SLU AT Student Gets Great Experiences in Familiar Places

SLU AT Clinical Site Spotlight - Bishop DuBourg High School and St. Mary's High School

By: Ryan Lilly (MAT Class of 2016)

This semester I had the opportunity to return to and serve my alma mater, St. Mary’s High School, and their rival school, Bishop Dubourg High School, as an athletic training student. These are two small private high schools in Saint Louis with less than 900 combined students. St. Mary’s is an all-boys high school and Dubourg is a co-ed high school. The students at each school are very involved in athletics and often play more than one sport. Also because of the small sizes of the schools students will play multiple positions in some sports such as football. 

My preceptor, Bridget Quirk MAT, ATC is the Athletic Trainer to both of these schools as part of SLU’s Outreach Program. As you could imagine, working at two schools provides quite the workload and has kept us busy. Because of the small sizes of the schools you learn faces and names quickly and easily form relationships with the students as well as the coaches. This makes helping the athletes easier because you know who to look for and what each individual needs. It also makes the communication between players, coaches and the athletic trainer a little easier which allows everyone to know what is going on. This has been very important when a star or vital athlete has an injury.

Tyler Wood ATC, Bridget Quirk ATC, Ryan Lilly and Scott Kaar MD on the sidelines at the DuBourg-St. Mary's football game.

Being at two school and working with double the sports teams you get to witness a lot of different injuries and also a lot of the same injuries. In season right now is football, boys soccer, girls volleyball and softball, and cross country. So far this season we’ve dealt a medial meniscus tear, an ankle dislocation, an ACL tear, an AC joint sprain and several concussions, ankle sprains, and shoulder dislocations, as well as many other things. Most of our time is spent in the athletic training room working with athletes to get them back on the field. We are almost always busy up until the point where we have to leave to go to a sporting event and sometimes there’s so many athletes in the room you can barely move. During the breaks in the all the madness Bridget takes to time teach and explain everything she doing and why she is doing it. I have learned a lot form her. The semester isn’t over yet and while I hope no one else gets injured, I feel there is still a lot to be learned. 

This is one of a series of posts by the Saint Louis University Athletic Training students featuring their clinical site and their preceptors. The number, quality and diversity of clinical instruction are major assets for the SLU AT Program.