Skip to main content

In the Midst of a Concussion Crisis, Why Does Oklahoma Artificially Limit the Number of Athletic Trainers?

Several Oklahoma news outlets have recently taken a deep dive into the problem of concussions in high school football. Stories have examined the inadequate data tracking of the Oklahoma State Schools Activity Association (OSSAA), an effort to legally require schools to keep an ambulance on site at football games, and even the differences in rules between high school and college ball that encourage quarterbacks to take additional hits rather than throw the ball away. 

Notably absent from the coverage has been mention of the overly restrictive licensing regime the state has set up for athletic trainers, which artificially restricts the supply of athletic trainers when they are apparently sorely needed.

 My research on the subject found that half of Oklahoma’s counties (38 of 77) do not have a single licensed athletic trainer. Others present an even more dire situation, reporting that only 13% of schools have a full time athletic trainer and only 32% even have a part time trainer. Of those counties that do have practicing athletic trainers, 10 have only 1 in the entire county.

This dearth of athletic trainers is unsurprising given the relatively cumbersome process of obtaining a license. Budding athletic trainers must obtain a 4-year college degree to be licensed. Contrasted with Oklahoma’s paramedic training requirement (itself unnecessarily onerous) that can be completed in just over six months, the 4-year degree requirement seems a little overboard.

What’s worse, the way Oklahoma’s licensing law is written creates a perverse incentive to avoid seeking the advice of a medical doctor. The law defines athletic training as rendering certain services to athletes “upon written protocol from the team physician or consulting physician to effect care.” Accordingly, any activity undertaken without consultation of a physician falls outside the scope of the license, and thus cannot be prosecuted for unlicensed practice. A volunteer or coach who effectively serves as the trainer on the team puts himself at risk of prosecution if—and only if—he follows a doctor’s protocol. For a high school with strained resources or located in an area without a licensed trainer, it is likely this practice occurs regularly.

The spate of recent news coverage of concussions has examined the usual policy prescriptions proposed by interest groups and politicians to address such hard to manage problems (more legal mandates, more funding from the state, more data tracking), but there is a simpler option that never gets talked about. Rather than erecting unnecessary barriers through lengthy and cumbersome licensing schemes, let’s reduce the obstacles to training and deploying athletic trainers. That is, let’s get rid of the licensing requirement all together.

Our athletic trainer licensing law unnecessarily restricts otherwise qualified individuals from providing needed services to our kids. Consider a retired military medic who wishes to volunteer as an athletic trainer for her son’s high school football team, at a school without the resources to hire a licensed athletic trainer. Under current law, it is a crime for her to volunteer her services, unless she does so without following a doctor’s protocol. The athletes on the team must make do with unguided assistance, or simply do without any assistance at all. How does this promote health and safety?

Concussion protocols are actually fairly easy to come by, and have been successfully implemented at the college and pro level in recent years. The information (and training) is available. It shouldn’t take more than a short, once a year training course to get that information and training to every high school in the state. It certainly doesn’t require a 4-year degree. What is needed to make protocols successful is a dedicated person on each team whose primary job is to see them through.

If the Legislature wants to make a dent in the concussion problem, it can do so - without spending a dime - by repealing the athletic trainer license.

Benjamin Lepak is Legal Fellow at the 1889 Institute. He can be reached at blepak@1889institute.org.

Popular posts from this blog

School Teachers Begging for Basics

What if a hospital’s administrators regularly told surgeons to make do without bandages, with dull scalpels, and little to no anesthetic while claiming tight finances? With all the money hospitals have , there would be questions about the administrators’ competence and possibly audits to look for malfeasance. Something like this needs to happen at Oklahoma City Public Schools. My wife is a teacher working in the Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS) system. Last year, she came home telling me how there was no paper available for the notoriously few and regularly broken, undersupplied duplicating machines at her school. What’s more, there was no plan for the district to provide any. In the past, she was told, a parent had donated paper to that particular campus, but that parent had transferred his child to a private school. The school had surplus paper from previous years, but that was gone. There were no plans for the district to provide more. Now, I am well aware that educatio...
Read more

Present Reforms to Keep the Ghost of State Questions Past from Creating Future Headaches

Oklahoma, like many western states, allows its citizens to directly participate in the democratic process through citizen initiatives and referendums. In a referendum, the legislature directs a question to the people — usually to modify the state constitution, since the legislature can change statutes itself. An initiative requires no legislative involvement, but is initiated by the people via signature gathering, and can be used to modify statute or amend the constitution. Collectively, the initiatives and referendums that make it onto the ballot are known as State Questions.   Recently, there have been calls to make it more difficult to amend the constitution. At least two proposals are being discussed. One would diversify the signature requirement by demanding that a proportional amount of signatures come from each region of the state. The other would require a sixty percent majority to adopt a constitutional amendment rather than the fifty percent plus one currently in place. ...
Read more

Oklahoma Leaders Should Demand Congress Fix the Supreme Court’s Mess, Not Rush to Strike a Deal with the Tribes

Five lawyers in Washington, D.C. have announced that many of us have been living on Indian reservations all this time, we just didn’t know it. In response, several of our elected state leaders have made noises indicating they are in the process of giving away the store in resulting negotiations with tribal leaders, apparently driven by defeatism and panic. They should get off this losing course, and instead demand that the one body that can fix this mess do so: Congress. First, how we got here. Jimcy McGirt, a revolting human being who was convicted of molesting, raping, and forcibly sodomizing his wife’s four-year-old granddaughter, has been justly rotting away in a cage for some 20 years as part of the 1,000-years-plus-life-in-prison sentence he was mercifully handed by an Oklahoma jury in 1997. McGirt came up with a clever legal theory, though. He claimed the State of Oklahoma never had jurisdiction to prosecute him because he is Indian and his crimes were committed on Creek reserv...
Read more

Is Education No Longer the Primary Mission of Our Public Schools?

Did you know that the state of Oklahoma is currently experiencing not one, but two pandemics? Until yesterday, neither did I. According to the Oklahoma City School District, the state is currently experiencing the “dual pandemics of COVID-19 and Systemic Racism,” and has decided to spend valuable time and resources to ensure that their teachers learn how to “practice alternative ways of relating to…[their]students.” In the meantime, teachers are supposed to conduct their classes online   into November. Unfortunately, if the District doesn’t adequately prepare their teachers to use the available online learning platforms, it won’t matter how woke they are, they won’t be interacting with their students at all.   At this point, we really have no idea what the school year will look like, and school districts have given little basis for optimism that students will actually learn anything. Oklahoma City public schools closed in March and “went online.” However, due to lack of suffi...
Read more