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RIVERSIDE — Ebonie Sherwood knows well how critical athletic trainers are to the student athlete.
She was a tri-athlete at Stebbins High School and practicing with the track team in March when she began to feel poorly. Sherwood made it to the trainer’s offices, where the training staff there saved her life when she went into cardiac arrest.
The effect of a nationwide shortage of athletic trainers has reached Dayton Public Schools, where the largest district in the Miami Valley right now is operating without trainers at practices or games. The district’s contract with Kettering Health ended in June.
Sherwood likely would not have survived had there been no athletic trainer at Stebbins that day. Stebbins is in the Mad River Local School District and not part of DPS.
She underwent a heart transplant in March and told News Center 7 Report Kayla McDermott she began speech and physical therapy a couple of weeks ago. She graduated from Stebbins a day after University of Cincinnati Medical Center released her.
“We had Alex and Emily there,” Sherwood recalled Thursday. “I went to my athletic trainer’s offices. And they actually did CPR and had an A-E-D on hand.”
Sherwood is a strong advocate for having trainers at every sporting event.
“It’s really important to get athletic trainers, aside from injuries, like rolling an ankle, or a concussion, they need CPR,” she said, “to have somebody right there that knows [the] athletes and knows what they’re doing.”
