SLU AT Student Comes Full Circle Through Clinical Experience by Returning to his Alma Mater at Alton HS

SLU AT Clinical Site Spotlight - Alton High School

By: Alex Davis (SLU MAT Class of 2023)

This year, my clinical experience is at Alton High School with preceptor Andy Renner, LAT, ATC.  This has been a great experience for me because I am again working with another AT in the Southwestern Conference in Illinois.  This conference has some great AT's working in it, and I am very blessed to have worked with some of them and at least met most of them.  It’s also a little weird because I graduated from Alton HS back in 2017.  Some things have changed, and some things haven’t.  This past year, they have built a new AT training room for Andy which is great because we are able to see more athletes at one time due to the increase in size from his previous athletic training room.  They have also built a new auxiliary gym which also means multiple games are now happening that need to be covered.  This is keeping us quite busy almost every day.  

The focus this year at clinicals is to learn more about the administration side of the job while also getting in as much practice and developing my own style.  Administration is a class we are taking right now so there are topics we have not covered yet in the class that I think learning about in clinicals will make it easier to learn and talk about in the future.  Last fall, I was able to work with two ATs and we also had a AT student from McKendree University.  However, it's nice this semester with it just being Andy so that I can get as much hands-on experience that I can get that I haven’t been able to get at my other clinical sites due to the number of ATs or AT students.

Andy is a great preceptor, and I am happy to be back at Alton High School.  I am looking forward to a great rest of the school year and I hope sometime in the future that he gets another SLU student to teach.

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.