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A busy year for University of North Dakota athletic trainers

Article reposted from Dakota Student
Author: Madison Overby

The athletes of the University of North Dakota are in good hands with the athletic training staff who are working to provide them with care day-in and day-out.

From the outside looking in, people realize there is a high risk of injury in college sports. It’s easy to look on the sidelines during a football game and see the large number of players in casts or on crutches instead of being suited up. What some people don’t realize is that probably at least a quarter of the football team is receiving treatment of some kind from the university’s athletic trainers, this is what goes unnoticed.

During the typical day of a trainer, they see a variety athletes. The athletic trainers at the University of North Dakota have their home base in the Hyslop Sports Center, but there are trainers assigned to each sport. There is at least one certified athletic trainer per sport, but based on the size of the team, the number of student trainers that work with that sport varies. When they are assigned to a sport they attend those practices, weight lifting sessions, games and travel with the team on the road.

The training room in the Hyslop is run by Sara Bjerke. Bjerke is an instructor as well as an athletic trainer at UND. Under her, there are two graduate assistants and about 30 undergraduate students also working to help the injured athletes.

The UND Department of Sports Medicine was founded in 1990. Since then, UND has offered a Bachelor of Science in Athletic Training degree. UND was the first university in the nation to have an athletic training program placed directly in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences rather than the College of Arts and Sciences.

After completing the undergraduate degree, students are able to take the National Athletic Trainer’s Association Board of Certification exam to be qualified as a Certified Athletic Trainer (ATC).

Blair Roemmich, a junior at UND, is currently on track to obtain his undergraduate degree in athletic training and plans to pursue a graduate degree in physical therapy following graduation.

Before being accepted into the program, students must complete 100 hours of observation, fill out an application and have a minimum GPA of 2.75. The program is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education (CAATE). Although it is a rigorous program, it is rewarding.

“I decided to go into athletic training because it was an opportunity to work with and help individuals come back from injuries. I’ve always been intrigued by the health field and athletic training was great combination of health, medicine and sports.” ”

— Blair Roemmich, Junior at UND

Roemmich said. “I’ve always been intrigued by the health field and athletic training was a great combination of health, medicine and sports.”

The athletic trainers offer assistance with anything from recovery to strengthening to rehabilitation programs.

Right in line with the post-graduate plans of Roemmich, the athletic training department at UND works in line with a group of certified physical therapists. For more advanced cases, specifically post-surgery, the UND Center for Sports Medicine has physical therapists stationed in the Hyslop. Physical therapy is run  by Cathy Ziegler and S. Jake Thompson, both of whom are certified physical therapists and athletic trainers.

The team that works in the Hyslop comes together to make sure the athletes are able to perform to the best of their ability. Although it isn’t the easiest route, for the students and graduates in the program, the athlete’s success is a constant reminder why they go through the schooling and training that they do.

“My favorite part is seeing all the different athletes that come in and getting to work with them as well as other athletic training staff and medical personnel to get them healthy as fast as possible,” Roemmich said.

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Poolman a big piece for North Dakota Hockey

Tensions existed between the UND hockey and football teams in the late 1980s.

Gino Gasparini, then the athletic director and men’s hockey coach, wanted to fix that. He tried to get some of the players from each team together and hoped that would lead to fewer altercations between the squads.
Quarterback Todd Kovash and Mark Poolman did their part. They went to the old Ralph Engelstad Arena and started to drive the Zamboni.

For Poolman, a farm kid from Warren, Minn., it was the first time he had ever seen a hockey game.

It didn’t start smooth for him, either.

His first attempt on the Zamboni, he missed a two-inch strip about 30 feet long. Gasparini laughed and had him get back out there. Eventually relationships with the hockey staff — including assistant coach Dean Blais — blossomed.

Blais left UND in 1989 and returned as head coach in 1994. During his second year as head coach, there was an open position for an athletic trainer. Blais and Jim Rudd, the head of sports medicine at UND, gave Poolman a call.

Poolman, an athletic training major, returned to his alma mater in 1995, and in the past 20 years, he has become an important piece to the North Dakota hockey program.

He has been the team’s main athletic trainer for that entire time period. And for roughly the last eight seasons, he’s added the role of being the strength and conditioning coach for the team as well.

“He’s a guy who can do it all,” UND coach Brad Berry said. “He’s a guy who never says no to anything. When a job comes up and there’s something to do, he’s the first person to do it. He brings passion. He’s such a positive guy. Our guys love him. When you think of him doing the strength side of it and the medical side of it, he does a lot, and he does a great job at both. Our guys respect him.

“Put it this way: We’re glad we have him and we want to keep him around for a long time.”

