Sports trainer already busy

Four Carrboro High School football players were injured during their game against Chapel Hill High School last Friday. Tommy Barr was there, ready to help all of them out.

Barr is Carrboro High’s new athletic trainer, the first full-time trainer in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools district. He is the school’s primary sports medicine professional, responsible for everything from administrative duties to dealing with on-the-field injuries.

“I’m basically the link between the medical community and the athletic community,” Barr said. “People come in for ankle and knee sprains, but they also come in complaining about the sniffles — the common cold. Athletic trainers do a lot more than tape ankles.”

Before coming to Carrboro, Barr held coaching and part-time training jobs, including at California’s De La Salle High School, whose football team won a record 151 games in a row from 1992 to 2003.

He was hired this semester and immediately went to work monitoring the football team’s practices, dealing with a significant abdominal injury, a dislocated kneecap and a concussion in his first 10 days.

Last summer, Atlas Fraley, a Chapel Hill High School football player, died after a scrimmage. He had been complaining of dehydration. His autopsy did not determine a cause for his death.

Barr said that although the incident has raised awareness of proper hydration, it played at most a minor role in Carrboro’s switch to a full-time trainer. Part- and full-time trainers have the same license, so they are equally qualified.

The main benefit of a full-time trainer is the added time on the job, he said.

“I don’t have to worry about getting grades in or going to teaching workshops,” Barr said. “Spreading someone too thin prevents them from doing as many things.”

Ben Reed, Chapel Hill High School’s trainer, agreed. Reed teaches physical education at Chapel Hill High and took over as head trainer in 1996.

A major part of the job, he said, is educating about dehydration.

After that, both trainers said, it is simply a matter of providing sufficient water to athletes, making sure they take water breaks and monitoring local weather conditions.

“Part-time/full-time is really a matter of semantics,” Reed said. “I’m not really a ‘part-time’ trainer. When school ends, I’m full-time.”

Still, Reed said he leaves as soon as possible after football games, having put in a full day’s work even before the Friday night lights went on.

“If I was to be at every single practice and event, I’d be at school 12 hours a day, five days a week.”


Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.