*WEB CONTINUATION: This article originally appeared in Volume 106 Issue 1 of our news magazine, Amplifier.

Nearly every day after school during the fall sports season, dozens of student-athletes start lining up in the office of Katie Colasurdo, West Linn High School’s athletic trainer. Minutes after the bell rings, the check-in list will already have multiple names on it, and if athletes don’t hurry, they will likely be in for a long wait. 

As an athletic trainer, Colasurdo deals with all of the medical coverage for West Linn’s student athletes. This includes everything from evaluating basic injuries, such as sprains or scrapes, to referring students to providers, covering games, and dealing with emergencies.

“I’m like [an] in-house urgent care,” Colasurdo said. “As with any career path in health care, you have to be good at adjusting on the fly, because I never know what’s going to walk through the door. Sometimes it’s just a sprained ankle, sometimes a kid is bleeding out of his forehead, sometimes it’s a broken bone. You have to be good at thinking on your feet and adapting.”

In recent years, Colasurdo has had a grad student to help her during the fall season. This year, it’s just her. To help ease the stress, Colasurdo has enlisted the help of high schoolers.

“This fall, I put out a word asking if anybody wants to help out,” Colasurdo said. “Because in the fall, I see like 50 kids a day, every day. And so I was [thinking], ‘if anyone wants to help out and learn how to tape, that’s an easy thing that people can learn how to do.’ And that takes that off of my plate, and I can focus on other things, like doing rehab with kids and looking at injuries.”

Although it means another person Colasurdo has to watch over when she’s working, she has adapted and learned how to work with students.

“I am used to multitasking in my office,” Colasurdo said. “Because pretty much at any given moment, I am taping one kid, while talking to another kid who’s waiting in line, trying to get a backstory on a new injury so that I can get to them a little quicker when I’m done taping the ankle. So it’s pretty easy for me to be talking to a kid, looking at an injury while still keeping half an eye on how the tape job is looking and being like ‘hey, let’s redo this strip here.’ Or I will hop over, and if it looks like they didn’t do something tight enough, I’ll go over what they did really quickly.”

This fall, four students started coming consistently, taping athletes and generally helping Colasurdo out. Emma Arakelian, junior, is one of these students.

“[Colasurdo] actually helped me before, when I was injured when I used to play for the high school [soccer] team,” Arakelian said. “I heard on the Live ROAR that she was looking for people to tape. And I want to do something in the sports industry when I’m older, so I reached out to her.”

What this assistance usually entails is taping body parts that are injured or prone to injury—most often the ankles, wrists, knees, and other joints.

In addition to helping out after school in Colasurdo’s office, people like Olivia Duffin, sophomore, helped out at football games.

“I would help wrap players beforehand, and sometimes I would go to the games to help [Colasurdo], making sure everything was okay and helping players who had a bloody nose, needed to get rewrapped, or something like that,” Duffin said.

Although taping may look easy when watching someone experienced, like Colasurdo, many steps must be perfected for it to be effective and secure.

“There are a lot of taping techniques, and I didn’t realize how hard they would be,” Arakelian said. “People think they would be able to tape, but it’s actually trickier than I thought it would be.”

In addition to being beneficial to Colasurdo, it has proven useful for helpers like Duffin and Arakelian, allowing them to gain valuable experience in the medical field. Duffin herself has found the experience to be very insightful and encouraging.

“Sometimes, I don’t know how to do specific wraps, or in situations where Katie’s not with me, I don’t know how to handle things. But I feel like I’ve learned how to stay calmer, and I know more of what to do if the situation gets bad,” Duffin said. “[After helping out] I’ve leaned a tiny bit more into possibly wanting to be an athletic trainer as well. But still, I feel like it’s made me more interested in wanting to go into the medical field.”

Looking forward to next year, Colasurdo aims to expand with even more helpers and a more robust application system.

“I’m hoping to make it more of a formal thing next year,” Colasurdo said. “I’ll put out [a message] and have kids apply, and then have a quick sit-down with them.”

Colasurdo also encourages students interested in helping out next year or pursuing a career in the medical field, specifically as a trainer, to reach out.

“If there’s anybody out there that thinks that what I do is cool and they want to learn more about it, don’t be shy about talking to me,” Colasurdo said. “Because obviously, I’ve been through the whole thing, and I can definitely talk people through the path of getting into a health profession.”