Herman Miller: This is a funny story: I used to work at the YWCA in Gary and we were promoting an event to get some students involved. Me and my assistant at the time came here to pass out some flyers. When I introduced myself to Linda [Anderson], the athletic director, and showed her my credentials, she told me IUN is looking for an athletic trainer. So I filled out an application and she read over my qualifications. She gave me an interview that day, wanted to hire me that day, but I couldn't start because it was my birthday. I had prior arrangements. That was six years ago, Sept. 23.

 

HM: When I first started here I was just going for the practices and the games. When Dr. Gary started he expanded my role a little more, maybe get more ‘bang for his buck.' That's why he made me Weight Room Manager and Strength and Conditioning Coach.

 

I'm in the weight room more. At first I was strictly athletes. If you weren't an athlete I didn't work with you. I'm still a certified personal trainer, but I also have a degree in athletic training. So, I still do both to keep me going. It's something I've been doing for ten years now. These days, I also work with faculty members, students, members of the community… I work with everybody.

 

I work with a few clients from the community and a few athletes who need treatment, whether it be helping someone work out or healing a sore body party. I may ultrasound their knee because they've been running and jumping a lot so they need to relieve the pressure. Baseball players throw a lot so I work with baseball players who have sore shoulders. Starting on October 26, I'll be working with them more because baseball season is starting soon.

 

I give athletes more high intense workouts and sports-specific training techniques. I look at the motions you make most often in that sport. I try to come up with different exercises that help them better play the game. I help them exceed their limitations. You never know where that balls going to go when it's hit, so I help the athletes with hand-eye coordination…

 

You have those that lift the people up, but schools like this you're not going to find guy lifters, so some of the girls here have to act as "bases." When you're a baser you have to lift somebody above your head, so you need a lot of upper body strength. If you look at any professional team you don't see any cheerleaders that are out of shape. You don't see any with flabby or big stomachs or big arms. They're muscular and in-tone.

 

It's very important. You have to have the cardiovascular conditioning to get up and down the court. You have to have the muscular training to hold somebody flying at you at. Every sport is basically a contact sport except for maybe baseball, but even then you're making a different kind of a contact with the bat. But every sport nowadays you're going to come in some physical contact whether it is boxing out somebody to get a rebound, stopping somebody from getting to the basket, or holding somebody to protect your quarterback from a tackle, there's going to be some physical contact. That strength factor helps you do your job a lot better. Take football for example: You're an offensive lineman and you may weigh over 300 pounds, but you can only lift 100 pounds. And the offensive lineman on the other team weighs over 200 pounds. You have to be able to take that pressure with him coming on full speed, and if you can only handle 100 pounds of pressure, you're going to get ran over every single time. You're going to be embarrassed. And that's the last thing a fan wants to see a player who makes millions and millions of dollars to do. You have to be ready.

 

What's the most challenging part of your job?

Working with different personalities… You have to be well-rounded. You work with people who have different goals, especially at the personal trainer level. People come in telling you they want to work this or that body part, so you have to adjust to their personality because it can be a hassle. With my athletes, it's just about re-iterating to them that what I do is crucial to what they do on the court. They need to come to me before they need treatment for an injury. If you're doing the right training exercises, you should be okay. It's kind of like taking a test without studying.

 

Knee injuries are the Achilles heel of sports. The ACL is the most common knee injury out there. The knee is one of the most sensitive places on your body because it's caught between the pressure from your hip and your ankle. It's that man in the middle. If you've ever planted your foot down and turned your hip, you don't feel it in your ankle; you feel it in your knee.

 

Definitely. Ankles are very common too. Sprained ankles and ligament tears are the most common in sports.

 

Well, I've played sports my whole life. I played three sports in high school and I went to college on a baseball scholarship. I was an education major in college.

