Saturday, December 24, 2011
Hubbard
When Walt Sokac was a high school athlete, the trainer assigned to his team was a fellow student who knew only how to tape ankles after an injury.
Today, Sokac is the director of rehabilitation for the Sharon Regional Health System out of Pennsylvania, where technology maps the recovery of athletes from injury to their return to the court or field.
But for many of the Mahoning and Shenango valleys’ high-school, college and free-time athletes, the injury road ends in Hubbard at the health system’s Diagnostic and Specialty Center.
“It’s kind of a nonclinical atmosphere,” said Ed Newmeyer, the director of marketing and community relations, during a recent tour of the Hubbard facility.
The center offers digital X-rays with instant results, cardiac stress tests and ultrasound testing. But the medicinal cherry-on-top is its sports rehabilitation center, giving the patients the feeling of being in a gym thanks to the center’s high ceilings left behind by the IGA grocery store that once filled the space.
It has an artificial-turf field with football-field lines painted on it. It also has half a basketball court and hoop.
“I like to simulate as much as possible,” said Jason Warrender, the lead physical therapist and girls varsity basketball coach at Brookfield High School.
For a Hubbard football player heading to East Lansing to play football for Michigan State University, Warrender had the athlete run through football drills on the turf. Banners for several teams in the Valley and their conferences line the high walls of the room, allowing the rehabbing athletes to feel as if they are in their own gym, Newmeyer said.
Since the center opened in 2010, it has signed contracts with four high schools: Hickory High School in Hermitage, Sharon High School, Mercer High School and Brookfield High School. It is looking to add a fifth.
Both the rehabilitation center and Liberty school district’s athletic director, Dave Davis, confirmed the two are in preliminary discussions to sign a contract.
“I’m excited about it,” Davis said.
Because the district is in fiscal emergency, a contract with the center would have to be approved by the board of education and the fiscal commission charged with overseeing the district’s finances.
“We have the interest and the ability to meet the needs of student athletes,” Sokac said.
He said a trainer from the health system is assigned to each school. The trainer becomes part of the school, testing student athletes involved in high-impact sports before and after injuries, particularly their cognitive abilities.
Commonly, Sokac said, they test the visual and spatial memory of seventh-, ninth- and 11th-graders in sports. This he called baseline testing, allowing the center’s staff to test students’ cognitive abilities after a head injury.
“We test not only the sports side of it but the academic side as well,” Sokac said.
Head injuries, once ignored, now are thought of seriously in the sports-medicine world, Sokac said.
“Our knowledge of concussions has grown,” he said. “And now, our tools have expanded.”