As high school sports ramp up across Connecticut, athletic trainers are keeping an eye on extreme heat.
“If it's 95 degrees on the turf, we're not going to have practice,” said Allison Gilbert, an athletic trainer at Killingly High School. “The old adage of ‘just push them hard,’ ‘punish them by not giving them water’ – those kinds of things – that shouldn't be happening anymore,” Gilbert said.
Gilbert and other athletic trainers from eastern Connecticut met at Norwich Free Academy on Aug. 11, to go over heat protocols. The trainers, medical professionals responsible for making sure athletes stay safe from injury, practiced different scenarios where the heat could make students on the field seriously sick.
During the practice, a trainer pretended to be a student suffering from exertional heat stroke, a potentially fatal condition where the body’s temperature reaches over 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Essentially you're cooking from the inside, and your cells are dying, and that results in organ failure,” said Rebecca Stearns, chief operating officer at the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut. The institute is named after Korey Stringer, a professional football player who died from exertional heat stroke in 2001.
In this scenario, trainers are taught to cover the person in ice and water, whether that’s in a giant immersion tub, or, if the school doesn't have that, a body bag.
“The handles are on both sides, the patient would go right in the middle,” said Katie Cooper, an athletic trainer at Stonington High School.
“You rock it back and forth. Cold water, ice – all over the body, and that helps bring the whole body temperature down,” Cooper said.
A growing danger as summers heat up
Protocols like these are some of the ways schools are trying to keep students safe as temperatures rise from global warming. The last two years were the hottest on record in North America. Across the United States, 9,000 student athletes are treated for heat-related illnesses every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
So far this year, Connecticut has activated its extreme heat protocols four times, denoting multiple days of hot and humid conditions that could exacerbate heat-related illnesses.
“There are caps to what is safe to be exercising in,” said UConn’s Stearns, whose research shows an average of 1 to 2 high school and middle school athletes die in the U.S. from exertional heat stroke every year.
“There’s going to be more days where we have to cancel practice, or more days with greater modifications to those practices, unless we do something else,” Stearns said.
That could mean moving sports seasons later in the year or exercising inside. But for now, the focus is on moving training times to avoid the midday sun and knowing what to do if something goes wrong, especially during the pre-training season, when students are returning from summer break and are most likely to get sick from hot weather.
“Across all sports, we see that the highest risk is also in the first few days of practices, when athletes are returning,” Stearns said. “We don't know what their current fitness is. They might not have been in a regular routine. Again, it's hot and they're doing a new exercise.”
Back at Norwich Free Academy, Cooper said she and the other athletic trainers gather each season so they know what to do ahead of time – before a student gets sick from the heat.
“A lot of your experience, literally, is on the spot,” Cooper said. “You don't see something until it happens. So we being together as a group, as a conference, really helps.”
Áine Pennello is a Report for America corps member who covers the environment and climate change for Connecticut Public.