 

I went to Central State University and River Forest Ohio. I got injured myself. I injured my throwing soldier. I let my athletic trainer know that I was about to get a degree in elementary education but I didn't really want to teach. I was coming home working in daycare centers, just trying to get a feel for it. I would dread coming home every summer more and more. My mom told me to not waste my time getting a degree you're not going to use. You're young, and you still have time to change majors. My trainer asked me if I've ever considered athletic training. He told me all of the fields I could go into down the line, like sports medicine. He let me shadow him one day to get a feel for the job. I was seeing guys and girls from the basketball team, volleyball team, track team, and football team. It seemed like something I could do. At that point, I was stilling wondering about the pay though. He showed me one of his check stubs, and his check had a comma in it. I was totally sold. I was used to seeing three numbers, a decimal point, and a couple more numbers.

 

Do it. It opens you up for one of the fastest growing industries, which is health care. So, you've got kids nowadays who are obese in the second or third grade. You have adults who want to be more health conscious. You have athletes that might be the next LeBron, the next hybrid athlete. I was training a kid who was twelve years old. He was averaging 26 points a game in basketball. In football he scored 40 touchdowns in one season. They're out there and there are parents out there who want their kids to have an extra advantage. You could always end up working for the pros helping professional athletes during the off-season. I know a guy who went to Purdue. He works with my cousin in Virginia. He works with Pat White, ex-Dolphins player, during the off-season. White is paying him a big sum.

 

Society has changed. Everything is done on the go. No one has time to sit down for a home cooked meal; they want what they want right now. We've lost our patience. You end up with a sedentary lifestyle where you mostly eat and sit down. Kids do less than they used to, but so do parents. I remember as a child going out and riding bikes all day long, and it was fun. Playstation, Wii, X-Box 360, and these diet pills and infomercials work against these guys who help professionals. If you work really hard in the gym and then go home to see a commercial that says, "Lose 10 pounds in 2 days," you'll be tempted. You see the ad everywhere but you don't see the fine print at the bottom that says, "not approved by the FDA." The examples they use in those commercials are so misleading. You see a guy go from John Candy to Arnold Schwarzenegger. What makes me laugh is that people buy into that. So I try to promote whole body wellness. It's a lifestyle change. Not until-the-summer-come change, not an over-the-winter change, not because a boyfriend-or-girlfriend-called-you-fat change, it's a lifestyle change. It's going to be hard in the beginning if you aren't used to it. Anything worth doing isn't going to be easy, otherwise everyone would do it.

 

I'm a workaholic, Don. I'm not even going to lie. When I'm not working, I'm at home relaxing. I have a six month old child; I really enjoy being a dad. I wasn't sure I'd be ready for it, but once it happened, I love my son. He looks exactly like me. Some of the faces he makes turn me into a punk because I make the same faces. I'm like, "Dude, Why you making that? That's my face."

 

I'm a Bears fan. I'm a Chicago sports fan, period. We either have the Cubs or Bears, but the Cubs are always losing. The Bears had Walter Peyton and the 85 Super Bowl team. I'm such a fan of sports; I watch highlights all day long. I just like seeing guys take advantage of sports because I'm still an athlete at heart. I'm 32 years old but I can still outrun people half my age sometimes.

 

Baseball, hands down.

 

It's a thinking man's game. Anything can happen at any given moment. You didn't see too many black baseball players. But I'm 5' 9", so I'm not playing much basketball. I just played whichever sports worked best for me. I still have friends that play basketball, like my cousins. I had to play what they play, so I still did it, but I never took it seriously.

 

The basketball season is just beginning. Games start in November, and the boys kick off the season with the Kettle classic. Last year, both the boys and the girls won 20 games for the first time ever. Last year, the boys beat the NCAA team Eastern Kentucky. It was the biggest upset in college sports that year. So, hopefully we can keep that enthusiasm going this year. It might be a rebuilding year for the guys, but the girls got almost all of their players back. The girls have the potential to win the whole thing.

 

Yes, yes. I'll be doing a lot of traveling this year. That's another nice thing about being an athletic trainer.

**Written by The Northwest Phoenix Editor-in-Chief: Don Sjoerdsma