National Collegiate Athletic Association

The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- Sports Sciences Newsletter -- October 26, 1998

National standards are objective of medical coverage task force

BY D. ASHLEY DIXON, National Athletic Trainers' AssociationThe National Athletic Trainers' Association (NATA) has created a task force charged with establishing guidelines for appropriate medical coverage for intercollegiate athletics. The goal of this task force is to define appropriate medical coverage and develop guidelines to support that definition. The ultimate objective, of course, is to provide the best possible health care for student-athletes.

Terry O'Brien, M.Ed., ATC, head athletic trainer at Towson University and NATA College and University Athletic Trainers' Committee (CUATC) chair, says the idea to form this important task force resulted from a number of serious injuries and deaths of student-athletes at the collegiate level. "As the CUATC talked about this issue in December, we initially thought it was something that would be a short-term project. With more study, however, it became more complex and more difficult to address," O'Brien said.

As a result of the complexities, O'Brien called on Denny Miller, ATC, PT, head athletic trainer at Purdue University, to take on the challenges of this issue. "We have talked individually about what might come out of this task force, and we all agree that there are a lot of things that can be very positive," Miller said. "I think it is going to be an exciting time, and I am glad to be a part of it."

Miller will chair the task force of certified athletic trainers (ATC), which includes six voting members and three ex-officio, or nonvoting, members. Once the task force is in a position to create the guidelines, a blue- ribbon advisory panel will be formed to review documents and provide input. Ideally, the advisory panel will be made up of representatives from NCAA, NAIA and NJCAA institutions, and college presidents from various divisions of the governing bodies. In addition, representatives from the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine and the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine will be invited to serve.

After their initial meeting in June, task force members decided to examine and evaluate the medical coverage standards currently in place during in-season and out-of-season practices and games in various conferences and individual institutions.

Therefore, the NATA task force needs help from individual schools by providing the following information:

  • Number of sports sponsored by your school.

  • Number of student-athletes participating in those sports.

  • Number of ATCs/Licensed Athletic Trainers on staff.

  • Number of graduate assistants on staff, broken down into certified versus noncertified.

    If there are any recent studies or surveys that may answer these questions and more, please contact task force chair, Denny Miller, ATC, PT, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907; phone 765/494-3245, fax 765/494-9899, e-mail damiller@athletics.purdue.edu, or NATA staff liaison, D. Ashley Dixon, 2952 Stemmons Freeway, Dallas, Texas 75247; phone 800/879-6282 (ext. 154), fax 214/637-2206, e-mail ashleyd@nata.org.

    In lieu of passing along knowledge of a completed study or survey, the task force is asking athletic trainers to take a moment to participate in its own independent survey. It is on the NATA home page at www.nata.org.