There seems to be some confusion about the roles and qualifi cations which separate personal trainers from athletic trainers. To help solve this apparent mystery, the National Athletic Trainers Association (NATA) issued a brochure outlining the differences between the two types of fi tness mavens. NATA has also let us know that March is Athletic Training Month (“Sports safety is a team effort” is the slogan). One telltale sign that someone is an athletic trainer is the alphabet soup that follows their names on business cards or email signatures. Athletic trainers have ATC (Athletic Trainer Certifi cation), sometimes followed by CSCS (Certifi ed Strength and Conditioning Specialist) behind their names. Also, spectators might recognize athletic trainers as the men and women seen running onto the fi eld when your favorite player lies prone on the turf, clutching at a hamstring or meniscus.
The fine line separating athletic trainers and personal trainers is a far cry from the challenging situation in England, where the population refers to sneakers as “trainers.”
In honor of Athletic Training Month, New York Family Sports decided to interview a bona fi de athletic trainer: Gene Schafer, owner of ARC Athletics in Manhattanville. Early in the phone interview, Gene was quick to produce the aforementioned NATA brochure via email.
He is a marathon runner, a graduate of Purdue University and has more than 15 years of athletic training experience, most recently serving fi ve years as an athletic trainer for Columbia University’s Division I NCAA basketball program. Somewhere along the line he earned the nickname “Mean” Gene. Let’s do a set of Q&A reps and feel the burn…
So who gave you the nickname “Mean” Gene? Well, I think some of our clients did. It helps that it rhymes, too.
I was wondering if it is good for trainers to have wrestling-style nicknames? Right, right exactly—Gene Okerlund! I actually looked that up to see if I could buy that but he still owns that.
Do you think some people are intimidated just by the concept of a trainer? We’ll go back and start with the definition. Jason [D’Amelio] and I are both athletic trainers, so we call ourselves athletic trainers versus a trainer. Pretty much anybody in this building could be a trainer in about a week. You need a four-year degree and a national certification exam to be considered an athletic trainer. So there is a difference there between trainers and athletic trainers. What we’ve done is combined sports rehab, which is our background, with fitness training. That is a lot different from what most people get at the gym. Our background has really defined what we do.
Are there a lot of uncertified trainers out there? I don’t know about the fitness trainers. There could be. All you have to do is pass something online or take a class and you can consider yourself a trainer, probably. Again, to be considered an athletic trainer you have to be licensed in the state of New York and pass the national certification exam. An athletic trainer, well—if you think about sports rehab and you ever watch a football game, when somebody gets hurt, it is always the athletic trainers that run out on the field. That’s our background. We combine that with fitness training, and I also now have certification from the National Strength and Conditioning Association so I can be a strength coach, a certified strength and conditioning specialist. I carry that dual certification. That’s a tough exam, which is a little bit different from some of the other exams they have out there.
How do you prepare for the national certification exam? First of all, your fouryear degree is in athletic training from an accredited university. All of your coursework is gearing toward the exam, so it is four years of preparation.
Did you find that your Big-10 Midwestern work ethic translated well to the Ivy League when you worked for Columbia? Absolutely, sure. You are right, you are there in the Big-10 in a big school and you are working all day and into the night and every day. Which is what I did when I worked men’s basketball at Columbia. I counted out like 150 days of the season starting in October and it ends at spring break, and I think I had four days off. I mean, they practice on Saturday, and Sunday they’re off—well, we’re not off because we had to go in and do treatments. And you are back on Monday to go again. It is seven days a week.
How was the transition of going from the Columbia job to opening you own business in the neighborhood? It was a good transition. I had been in high school athletics and worked in physical therapy and sports rehab settings and then I had five years at Columbia. So I had the beauty of working in all those different settings, and we were ready to do something else. We realized there was nothing like what we do in the area, near Columbia’s campus. I mean, I was working five years in NCAA Division I men’s basketball. For a kid growing up in Indiana, that was exciting. I didn’t get to play in college, but it was fun to be able to work with those athletes. I still have a great relationship with all the coaches. The students that I knew have all gone now after five years, but the coaches and the staff and the community are all there and it really helps to have started in the community first. People ask me what it is like to work for yourself, and I say, I do, but I have 50 bosses.
