Riley is only 15 and will be a sophomore at Austin High School this fall, where he plans to play basketball for the Packers.

Thursday, September 07, 2000

Riley is only 15 and will be a sophomore at Austin High School this fall, where he plans to play basketball for the Packers. He’s also one of countless players who have passed through the offices of Mark Hecimovich, an Austin doctor who works closely with Austin High’s football, hockey and basketball teams.

You’ll find Hecimovich standing near Penny Bennett, a physical therapist and certified athletic trainer from Austin Medical Center, on the sidelines of every Packer game this fall. The two are a part of perhaps the biggest group of unsung heroes in the world of sports – the people who make sure your favorite athletes are taped, bandaged, iced or wrapped enough to play.

Bennett and Hecimovich are part of the rapidly growing field of sports medicine, a field whose parameters are difficult to define.

"I’d say I deal with a broad range of injuries in a narrow category," Hecimovich said. "We see everything from ankle sprains to dislocated shoulders to concussions."

Bennett said concussions have become a major concern of doctors and athletic trainers worldwide. As athletes continue to get bigger, stronger and faster, they hit harder. Bennett said she is beginning to notice that trend at every level of sports, and not just in football and hockey.

"We’re seeing more girls come through with injuries now because their games are becoming so much more physical," Bennett said. "It’s tough to get through to the kids that (concussions) can be life-threatening. With the way pro sports are, they just kind of blow it off; then the kids see that and think the same way."

In the past, Bennett and Hecimovich have taken players’ helmets and hidden them under a bench on the sideline or in the locker room to prevent an injured player from returning to the game.

"I don’t know if the propensity for players suffering concussions is getting higher, or if we’re just catching them more often," Hecimovich said. "Ten years ago, maybe concussions weren’t taken as seriously."

The biggest concern doctors and trainers have today is second-impact syndrome, which occurs when a player suffers a mild concussion, is allowed back in the game, then suffers a second concussion.

While concussions have become the most common serious injury Hecimovich and Bennett deal with, they say it seems as though athletes have been lucky enough in this area to not have to rehab from one of sports’ other trendy injury – the torn anterior cruciate ligament, more commonly known as the ACL.

Hecimovich recalls seeing several ACL patients who were injured playing softball, and Bennett said she’s seen just one or two ACL injuries in the past year or two. When an ACL injury does occur, though, the rehabilitation process can be a long one.

"The patient has two options," Hecimovich said. "They can have surgery or not have surgery."

Having surgery requires upwards of eight months to properly heal, while not having surgery will add at least two to three months onto that time period.

An ACL crisscrosses behind the knee cap with the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) and the "X" that is formed keeps a person’s knee from bending too far forward or backward. It also allows a persons knee to rotate and twist. So an ACL or PCL injury commonly occurs when athletes plant one of their legs and attempt to make a cut, or when they plant a leg and are clipped at the knee by another player.

The best examples of ACL and PCL injuries are pro football running backs Terrell Davis of the Denver Broncos and Jamal Anderson of the Atlanta Falcons. Davis was accidentally clipped by his own teammate, and Anderson collapsed while trying to make a cut on artificial turf.

 

"Turf has a bad reputation and deservedly so," Hecimovich said. "We don’t have much artificial turf around here, but it has a high potential to cause serious injury."

As difficult as their jobs may be sometimes, Hecimovich and Bennett’s biggest supporters are the coaches they work with.

Austin High football coach Steve Knox said it’s a relief for the coaching staff to not have to be the ones taping and icing players before games. It allows them to focus on the task at hand, he said.

"If Penny or Mark tells us that a kid needs to come out or stay out, we don’t argue," Knox said. "We may ask them two or three times to make sure, but we won’t disagree with them."

Knox said he has noticed an increase in the number of concussions players suffer at all levels of sports in recent years. While injuries are part of competition, Knox and his staff have found ways to reduce the risks.

"The hardest thing for us to get the kids to understand is the importance of mouth guards," he said. "A lot of kids will bite the ends off of the guard, then when they take a big hit, their teeth bang together and they’ve got a concussion."

Hecimovich offers some simple advice to players in terms of what they can do to reduce the risk of injury.

"For example, football players come into fall practice big and strong from lifting and jogging all summer," he said, "but they aren’t used to the 40-yard sprints and tackling dummies. They haven’t geared their bodies for that.

"Most players, though, have a preconceived notion of what practice will be like. All they have to do is contact the coach and find out what will happen in the first week or so of practices and do it on their own."

That way, the athletes won’t wind up in Dr. Hecimovich’s office.