![National Athletic Training Month](/features/releases/NATM-Square.png?max_width=729)
National Athletic Training Month is held every March in order to spread awareness about the important work of athletic trainers. Athletic trainers are health care professionals that prevent, diagnose, treat, and rehabilitate injuries for active people in many industries, including sports, military, and clinical practice.
Taping and ice is a small part of what athletic trainers do. Athletic trainers also coordinate and execute injury prevention programs, prepare athletes for practices and games, communicate with physicians about injuries, treat and rehabilitate injured players, help determine return to play for injured athletes, monitor environment and weather conditions, develop and execute emergency action plans and are first responders on the scene.
Athletic trainers everywhere are essential to health care, and it’s no different at Lake Forest College. Our athletic trainers have been irreplaceable during this spring semester as they have worked tirelessly to ensure the health and safety of the Forester student-athletes. COVID regulations have mandated high expectations from the staff, and they have been exceptional in their response.
In celebration of National Athletic Training Month, we wanted to take a moment to feature our two new assistant athletic trainers in the Forest: Luis Perez and Megan Blackburn.
Luis Perez, ATC worked for Athletico and was placed at Morton High School and Rolling Meadows High School prior to coming to the College. His favorite part of being an athletic trainer is working with athletes and creating new and fun relationships with everyone.
“I was always into sports growing up. Pretty much played every sport but to be frank, knew I was never good enough to be a professional. So I started to think of ways I can stick to sports as my career and came across Athletic Training and was intrigued about being able to help injured athletes,” Perez said. “The main sports I was involved with were boxing, basketball, and baseball. For boxing, I was trained by [my] friend who is a professional heavyweight boxer. For basketball, I played for the College of Du Page. And for baseball, I only played little league while growing up.”
When asked about his time at Lake Forest so far, Perez said, “Although hectic because of Covid, it has been fun and intriguing. I've made a lot of new relationships and have felt very welcome by everyone so far. I can't wait to continue making this my home and growing in my profession here.”
Megan Blackburn, ATC was the head athletic trainer for the Chicago Red Stars for the past two years. In the off season, she was treating patients at the IBJI Highland Park PT clinic, working mostly with return-to-play patients. She played two seasons of soccer at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Ill.
“I really enjoy being able to help my athletes compete and play the sport they love, whether that’s through helping them recover from an injury, “maintenance” work, or just general injury prevention,” she said. “I grew up playing soccer, with that came a handful of injuries. I spent a lot of time with my club’s athletic trainer doing both rehab and preventative work. In high school I quickly learned that I wanted to help athletes the same way that my AT helped me.”
“I've really enjoyed being at LFC so far, COVID makes it a bit harder to build relationships with the athletes, but I'm still enjoying it!” she said.
Welcome to the Forest, Luis and Megan!