Wildcat Weekly: Jeff Sage (2020-21 Episode 6)

10/21/2020 1:00:00 PM

Wildcat Weekly brings you inside the locker rooms of Western New York's Premier Division II Team with host Joe Kraus. In the sixth episode of the 2020-21 season, Joe is joined by Jeff Sage, assistant athletics director for sports medicine and performance. Daemen's head athletic trainer for the last 25 years, Sage has been deeply involved in Daemen's COVID-19 response, as well as that of the Division of Athletics. He discusses the work that's been done leading up to and throughout the Fall 2020 semester, what games may look like when they resume, as well as his long history here at Daemen. To view the full episode, click on the play button over the image above, or visit youtube.com/daemensportsinfo.

JEFF SAGE QUOTABLE...

On working through the difficulties brought about by COVID-19...
"It's been a drain, it's been a real drain, not just wrapping up athletics, but being on the emergency response team with the campus, being involved with testing, and as that continues, in contact tracing, it's it's been a lot. And, it continues to be, but you know, we take it day by day. And, you know, we're here for the students and that's what we do."

On the implementation of six-week resocialization plans for Daemen teams...
"It's been working. You know, when we first looked at the whole the big picture of things and how do we get athletics back and doing things in a safe manner, and you have to remember, the whole thing that we're doing here is to keep people safe. It's the student-athletes, it's the coaches, it's the support staff, it's everybody. And how can we do that in a manner that's going to allow some level of activity but safe activity? At the same time, we had to consider that our student-athletes had had an exorbitant amount of time off, in reality double the amount of time off that it normally would have. When you look at a typical summer, it's three months off. When you incorporate half of March, April, May, and then August, it really turned out to be a six-month-plus situation where teams were off. And so, we had to take a look at not only do we need to create a safe environment, we also needed to allow time for student-athletes to get back into shape, to get back into condition before we turn them loose. And when I say turn them loose, it's to go back to a full, intense practice, because we don't want to create a situation where their bodies aren't ready and they end up with major injuries. And so, that was part of the rationale in creating this pod structure over a six-week resocialization period. And we took a guide from the NCAA and what we're doing on campus and put that all together and we came up with a with a six-week resocialization plan. And right now, we're in week five, week five of that, and I think it's gone well. I know some people may say it's not fast enough, but I think not only has our active COVID cases on campus stayed low, and that also is reflected in athletics, but so far we have been able to keep injuries to a minimum as well. So again, we're doing well, we're not finished yet, we got to finish it off and continue on. But so far, so good."

On the importance of universal masking when competitions return...
"So, universal masking is going to be something that I think is going to be here to stay for a period of time. And, you know, that's going to be for all coaches, for any of the support staff, obviously for the medical staff. There's going to be certain situations where we're going to ask our players to have universal masking, and it's to and from the venue, obviously, when they're in common spaces. There's going to be some situations when they're on their field of play or their court that the mask can come off, but we may ask them to put it back on when they're on the bench. So, it's universal masking, that's what I think is going to be here to stay for a period of time."

On assessing different COVID-19 protocols by sport...
"When you look at different sports, part of the things that we look at is it an indoor sport, or is it an outdoor sport. And we can break that down further, but we'll just start on the top here. So indoor and outdoor sports, if we're outside, we have a better opportunity to mitigate any spread of the virus because we're outside, it's open air. We're not in an enclosed space with air getting moved by a machine or things like that. So, outdoors is generally going to be considered safer, all right? So, when you look at our soccers, our tennis, our track and field, cross country, the elements of triathlon, part of the elements of triathlon, so, those things being outdoors is going to be better. Now, if we move inside, which we will as the weather starts to turn and our court sports, volleyball, basketball, and even as we start to train indoors, now we have to take a look at our venues. We have to take a look at our venues in terms of what is the square footage, what is the air movement capability with our infrastructure, also using other fans to move air, opening the doors to get fresh air in. The more that we can do that the more that we have the ability to mitigate any virus spread. And so, those are all the things that we've been trying to do as we have in a controlled fashion ramped up over the six-week period, our resocialization together. When we started, everything was individualized. Now we're at a point in week five here, where we're having pods do things together. There's still no contact, but we're allowing them to do things together and introducing these things as we move along. And again, we'll continue to do that over the next couple of weeks until we get to that full practice part. But even when we get to the full practice part indoors, we're still going to have doors open, fans on, masking if we're not involved in the play, so all these things are going to continue. It's just going to, again, we're taking another step forward, another step forward."

On choosing athletic training as a profession...
"What drove me and to get into sports medicine, athletic training was, I was a high school athlete, I had a couple injuries, ankle injuries in particular. One of them was pretty severe, and I went for physical therapy and liked the idea of that. My mother is a nurse and my sister's a nurse, so you know, the medical field is always kind of been there present. But, I always want to do something in sports. So my first my first thought was, you know, be a P.E. teacher, be a phys-ed teacher. And then I also like the medical side of things. So, you know, back in the day when when we had to meet with a guidance counselor about the talk - okay, what do you want to do when you grow up? Well, I sat across the desk, and this is before computers, of course, before the internet. So, the guidance counselor asked me, 'Hey, what do you want to do?' And I said, 'Well, I think I want to get into physical education.' So we turn around, he had a big bookshelf behind him and he had college catalogs of all the colleges locally. And so I said physical education, he turned around, he pulled out a college catalog from Brockport, SUNY Brockport, and he threw it across the desk and he goes, 'Here, take a read through that, they got a good P.E. program. Have a nice day.' That was my guidance counseling right there. So I took that book home, I opened it, turned to the physical education page, I was flipping through and I came to this section called athletic training. What is athletic training? I never heard of that before. And so I started reading at the description of it. And right then and there, I can still remember sitting at home in a recliner in the house I grew up in reading that paragraph, saying to myself, that's what I want to do.

Daemen College features the premier NCAA Division II athletics program in the Buffalo-Niagara region, sponsoring 17 intercollegiate teams. For the latest information on Daemen Athletics, follow the Wildcats via social media on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, or sign up to receive customizable news alerts, e-mail newsletters and weekly schedule alerts.

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