By KELLY FENTON
Leader sports editor
It was a simple reverse play to Terrell L’Herise, with wide receiver Demetrius Harris providing the interference on the edge.
But a Mountain Home defender slipped underneath Harris and dove on top of L’Herise’s foot just as he planted it.
It was one of the two worst injuries Jacksonville head coach Mark Whatley has ever witnessed. L’Herise, an outstanding athlete with a promising future, had suffered a complete dislocation of his knee. He is still in rehabilitation and likely has a year more of it ahead.
“That ranked right up there,” said Whatley, who will be starting his fourth season at the Red Devil helm this fall. “When I was at Southern Arkansas University, I had a kid sever an artery. But Terrell’s was as bad as I’ve seen.”
And yet, thanks to Jacksonville athletic trainer Jason Cates, L’Herise, who graduated last month, hasn’t abandoned dreams of playing again. Cates has been working with L’Herise ever since, but has gone beyond what anyone might have expected of a man who, after all, isn’t even an employee of Jacksonville High School. Cates works for Ortho Arkansas, which donates Cates’ time to the school.
Cates had heard about a similar injury to Philadelphia Eagles free safety J.R. Reed. Reed began wearing a new type of brace — one which has just recently been patented — and is now back playing.
“I had never dealt with an injury of this type before,” Cates said. “I called all the other trainers I knew to see if they knew of anything. A friend from NFL Europe told me about J.R.’s injury.”
Cates got in contact with Reed, then put Reed and L’Herise in contact with one another. The result: A similar brace is on its way to L’Herise.
“He’s not hanging up his cleats yet,” Cates said. “There’s a chance he’ll get to play football again. J.R. told Terrell, ‘Just because medically they tell you your career is over doesn’t mean it’s so. Look at me. I’m playing at the highest level.’”
That is just one of the many things that has Whatley in awe of Cates, and grateful beyond words for his services.
“There’s no way I could ever say enough,” Whatley said. “The thing with Terrell — that stuff never ceases to amaze me, what (Cates) gets done. Not just football, but baseball, softball, basketball; he covers all of it. And he does it with a genuine caring. I don’t even know if he looks at it like a job.”
HIGHEST HONOR
And yet, the L’Herise case probably had little, if anything, to do with the recent high honor Cates received. The Jacksonville native and Arkansas State alum was named Arkansas Athletic Trainer of the Year last month.
According to Eric Linson, assistant trainer at the University of Arkansas, and President of the Arkansas Athletic Trainers Association (AATA), it has been Cates’ tireless work in helping to launch a legislative task force for better health care for athletes at the secondary school level that was pivotal in his earning the award this year.
“The award is geared for the person who has distinguished himself or brought recognition to the profession during the course of the year,” Linson said. “This recognition is for Jason’s bulldog attitude to make the public aware of the issue of health care (for secondary school athletes) and to communicate that to the state senators and representatives.”
The state received another dramatic reminder of the issue of inadequate health care for athletes when Parkview basketball player Anthony Hobbs died suddenly on the court earlier this year.
Yet Linson bristles when asked if Hobbs’ death was the impetus for the latest efforts to improve health care, citing the disturbing slate of Arkansas youngsters who have died during athletic activity over the past 13 years.
“That wouldn’t be fair to Kendrick Fincher of Rogers (who died of dehydration in 1995),” Linson said. “That wouldn’t be fair to Rodrick Morris of Camden or Gary Richardson Jr.”
Linson ticked off a long list of accidents and injuries to athletes at the secondary level. Morris died of heat stroke in 1997; Richardson collapsed and died during football at McGehee High; North Little Rock’s Kenyana Tolbert, already signed and heading to Oklahoma State the following year, was paralyzed in 1998 and died last year; eighth grader Jeremy Spinnett died after suffering head injuries in 1999; Anthony Brown of Malvern suffered a cervical fracture and died in 2001; Samuel Urton collapse and died at a North Little Rock basketball practice in 2003.
It was Brown’s death in 2001 that really got the attention of the AATA.
“We have known for a long time,” Cates said. “To say they could have all been prevented, it’s hard to say. But a lot of it could have.”
If the high number of tragedies is disturbing, so too is the low number of schools that have a trainer available. Of the 344 high schools around the state that field a varsity team of some sort, only about 50 have athletic trainers at their disposal, Cates said. Of those, only about 10 high schools actually employ a trainer. The rest of the schools, including Jacksonville, have trainers only through the donations of hospitals or sports medicine clinics.
Cates works for Ortho Arkansas, but devotes much of his time each week to being a trainer to Jacksonville athletes. He is passionate about his work.
“Just because a kid’s in high school doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve the same level of care as the kids in college or the NBA or the NFL,” he said. “Everyone knows those athletes are taken care of. Unfortunately, at the high school level, too much goes unattended to.
“Some high schools don’t even have paramedic services available on Friday nights in football season.”
Adds Linson: “We have 17 certified athletic trainers for 400 athletes at the University of Arkansas. That much expenditure at a college, but we can’t afford to have someone there when Kendrick Fincher has a heat stroke? And there’s no ambulance when Anthony Brown broke his neck? We’re really trying not to be reactionary. We’re being proactive.”
GETTING THE GOVERNMENT INVOLVED
After several years of pushing for it, the AATA finally got some action. In April of 2007, Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe signed a resolution providing for a legislative task force to look into the issue of sports medicine for athletes and health care in general at the secondary school level.