The start

Early in his college days, Poolman didn’t have an idea of what he wanted to do after graduation. He admits that he was focused on football.

But after he sustained a broken thumb, everything changed.

“That’s when something clicked,” he said. “I became interested in the sports medicine side, injuries and how you heal. I started taking advantage of the education and understanding more.”

Upon graduation, he moved to Dubuque, Iowa, briefly before coming back when Blais called. Poolman will never forget the start of his time at UND.

His third game was on Oct. 20, 1995 at Boston University. The Terriers raised their national championship banner that night. Minutes into the game, Boston University forward Travis Roy missed a check and went head-first into the boards. The impact caused the cracking of his fourth vertebra, leaving him quadriplegic.

“I can still picture it,” Poolman said. “I can still remember looking down the boards and seeing his arms going down.”

Poolman didn’t handle Roy that night, but wasn’t deterred from working in the field.

“If anything, it strengthened the idea, because I was nervous,” he said.

During the next 20 years, Poolman was on the bench for two other games where a player suffered a broken neck — UND’s Robbie Bina in 2005 and Denver’s Jesse Martin in 2010. Bina missed a year and a half, but eventually returned to the lineup and is now playing professionally in Europe. Martin never played again.

Bina, who played high school hockey in town, suffered his broken neck at the Western Collegiate Hockey Association Final Five. Poolman didn’t see what happened, because he was attending to an injured Brady Murray in the tunnel with team doctor Greg Greek.

“Some guys yelled at me to get on the ice,” Poolman recalled. “I didn’t know who it was or what happened. Halfway out there, I recognized it was Robbie. I knew it was something serious, because Robbie wouldn’t stay down like that.

“It could have been really bad and it turned out wonderful. The fact that he’s still playing is unbelievable. It’s fun to check in on him in the summer when he comes back. To think of everything he went through, that’s a neat story for me.”

Dealing with injuries

More often than not, Poolman is working with smaller injuries.

So far this season, 13 of UND’s 27 players have missed games due to injuries, but none have been season-ending.

Poolman works closely with Greek, the player and the coaching staff to determine when a player is ready to come back.

“There’s a lot of gray area,” Poolman said. “The first question is whether it’s dangerous to come back. If it’s dangerous, that’s an easy no. If it’s a concussion? No, absolutely not. That’s black and white.

“There are some orthopedic injuries that you can play through. That’s individualistic from player to player. You need to take so many things into consideration: What position do they play? What time of year is it? Is it a freshman or a senior? All those things come into play. The coach has an awful lot of say, but it’s usually the player, the doctor and the coach.”

Through the years, numerous players have played through significant pain to be in the lineup and try to help the team. win. Many of those injuries often go untold and those outside the program don’t know a thing about them.

“There are a lot of players who get heat from fans and others about not playing well or not doing this or that,” Poolman said. “A lot of times, they aren’t aware of what the player is sacrificing to be out there, the pain and everything else. Sometimes there’s a reason. That’s a frustrating side, knowing what’s going on and why things are happening, but obviously, you can’t say anything.”

Strength side

After the hockey team’s old strength coach, Jared Nessland, left for another job, Dave Hakstol asked Poolman if he would take over that role as well.

Poolman jumped at it.

“I was excited,” he said. “As an athletic trainer, I’m kind of like a mom. In the weight room, I’m like the dad. I’m more demanding. More intense. I like that side of it. Being a former athlete, I missed the intensity side.”

Poolman has become renowned for tailoring workouts to each player’s specific needs.

“Some guys need to work on injury prevention,” Poolman said. “Some guys need to put on mass. Some need to work on quickness. A lot of what I do is very dependent on the athlete.”

Poolman explained how different it is to train a hockey player than a football player. Football is about strength, mass and being explosive for two-to-seven seconds. Hockey is more cardio and more fluid activity.

Poolman frequently converses with NHL teams to see what type of programs they use, but doesn’t always follow them to a T.

“Just because they do something doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone,” he said.

Consistency behind the bench

Nobody has seen more consecutive UND hockey games than Poolman.

He hasn’t missed a UND game in 14 years. The last time was January 2002, when he was waiting for the birth of his son, Mason.

He has been in Ralph Engelstad Arena for every single game. There was one in 2003 when he didn’t come out to the bench because he was ill and getting IVs in the training room, but he still made it there.

Although he knew nothing about the sport of hockey growing up, one of Poolman’s sons, Tucker, is a sophomore defenseman on the team, and another, Colton, is coming to campus next year to join the team.

