“You try your best to prevent all the injuries, that’s part of our job,” said Head Athletic Trainer Dan Davies. “But you can never fully, 100 percent prevent somebody from getting injured.”
When an injury does present itself, the athletes are in the hands of the College’s athletic training staff. Each team has an athletic trainer that works with their program specifically, yet with so much risk involved, the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) mandates that colleges must be associated with team physicians as well. For Bowdoin, Orthopedic Associates (OA) in downtown Brunswick provides the team doctor and additional physical therapists.
Dr. Michael Pleacher has worked as a sports medicine physician for 10 years and has been in the Brunswick office of OA since 2011. In addition to serving as the team doctor for the College, he also works with the Brunswick-area high schools and the U.S. Cross Country Ski Team.
“The overarching goal of the care I provide for Bowdoin students is number one, to look out for their safety, provide them high quality care, take care of the injury,” said Pleacher. “We’re here to help people get back on the field. Sometimes that means they need to be out for a few weeks, but when it’s feasible, when it’s reasonable and safe, we try to allow the athletes to return quickly. I think because we have a collaborative team approach we routinely achieve that.”
In order to provide the best care for the athletes, OA works closely with the athletic training staff and Health Center on campus. The physical therapy staff at OA and the athletic training staff at the College meet on a weekly basis to discuss the state of currently injured athletes and coordinate recovery plans.
“There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes that maybe the athletes and students aren’t aware of,” said Pleacher. “We are really trying to make this a very smooth process for the injured athletes so they can concentrate on getting better and staying up with their academics.”
Each season poses new challenges for the sports medicine staff. Due to the competitive and physical nature of each sport, there’s no exact science to predicting and preventing injuries.
“Each sport has their own niche of injuries but every year, that’s what I like about this job, you never know what’s going to happen,” said Davies.
However, there are some trends due to the inherent makeup of the sports. The repetitive overhead motion involved in volleyball, baseball, softball, tennis and squash lead to more upper extremity injuries, while track or cross country athletes see more lower extremity injuries.
“You just think of the different activities involved in each sport, they’re going to strain different body parts in different ways,” said Pleacher.
Injuries also vary based on timing within the season.
“In general, we see a fair number of overuse or wear-and-tear injuries as a particular season gets along,” said Pleacher. “At the beginning of each season we see some more strains and sprains. People who have just gotten off of their summer conditioning program and just gotten into their sport—those first couple of days are the other period of time where we see a fair number of injuries.”
The NCAA Injury Surveillance Program (ISP) collects data on collegiate athletics and injuries in order to facilitate better injury prevention programs nationwide. Their data shows that football tends to have the highest injury rate nationwide, with the highest rate during preseason as opposed to in-season and postseason play.
Trey Brown ’16 knows his way around knee injuries as he’s torn his right ACL twice and his left ACL once over the course of the past four years, while playing football both for Bowdoin and Phillips Andover Academy. After taking a break from play during his junior year, he returned his senior year only to tear his meniscus during preseason, about two weeks before the team’s first game.
“I kind of feel like the ACL guru because I tore mine so many times,” said Brown. “I’ve seen plenty of patients go in and out of there with ACL tears, and they’re always asking me questions.”
The OA office becomes its own community through conversations among patients and therapists. Therapy varies depending on the injury’s severity, but usually starts out with three sessions per week. After spending so much time together, athletes have developed close bonds with the therapists and other patients.
“There were a couple Bowdoin students who would be there at the same time every week, a couple of people who lived in town,” said Maddie Lemal-Brown ’18, a member of the women’s rugby team. “That’s actually how a relationship formed, kind of bonding over the same injury and helping each other through the recovery.”
While injuries can be devastating to many student athletes, for Bowdoin students, OA provides a positive aspect of a negative situation.
“It’s an interesting way to break the Bowdoin bubble,” said Lemal-Brown. “It’s a very regular thing that gets you more incorporated in Brunswick and you learn more about people outside of your class who aren’t your age and aren’t in college. I’ve appreciated getting out and being away from campus just for a couple of hours every week and I think other people who’ve been to OA can attest to that fact. It’s a small different experience that you wouldn’t have had if you weren’t in that situation.”