Cates, who serves as an at-large delegate on the AATA’s executive committee and as the secondary schools chairman, became the point man in the battle to get the state to make changes. The task force finally convened last fall and had its first hearing earlier this year. Cates was there to provide guidance, as he will be when the task force meets again this Wednesday.
“Jason has been very instrumental in educating everyone along the way, from the coaches to the Department of Education to school nurses to the legislators to the Arkansas Paramedics Association. He’s been a bulldog trying to address minimum athletic health care in the state.”
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that things could well get worse before they get better. That’s because budget cuts and cuts in Medicaid are forcing clinics and hospitals to cut back on their largesse to the schools. That means even fewer trainers available.
“Fort Smith is a great example,” Linson said. “The two high schools each had a trainer provided by a hospital. The hospital finally said, ‘Sorry, because of costs, we can’t do it anymore.’”
That means schools more than ever will be on their own to provide their own athletic trainers. But that costs money. In the meantime, as hospitals and clinics begin cutting back, trainers are leaving the state, Cates said.
“That’s why I’m so passionate about this,” he insists. “We only have 175 certified athletic trainers in the state of Arkansas who actually have jobs in their field. That means we have to be careful what we wish for. We want to make sure the kids are taken care of, but if the task force recommends legislation that every school has to have a certified athletic trainer, we don’t have the bodies.”
To that end, Cates, who has traveled to other states to try to learn how they are handling the matter of sports medicine in schools, is hoping the Department of Education will add sports medicine to high school curriculum, to get kids interested at an early age.
“The hope is that, once they graduate and get certification, they’ll stay in the state.”
MINIMUM STANDARDS OF HEALTH CARE
In the meantime, there are things the state can do to ensure at least minimum standards for athletic health care, Cates said. And it goes beyond the issue of automatic external defibrillators (AEDs), which became such a major controversy after Hobbs’ death.
“Everyone thinks if every high school has an AED, that’s it,” Linson said. “I’m not saying that’s not an important issue. But if you have an AED, who’s trained to use it?”
Cates agrees.
“Just having one on the wall is not going to save anyone’s life,” he said. “They’re nice to have if you can afford it. But, more than likely, an AED is going to be used on a non-athlete — a parent or a fan.
“The big thing is having people CPR-certified. There was legislation in 1975 to have one CPR-certified person on campus. But what’s wrong with having students CPR-certified? They’re going to probably be closest to an individual in distress.”
Cates boils down the primary goals of the AATA vis a vis the legislative task force to (not necessarily in order of importance): 1) creating a sports medicine advisory to the Arkansas Activities Association, 2) emergency action plans and drills at each school, 3) minimum requirements for preparticipation physicals, 4) staph infection education, 5) CPR certification, 6) Concussion guidelines, among others.
Regarding the advisory committee, Cates said he has run into some resistance from the AAA.
“The National Federation of State High School Association (NFSHA) encourages advisory committees to the athletics association at each state,” Cates said. “The guys at the AAA are all smart people, they’re all ex-coaches or ex-principles, ex-superintendents, but no one is policing all the medical jargon from the NFSHA. We don’t have anybody helping them decipher it or determining how best to implement it. The executive board at the AAA keeps denying us.”
Lance Taylor, executive director at the AAA, maintains an advisory board is not necessary, given the sports medicine meetings he and Dr. Joey Walters, one of the AAA’s associate executive directors, attend each year at the NFSHA.
“The National Sports Medicine Committee (at the NFSHA) keeps us current with everything, and they revise their books every year,” Taylor said. “They have four trainers on the committee, and we just haven’t seen a need to have an advisory committee here.”
Emergency action plans are also vital, Cates said, so that medical professionals can know precisely where they need to go if, say, an accident occurs on campus. An AED drill, assuming a school has an AED on hand, is as important as a fire drill in keeping people prepared, Cates said.
Cates also said there is a real problem with preparticipation physicals verification.
“There’s no enforcement,” he insists. “Most coaches are real conscientious, but there are bad apples in every group and you might have a coach checking off that a kid got his physical whether he did or not.
“Or I’ll get a note from a doctor saying the student got a physical but with no information like allergies or blood pressure or anything.”
One of the big issues these days, Cates said, is staph infection, an illness that has been in the news the past several years. Untrained individuals, Cates said, can’t identify it. The result can mean loss of a limb, or even death.
And Cates said there should be guidelines for identifying and treating concussions.
“Who’s making sure coaches are handling these cases properly?” he said. “Right now, it’s up to the coach’s discretion.”
TAKING CARE OF ATHLETES
Cates said it’s too early to determine what effect his efforts and the efforts of the legislative task force will have on athletic health care at secondary schools. In the meantime, when he’s not educating the task force or looking at other models from other states or doing his marketing job at Ortho Arkansas, Cates is tending to Jacksonville athletes, something for which Whatley remains thoroughly grateful.
“We are just very fortunate to have him, and the parents are very fortunate to have him watching out for their kids. He’s phenomenal and very deserving of his award.
“And another thing, the hours that guy puts in, his wife must be one heck of a woman. She probably deserved wife of the year award.
“It says a lot about them not only as people, but as family people.”
Cates returns the high praise for the entire coaching staff at Jacksonville.
“Our coaches are awesome about doing special things, managing situations, working with me with the kids that have injuries,” he said. “They get the kids down time when they need it. That makes it a lot easier for me.”
As for his award, Cates admits it’s flattering.
“It’s a pretty big deal, coming from your peers and being voted on by your peers,” he said. “Athletic trainers as a whole and as a profession are always behind the scene, never looking for glory. We’re just there to take care of athletes.
“For someone to notice what you’re doing is a pretty big deal.”
