Wayne Sawchuk

Introducing Wayne Sawchuk…

The first Alaskan to be interviewed in this series is not originally Alaskan at all, but an Alaskan transplant by choice. Wayne Sawchuk is currently the Activities Coordinator and a physical education teacher at West Valley High School in Fairbanks, Alaska, but he has an array of previous roles within athletics. Wayne is originally from Kenora, Ontario, Canada, and “like every Canadian [he] grew up wanting to be an NHL hockey player.” He started out playing junior hockey, and eventually was granted a Division I athletics scholarship to play hockey at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF), where he pursued a degree in physical education. After graduation from UAF, Wayne says he was fortunate enough to be able to get a job working as a physical education teacher and coach, which was what he knew he eventually wanted to do after graduation. Wayne has coached and taught in a variety of settings, from elementary school all the way to high school, and with many sports to include soccer, volleyball, hockey, junior golf, and more, and he has now been an educator for an impressive 26 years.

In his current role as Activities Coordinator at West Valley High School, Wayne is responsible for a plethora of things. One of his primary roles is to hire coaches and ensure that they have completed the necessary trainings and paperwork for the district to include mandatory CPR training, as well as other requirements through the Alaska School Activities Association (ASAA) and the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). Wayne also helps to ensure that all of the student-athletes have completed their required paperwork and training tasks, to include yearly physical exams, understanding of the attendance policies, and completion of “Tobacco, Alcohol, & Drug” (TAD) training trough ASAA. Aside from enforcing adherence to the various policies surrounding high school athletics, Wayne is responsible for coordinating and scheduling practice times and game schedules for the numerous sports teams at the school.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to Wayne’s usual responsibilities, he has also gained several others. As an administrator, Wayne has become responsible for helping to craft and enforce the COVID-19 mitigation plans at West Valley, to include screening of student athletes and spectators at games and practices. Wayne also helps coordinate quarantines of specific teams after an exposure. When teams travel to other districts, or other districts travel to West Valley, Wayne helps to ensure that the mitigation plans between the two districts or schools are being considered and enforced. Recently, Wayne and a few other West Valley staff have also been trained to administer Rapid antigen-based COVID-19 tests so that they may do so when wrestling starts and the athletes must be tested routinely before competitions. Wayne says that, with the COVID-19 pandemic and the additional responsibilities and considerations that come with it, “the biggest thing is just trying to find ways to let our athletes be able to participate in something.”

Wayne has had numerous positive experiences with athletic trainers throughout the years in his various roles within athletics. He tells us that he was first introduced to an athletic trainer as a junior hockey player when he received a thigh contusion. Wayne says that having an athletic trainer on the bench with the team was invaluable because the athletic trainer was able to teach the team about injuries and injury recovery, and specifically that Wayne realized how important an athletic trainer was to his ability to return to play after an injury.

As a coach and administrator, Wayne says he feels very fortunate that he has always had the opportunity to have an athletic trainer provided by the district to his student-athletes in Fairbanks. He appreciates the burden that athletic trainers take off of him so that he can focus on his duties, and athletic trainers can do their jobs to protect the student-athletes. Specifically, Wayne says he appreciates the care that athletic trainers take to follow the concussion protocol. He says that having athletic trainers has made his life much easier, as he “[lets] the professional deal with” recognizing and monitoring athletes with concussions. He sees the value in having an athletic trainer present so that there is “legally somebody there that could take care of the kids and devote their full time with the kid when an injury did happen.”

When asked what value he thinks that athletic trainers provide overall in the athletic setting, Wayne says that he “values athletic trainers way up there” as being “just as important as the coaching staff. It’s the relationships that they build with the kids because they have a little more on-on-one time when maybe they’re evaluating an injury or they’re talking to them after a game. And sometimes we get insight as coaches that there may be those kids that, you know, it’s not an injury. Maybe it’s just more that they’re a little frustrated with playing time or something else is going on. So I think sometimes an athletic trainer has to be a little bit of a sports psychologist to our athletes too. And that sometimes gets relayed to the coaches [because] sometimes we don’t see something that gets shown to us.” In the overall world of health care, Wayne believes that part of the value in athletic trainers is in “keeping the kids in a safe environment” and teaching the student-athletes about various things, such as “rehabbing an injury.” Wayne remembers hearing conversations between athletic trainers and athletes where the athletic trainer described the difference between doing “just the basic icing for 10 minutes” and “icing and doing other things,” and how healing and safety are impacted by each option.

When asked what other real-life examples he has seen of the NATM theme “Athletic Trainers are Essential to Health Care,” Wayne tells us that he has been fortunate to have had very positive experiences with athletic trainers at West Valley. He says that he can tell when they have had a certain athletic trainer at the school for multiple years, because the relationships they have with the athletes are different. The school sometimes has a rotation of athletic trainers, and Wayne says that only one athletic trainer that has been at West Valley has ever struggled. That athletic trainer had only been at the school for one day, and had not had the opportunity to develop relationships yet with the athletes. However, Wayne says that he noticed once the relationships with the athletes had been built, the athletic trainer was much more successful and the athletes were willing to share things with the athletic trainer that they may not have revealed to anyone else. Wayne says that, in his experience, these relationships that athletic trainers are able to build are vital in encouraging athletes to “reveal” their injuries, which allows the athletic trainer to effectively do their job to keep the athletes safe, healthy, and playing the sports they love. We would have to agree with Wayne that these relationships between athletic trainers and athletes, and the doors that they open, are just some of the many reasons that athletic trainers are truly essential to health care.