Ty Eshenaur before taping it.

Photo by Jeff Baughan Ripley High School football player Rocky Ford, left, awaits taping of his hand to begin by Lexi Price while Ripley High School Athletic Trainer Steve Lough puts a pre-wrap spray on the ankle of Ty Eshenaur before taping it.

Lough walks towards the field as well. He walks past the band boosters concession stand, where the smell of the hamburgers would make a lot of people stop, across the running track and takes a look at the Riverside bleachers. The Warriors have a 1-1 record coming to Ripley. The Riverside bleachers are nearly full. Lough, the AD, smiles a bit as he sees it will be almost a full house by kickoff. The smile fades as he resumes the role of athletic trainer.

“I love working with kids,” he says. “The health of the kids are important. It’s vital they receive proper care with concussions and injuries coming under the microscope. The student assistants are trained with backboards and they are part of the emergency action plan.

“They work hard. They’ll put in 240-250 hours from August to the end of football season,” he added.

The training program is in its eighth year. Lough states four graduates have gone on to athletic training careers.

It’s 7:30 p.m.; game time. It’s time to listen to the pads pop and helmets collide. Time to make sure everyone stands up after every play.

The night has its usual bumps and bruises although one first half Ripley injury sends Lough and Price to the middle of the field. The player is taken from the field on a stretcher and leaves in an ambulance with a leg injury. Lough is not happy with the expected outcome and declines to talk about the injury.

Riverside would hang Ripley’s first loss on the Vikings. It was a 33-28 decision in which Ripley closed late on a halfback option 52-yard scoring pass from J.T. Kemp to Brayden Campbell with 3:36 to play.

Ripley rode to St. Albans Friday, Lough and crew made the journey.

“I go everywhere the football team does,” Lough says. “I’m the trainer. That overrides the AD job if something is left to do here for Saturday. There are times you delegate.”

“It takes a lot people to make this program work right,” Lough said. “A lot of people giving a lot of hours. We’re making it work and it keeps the kids safe. That’s what this is all about.”

Posted on

Hands-on experience among benefits of W. Virginia HS Athletic Training program

Article reposted from Jackson Newspapers
Author: BRIAN HARPER

The Ripley High School Athletic Training program provides its students with invaluable experience, both in the classroom and on the playing field. But it also provides its students with a path to a career, both in high school and beyond.

Former Ripley AT student and current University of Charleston Athletic Training major Erica Gibson is one such example of that career path.
Gibson, a 2014 Ripley High graduate, is spending the 2016 football season assisting Ripley Athletic Trainer Steve Lough and his staff of student-trainers as a part of her continuing education. For Gibson, the Ripley AT program not only started her on the athletic training path, but continues to enrich her with hands-on experience in the field.

“I’m an athletic training major,” Gibson said earlier this season, “We do a lot with the sports teams, so we have a certain amount of clinical hours we have to get. I’ve participated in sports my whole life, but when I was [at Ripley] I thought it was definitely something that I could do and made it seem more fun.”

Gibson is among the latest Ripley AT program alumni that has moved on to the “next level” of athletic training. Like any endeavor, one of the marks of success of a program is the number of those that take the lessons learned and apply them going forward. When Lough began utilizing student-trainers six years ago, which allowed the program to flourish and reach the level it has today.

Gibson, along with this year’s crop of student-trainers–seniors Allie Hamilton, Brooklyn Hively, Olivia Ludtman, Laurel Miller and Allison Phillips–have spent countless hours on the various athletic fields tending to the needs of the numerous Ripley High athletes.

It’s a demanding task, to be sure, but one that goes a long way in providing its students with the necessary tools and real-world experience that can put them on a track toward the athletic training profession.

“The biggest thing is when we have students that come through our program here and their excitement with athletic training and they want to go on into the profession, it makes us feel a lot better,” Lough said, “It is a very long and tiring profession. You have to be accepted into programs. They only accept 12 to 15 into the program at UC and myself being a preceptor for them as a clinician, it is a real benefit for [the students].”

While the Ripley AT program provided students like Gibson with the opportunity to further their interest in athletic training, it’s the actual hands-on experience it provides that really drives home the reality of being an athletic trainer.
“I definitely got to be a pro at making Gatordade,” Gibson said with a laugh, “Soccer games were really fun. I couldn’t work football games in high school because I was a band member, so I worked soccer games with Mr. Lough. The whole, overall aspect of it was nice. They were my classmates, but then I also got to help them and see how they did with their sport.”

With a solid track in place, the hope now is that examples like Gibson will continue to provide an illustration of life after the Ripley AT program. As far as Lough is concerned, getting them to the next level is a welcome byproduct of the time spent in the program.

“Who wants to continue on is the biggest thing,” Lough said, “I get to see these kids progress and enjoy the program as much as I do. I think with the Athletic Training 1 class, which is a junior level class, it gives them the basic information about the medical field. As they go on, it gets more in-depth as to what it’s like to be a trainer. Then by the time they’re seniors, they go through what it’s like at the college level: they go through an interview process, an application process and so on. With some students, they want to become chiropractors or phsyical therapists. This is a great way to start it and they have the hours to do that.”

 

Posted on

West Virginia High School Student Aides Put Athletic Training Lessons to Use

Article reposted from WCHS8
Author: BROOKE THIBODAUX

Ripley takes on Huntington on its home turf Friday.