“It’s been great working for the three coaches between Blais, Hakstol and Berry,” Poolman said. “They’ve always allowed me just to do my job. The same goes for Jim Rudd and Steve Westering. That’s the most you can ask for from your boss: to allow you to do what you need to help the team.”

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North Dakota Women’s Hockey Athletic Trainer Vanderpan

McKynsay Vanderpan graduated from UND in the spring of 2002.

She moved to the Twin Cities and accepted a job at a swimsuit store in the Mall of America.

“I left Grand Forks and I wasn’t coming back,” she said.

That was the plan.

Three months later, she got a call from Jim Rudd, the head athletic trainer at UND. Rudd told her that a women’s hockey program was set to debut that fall and asked her if she wanted a graduate assistant job as the team’s trainer.

“I had 24 hours to decide,” she said. “I wasn’t doing anything job-related at the time. I said I’d call back in a little bit. I decided to come back to Grand Forks.

“I was surprised. My family was surprised.”

That’s how it all began.

Vanderpan started as a graduate assistant trainer for the women’s hockey team in Year 1 of the program. The position soon turned into a full-time job, and 13 years later, she’s still with the program.

She’s the only person to be associated with the UND women’s hockey program for each year of its existence.

Vanderpan now plays a multitude of roles for the program.

Her job title says “athletic trainer,” but those within the team say she’s much more than that: a strength and conditioning coach, a program historian, a second mother to the players and the glue that keeps the club together.

“She’s so valuable to our team with who she is as a person and how much she cares for the players,” UND coach Brian Idalski said. “We’re pretty blessed to have her.”

Something missing

Through the years, Vanderpan has been on the bench for more than 450 home and road games. She’s only missed a few.

There was one in 2003 to watch her now-husband, Matt, play in the NCAA Division II national football championship game. She missed two for her sister’s wedding in 2008 and two more for Matt’s sister’s wedding in 2010. And she missed four in 2011 after her grandmother died.

Other than that, she’s been standing in her usual spot on the end of the bench, watching the games.

That’s what made this fall so strange.

Vanderpan gave birth to her son, Craig, in October, so she missed the first 12 regular-season games of the year. That was more games than she had missed in the previous decade combined.

“It was kind of weird,” UND senior Samantha Hanson said. “That was the first time since I’ve been here that she hasn’t been around. It was an adjustment.

“We had a male trainer come in. We usually kind of talk to Mack about anything, so we kind of had to tone that back a little bit.”

Idalski said he told Vanderpan to take her time and not be in any hurry to get back to the team.

“I think after the first month I called her and said, ‘I lied to you. You need to get back as soon as you can. That take-all-the-time-you-want stuff wasn’t true,’” Idalski said with a laugh. “You have to give a lot of credit to the rest of the training staff. They did a good job, but there’s no doubt that you have that familiarity with McKynsay and how she does things. I missed her.”

Increased role

Idalski was a strong advocate for increasing Vanderpan’s role on the team when he came aboard as the head coach in 2007.

Instead of just being the athletic trainer, Vanderpan also started taking control of the strength and conditioning program for the team, too, mirroring what Mark Poolman did for the men’s team.

Idalski said it was “invaluable” to have a trainer with the ability to tailor strength-and-conditioning workouts for each player based on deficiencies or injuries. Olympian Jocelyne Lamoureux is now helping with that aspect.

Through the years, Vanderpan also has adjusted certain parts of the treatment program to better care for the athletes.

She now packs nearly everything in the training room to bring on the road. Vanderpan turns her hotel room into a training room, so she can treat players there on Thursday nights before weekend series, as well as after games.

“We didn’t have anything like that in my first 10 years,” she said. “That’s all changed in the last four, five, six years.”

Differences

A lot has changed since that first year.

Vanderpan, who had no previous experience with hockey and only attended three or four men’s games while in college, now knows plenty about the sport.

While the training room was always packed full those first few years, it has become much more manageable in recent times with stronger players.

While the sport of women’s hockey was relatively young and budding back in 2002, it is starting to gain its foothold now.

“The quality of play of women’s hockey is unbelievable from when we started until now,” Vanderpan said. “Not just us, all around us, too. It’s quicker. There’s more skill. That’s the biggest change.”

The future

Vanderpan admits that she never thought she would wind up back in Grand Forks and never thought that she would be at this job this long.

For that, she thanked her husband — a former UND football player who played in two national title games and won three consecutive Nickel Trophies.

“I wouldn’t be here without the help of Matt,” she said. “I couldn’t do it. The hours of athletics are demanding with all of the weekends. He’s aware of that because he was part of it.

“He hasn’t missed many of our home games. You’ll see him up in Section 111 every game. Without him, I wouldn’t have been here this long.”

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