Colton’s Athletic Trainers are on the call

March’s National Athletic Trainer Month highlights CHS’s athletic training program and its adviser, Megan Kelley

Erin Dallatorre, Pepper Bough Staff Writer|April 7, 2022

J. Dollins

Megan Kelley and her team of athletic trainers support an injured Colton football player during the 2021 season.

Tennis, softball, baseball, and track and field are all well-known sports played in the spring. They are also potentially dangerous if you make a wrong move. When an athlete gets hurt, who are you going to call to help them out? 

At Colton High, there is only one answer. Megan Kelley, Colton’s sports medicine professional and athletic trainer. 

Athletic Trainer Megan Kelley discusses health and safety with Steven Medina during a timeout. (Olivia Torres)

Coincidentally, spring also yields the month of March; National Athletic Trainer Month. 

NATM’s purpose is to spread awareness about the profession of Athletic Trainers and the work they do to keep others at the top of their game. 

Athletic trainers deal with the prevention and treatment of most sports related injuries, but also work in schools, colleges and universities, military, performing arts, and industrial type settings.

While Kelley is able to work in all of these settings, she is devoted to Colton. Kelley is always at CHS’s football games, home or away, watching and taking care of our student athletes with her Sports Medicine students. 

She teaches Medical Services Occupations for HEAL Pathway and Sports Medicine as a rigorous elective for seniors. 

To add to that rigor, she has students accompany her to games so they can learn and help make sure everything goes smoothly for the players. The job is tough, but they love it. 

“I’m actually enjoying it more than I thought I was going to,” explains Sports Medicine student Valerie Andrade, “I thought it was going to be difficult to understand, but I think if you have the passion for sports you can do it.”

A passion for sports and an interest in the human body was also Kelley’s motivation for becoming an Athletic Trainer. 

“We actually had an ROP program for sports medicine at my high school,” she shares. “And I took it because I knew I really liked the human body and I knew that I was an athlete so I had that sort of athletic identity to my own psyche. I wanted to find a way to combine those two loves of sports and the human body. So I said ‘Well sports medicine makes perfect sense, right?’ Took the course, fell in love immediately. I was like ‘Oh no this is what I have to do.’” 

She continued to explore the occupation and did all the necessary programs and exams to earn her athletic training credential. 

As Athletic Training has become more recognized, the bar for entering the profession has been raised in recent years, requiring lots of clinical hours working in internships. 

To get Kelley’s own students that kind of hands-on experience before college, she not only allows them to accompany her home games, but she also advises the Sports Medicine Club. 

The club is separate from the Sports Medicine class, granting students the opportunity to join Kelley at different schools for away games. 

To join the Sports Medicine Cub, students must submit an application and interview. There are limited spots available. If students want to join this club to learn about sports medicine, it is recommended they are enrolled in the class. 

Megan Kelley shares her passion for sports and health care through her teaching and helping out the next generation of Athletic Trainers for this growing profession.