While most will be focusing on the game, a group of young women will be on the field, ready to help atheles right away.

Steven Lough joined the Ripley Vikings ten years ago and established the school’s athletic program in 2010.

He said students learn hard work and determination

“The ability to go place to place ability to change time frames to work extra hours. Some coaches will say we start at 3 o’clock and will be done by 9 o’clock,” Loug said.

Lough said many students are athletes and have to complete hours outside of their own practice, like Laurel Miller, who is also a cross country runner.

To him, the five seniors taking the course this year stand out,

but the class can be intimidating.

“I think the most intimidating is seeing an injury they haven’t seen before such as a fracture or seeing someone just laying there, not knowing what to do at that point,” Lough said.

Miller ran into that a few weeks ago during a cross country meet.

“This time last year I would have had no idea what to do,” Miller said.

Miller was running when she came across a girl who had fainted on the trail and no one had stopped to help her.

she tried asking the girl if she was okay.

“I asked her to move a finger if she could here me and she didn’t move. So at this point I knew something was wrong, so I ran back, got my coach got help and waited with her until the ems got there,” Miller said.

Miller said class prepared her and helped her act quickly.

“What if I hadn’t of stopped. Would anyone else would have? And it’s just one of those things that’s scarry to thing about. But I’m definitely glad that I stopped,” Miller said.

Lough was named atheletic trainer of the year for the state in 2012 and 2014.

Miller said she’s interested in studying sports medicine or physical therapy when she graduates.

Posted on

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.”

Posted on

West Virginia High School Provides Unique Student Opportunity

They’re there before anyone else. And they’re there long after everyone else is gone. The Ripley Athletic Training staff is an integral part of Viking athletics, and utilizes a group of dedicated students under the direction and guidance of 2015 MSAC and West Virginia Athletic Trainer’s Association Athletic Trainer of the Year Steve Lough. Lough and his six student trainers–seniors Myranda Murphy, Caylee Painter, Makenzie Hartley, Brooke Carter, Kelsey Holmes and Angel Knight–are tasked with making sure all the student athletes who wear the blue and white are properly prepared for both games and practices, as well as appropriate care when an injury inevitably arises. As you might expect, this task is fairly time consuming.

“These girls and guys I’ve had before get practice set up, get water set up, all the equipment out to the field,” Lough said, “That takes a little bit of time, and they do a really good job at that.”

While the position is time consuming, the training staff is undoubtedly properly trained and vetted. Lough, who also serves as a teacher and athletic director at Ripley High, is now in his sixth year of utilizing student trainers. He begins to assemble his staff when they are juniors in his Athletic Training I course. From there, all those interested in furthering their service must go through an application process, including a resume evaluation and interview, and are then chosen by Lough and other members of the medical staff. Once selected, they get to work on preparing and executing the various tasks related to the training program.

Murphy, Painter, and Hartley were all interested in pursuing careers in the medical field once their time at Ripley High School is up, so becoming student trainers was an obvious choice.

One of the more interesting aspects of the program is the closeness it fosters. In talking to Murphy, Painter, and Hartley during a recent football practice, they each noted that being apart of the training program has been a fulfilling experience, as it has allowed them to get to know each other more, as well as get to know many of the athletes (who are also friends) better.

“We have a lot of fun together,” Murphy said, “My favorite part is interacting and [the players] are our friends, but when they’re in their game mode, we have to let them be in their game mode. I’ve learned most of their personalites. I like watching [the players] and how they interact.”

For Painter, an up close and personal experience in seeing injuries and how to treat them is her favorite part of the position. However, as she would point out with a smile, that comes with some drawbacks.

“There’s so much different stuff in different bags and different hand signals,” Painter said, “To know where everything is kind of hard sometimes. Also, dealing with the boys on the sidelines when they smell awful. But, it’s a lot of fun and I’m glad I did it.”

Hartley echoed those sentiments.

“Learning new things and interacting with new people,” Hartley said, referring to her favorite part of the position, “It’s a lot of time, so that’s the most challenging part. If there’s an injury, you don’t quite know what your boundaries are sometimes. But, it’s something that I think I want to pursue in the future, so I thought it would be good experience to have.”

Staying on task and keeping the schedule is difficult for any program, but Lough noted that his staff does an excellent job. Aside from their duties as student trainers, this particular crew has many other extracurricular activities that they must tend to. However, Lough and his staff do a great job of delegating tasks and making sure each trainer knows their specific task to perform.

Lough praised his staff endlessly for their devotion and help, and when it comes right down to it, that help is extremely important to the functioning of the entire athletic program at Ripley High.

“For one person, it’s tough dealing with 55 players,” Lough said, “They’re the eyes and ears of what goes on on the sideline. They can give me a shout. They’re capable of knowing and giving me assistance. Of course, they can’t perform any type of evaluation or anything of that nature, but they can grab tape or things like that to help out. They’ve gone through what I call ‘proficiency’, and they have a check off sheet as to what they can do and where they’re comfortable.”

“These girls have put in almost 250 extra hours,” Lough concluded, “They take away a sense of pride and accomplishment of doing a great job. They put in a lot of extra hours. They’re here before and after [games]. Their dedication to the program will carry on for them later in life.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
http://www.jacksonnewspapers.com/article/20151104/SPORTS/151109863/?Start=1