Are there any particular trends you see emerging in athletic training for youth sports? I think some of the things that have happened is that a sport is all year round. When I was in school 20 years ago, you could do football, basketball and baseball. I think nowadays if you are good enough, these coaches will want you to focus on just one sport. Take soccer for example. Girls’ soccer in New York, they have spring club season, they do something in the summer with travel, then they have a fall season, and then an off-season in the winter when they are getting ready for their spring season. So they’re into soccer all year round. You see that with volleyball and basketball as well.
With your younger clients, do you ever get their athletic-minded parents training along with them? We’ve had a couple. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.
We had one that was a woman and her son who lived over on the East Side and they would come all the way over to the West Side. Originally the son was referred to us by a doctor, he sent us the student-athlete and the mom asked, “Can I work out too?” so we had both of them working out and doing some things and it was kind of a nice camaraderie between the 7th grader and his mother. It was pretty cool, it was good. Sometimes we’ll get husbands and wives that can work together, and for a while we’ll get husbands and wives that can’t work together.
We don’t have a huge space, so we are kind of limited with the number of people we can see.What is the cut-off age for the youngest kid you will work with? They have to be able to pay attention. Eight years old, 10 years old. Some kids will listen to you and pay attention and have a half-hour of one-onone time. Typically they will come in here for some strengthening and rehab and you just have to keep them entertained. Some of the stuff we are teaching now is some landing training. We had one girl who came in and she had knee pain. Well, she didn’t know how to do a squat. She was playing basketball and lacrosse and other sports, so I had her do a squat and when she would sit down, her knees would go forward so all of that sheer force of the shin bone and the thigh bone would meet in front of the knee. She was able to play the sport, but didn’t know the little things of the sport, the little specialties. So I gave her a medicine ball and said when you sit down, push this ball away from you, sit your butt backward. Your first move is your butt going backward. We taught her to do a squat, and I asked, “How do your knees feel?” and she said, “Fine, no pain.” A lot of times we’ll get kids in there who don’t know how to do a push-up correctly, a sit-up, a crunch or a squat or how to land. If you ever watch a kid land, a lot of times they’ll land BOOM, really hard and they don’t absorb that landing. We tell them to land like they take off, squat, bend, raise up and jump, and when you land, squat, bend and absorb that landing. We can’t say that we prevent ACL injuries or tears, but we can say that we try to reduce them by teaching them better ways to land.
In terms of rehab, are the injuries getting more elaborate through the years, or are they pretty much the same? Pretty much the same. ACLs, ankle sprains, shoulder issues, things like that. It depends on the kid and how much they play.
How did you arrive at the name ARC Athletics? When I left Columbia, I kind of liked the idea of something that started with A. I had active-something in there, but I didn’t know what I wanted. The truth is, it is hard coming up with names. When I was leaving Columbia, I had asked my boss, Jim Gossett, who is the head athletic trainer there, what I should name this new business. He was with me and helping me as best he could and at the end of the day he came up with Arc and something else. I took Arc and made it an acronym: Active, Rehabilitation and Conditioning. So it was ARC Center for a while, and another friend at Columbia said how about ARC Athletics? It was available so we took it. We had some good help with some of this stuff. Our old logo had a bridge over it. We took a photograph of the Riverside Viaduct and sent it to California and they came back with a few things so we came up with the logo. That was the old logo. Now we’re working on a new one because we probably won’t be in this area anymore because of the Manhattanville project, we have to move. We’re looking to move anywhere in the Upper West Side because that is kind of where we get a lot of our clients.
When will you have to move? I don’t know. It will probably be this spring or early summer is my guess.
Well, it is a changing city, isn’t it? It sure is. You know, you learn, it’s OK.
It is certainly not West Lafayette, Indiana. No. West Lafayette is a great town. The Midwest was fun, but we’re having fun here.
When I left Ohio
University in the mid- 1980s, the sports medicine program was booming.
Did you have any idea it would become such a growing field? We didn’t know back then.
Now there’s probably 25 to 27 thousand members of the National Athletic
Trainers Association. But I did sports as a kid and I kind of liked to
help if I couldn’t do it myself, so it is kind of a nice thing to be
able to do, help some of these athletes get back.
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For more
information, visit www.ARCathletics.com
