6-Year Anniversary of COVID

Happy 6-Year Anniversary of COVID and Athletics Trainers Stepping Up

Around this time seven years ago, the world shut down due to COVID-19. Sports stopped. Schools closed. Entire systems paused.

When sports began returning, athletic trainers were placed on the front lines of reintegrating athletics back into society.

Athletic trainers suddenly became responsible for:

• Daily symptom screenings and temperature checks

• Isolation and quarantine protocols

• Contact tracing for teams

• Interpreting evolving CDC and institutional policies

• Return-to-play clearance following infection

• Monitoring athletes for post-COVID complications

In many organizations, the athletic trainer was the only healthcare professional consistently present with teams every day.

ATs were not just managing injuries anymore, we were functioning as public health operators inside athletic environments: locker rooms, buses, weight rooms, and practice fields.

Sports at the collegiate and professional level represent multi-billion-dollar industries, and those industries were able to return largely because someone could operationalize medical risk and athlete safety.

Athletic trainers carried that responsibility.

Yet seven years later, I am going to ask an uncomfortable question:

What professional advancements came from that moment of uncertainty and hysteria?

Other healthcare professions leveraged the pandemic for structural gains: expanded scope, reimbursement changes, policy influence, or stronger labor protections.

For athletic trainers, the outcome often looked different:

• Increased workload and responsibility

• Enforcement of controversial policies without institutional backing

• Exposure to health risks without hazard compensation

• Little structural change in compensation, authority, or recognition afterward

Once sports resumed and stadiums filled again, the pandemic work largely became invisible operational labor.

But the experience raises an important reflection for the profession moving forward.

Questions I still have after this pivotal moment in AT history:

Why didn’t athletic training leverage its frontline role during COVID into structural professional advancements?

Who was supposed to be hosting a national/state reflection on how ATs handled the pandemic?

Who should have been responsible for advocating for those gains?

Why did we not become "essential workers," or compensated with "hazard" pay?

How were we not acknowledged at a national scale for being a first step back to normal public operations with athletics?

What lessons should the profession take from this next large-scale health crisis?

How can athletic trainers better translate frontline value into long-term policy influence and professional recognition?