For ailing Crusaders, training room is crucial

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Valparaiso University athletic trainer Rod Moore, left, takes a break from taping the ankles of freshman center Hrvoje Vucic to talk to men's basketball coach Homer Drew at the ARC on campus Wednesday. Moore has been athletic trainer at the school since 1967.

VALPARAISO -- Have you ever watched an orchestra conductor at work? Ever marveled at how he or she can give the percussionists their cue and keep the oboes on beat, all while coaxing some more volume out of the trumpets, demanding a style change from the violins, and mouthing the lyrics to the chorus?

That's Rod Moore right now.

It's 3 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon -- and it's a madhouse in the training room at Valparaiso's Athletics-Recreation Center. Men's basketball players, women's basketball players, soccer players, football players, track runners and throwers -- they're all stuffed in here. All crammed into a tiny room, waiting for a turn on one of the four beds or five tables. Waiting to have their ankles tapes. Or their wrists. Or both. Waiting for some electrical stimulation on a bad back or an aching hip. Waiting for a massage. For a heating pad. For a turn in the ice tub.

At the center of it all is Moore, who's been the Crusaders' head athletic trainer since 1967.

And right now, he's a little busy.

His three assistant athletic trainers, four graduate assistants and handful of student helpers mostly worry about the other sports. Moore's job right now is to get the men's basketball team ready for the 3:30 practice.

It's no easy task today, as the Crusaders look like the walking wounded after a week that dropped them into a tie for first place in the Horizon League, and left players, coaches and fans nervous that several key players could be out for Saturday's highly anticipated home game against perennial conference champion Butler.

Brandon Wood has a pulled hamstring. Ryan Broekhoff has problems with his back, his hip and his thumb. Jay Harris has a sprained ankle. Kevin Van Wijk has his usual back problems. Matt Kenney does, too. And it's not like the rest of the team is feeling all that great three months into the grueling grind of the college basketball season.

And here's the twist: What every single one of these guys needs is rest. A handful of days off would probably leave most of them feeling like it was November again. That's all it would take.

Moore knows this. Moore knows more than just about anybody when it comes to sports medicine. He's in the Athletic Trainers Association Hall of Fame, and the Indiana Football Hall of Fame, too.

But Moore's job isn't to insist they all get the rest they need to feel better. No, his job is to make them feel better enough

so they can get out on the court and practice. Because as desperately as they need to rest, they need to prepare just as much.

"It's a dichotomy," Valparaiso coach Homer Drew says. "I don't know how you juggle that. That's the million dollar question. But you've got to practice. If you don't practice, it's hard to step into a game and play. At this level, it's all about the timing. And when you miss three, four or five days, that timing takes a while to come back."

And so Moore -- maestro of the MASH unit -- goes to work.Rush hour

Wood came in early -- always does. He showed up 90 minutes before practice, stretched on his own, got taped up ahead of the rush and worked on his jumper (that's about all he can do, since running still is out of the question for him). So while he works on 18-footers, his teammates descend on the training room.

Kenney's up first. He's getting his ankles taped. Moore can do this in his sleep by now, of course. First a layer of yellow cellophane-like material to protect the skin and hair. Then a layer of white tape -- over, around, under, around and around and around. Then a layer of flesh-colored bandage -- over, around, under, around and around and around. Then another layer of white tape -- over, around, under, around and around and around. Moore's barely even looking at what he's doing.

Yeah, he's taped a few ankles in his life.

"Hundreds of thousands," he says.

When he's done with Kenney, Moore heads over to one of the beds, where Broekhoff is lying face down. Moore squirts a blue goo on to the ailing swingman's skin and starts the electric stimulation -- "stem," for short -- of Broekhoff's back and hip, the latter of which badly locked up during a win over Milwaukee on Friday when he took a hard elbow. It was only made worse by a few hard collisions underneath the basket on Sunday.

"The weekend was a little bit tough," Broekhoff says with a weary smile.

Moore doesn't have time to do this, of course. Not at 3:05 p.m. So he passes off Broekhoff to one of his assistants and goes back to the taping table -- the first one you see once you enter the room. First up is Hrvoje Vucic. While taping up the 7-footer, Moore answers about six rapid-fire questions from players and trainers. Do this, do that, go here, over there, not now, you've got it.

Howard Little ambles in, grabs a heating pad and lies down on a suddenly open bed -- a hot commodity around these parts. He puts the pad on the back of his left leg and chats with the occupant neighboring bed. Harris limps in and takes off his walking boot so Moore can give it a quick look -- while he's taping Cory Johnson, that is. Over, around, under, around and around and around.

Moore asks Harris how he's doing -- "better," he says -- while Michael Rogers harasses the poor freshman, offering to "help" him with the boot and his socks. Rogers will be taped last, because he needs some extra time to have some protective tape and gauze put on his two mangled big toenails -- both of which are in danger of falling off, an annual postseason occurrence triggered by years of playing barefoot soccer on the hard, dusty ground of Jamaica.

So while taping Johnson, talking with Harris and laughing at Rogers, Moore calls over Broekhoff, who's done with his stem treatment. No room at the inn, though, so Broekhoff -- owner of the most important hip in Valparaiso -- has to stand around and wait his turn like everyone else.

As he finishes up Johnson, Moore asks Broekhoff how the hip's doing.

"Definitely looser," Broekhoff says.

"Good," Moore says. "Hop up."

Broekhoff gets his ankles and left thumb taped up -- "it's not my shooting hand, so it's OK," he explains -- while Moore explains to Van Wijk (who's just had a cortisone injection) that he can't practice today.

"Can I do some walking?" Van Wijk asks.

"Nope. Just ballhandling," Moore replies.

In other words, Van Wijk will join Harris on the side of the gym, sitting in chairs and dribbling a basketball with each hand. Exciting stuff.

Moore doesn't get to unilaterally decide who does what on a given day -- he talks it over with Drew and the rest of the coaching staff each day.

But he does have the ultimate veto power.

"What Rod says, I go with because of his experience," Drew says. "Rod gives me a list every day of who can practice and who can't. Then we discuss what we're doing to rehab those who can't practice."

In other words, nobody's ever completely idle. There's no time for that. Especially not during league play. Especially not when first place and a chance to host the Horizon League Tournament is within reach. Especially not when Butler's on its way.

'You get used to the pain'

It's a fine line Moore walks. His job is to make players better, but his job also is to make injured players available -- if a player has to be patched up with duct tape and chewing gum, so be it. He's just got to squeeze six more weeks or so out of these guys. They'll have all summer to rest.

"Half my work is mental," Moore says. "You've got to get them ready to want to come back and ready to want to play at the highest level."

He shares a story that one of his former assistants tells from his days with the Boston Red Sox. On the first day of spring training, a left-handed pitcher -- a high draft choice given a boatload of guaranteed money -- came to see the athetic trainer. Said his hamstring was bothering him.

"He'd been in camp half a day," Moore says.

So the trainer immediately took the pitcher to the weight room -- didn't even bother looking at the kid's leg. He had the pitcher spend the next 90 minutes lifting, focusing exclusively on strengthening the hamstring. Then he told the pitcher to get some lunch, and come back at 1 p.m. Two more hours of serious lifting.

"He never saw the kid again," Moore says with a laugh. "You want to earn your signing bonus, you've got to be healthy. The little things -- if you're stiff, you're a little sore -- we don't want to know. You've got to suck it up and want to play."

The players know this. And they understand it. Heck, hard as it can be sometimes, they agree with it. It's the cost of that expensive scholarship, the cost of playing basketball at a high level.

"Basically, you just get used to the pain," Kenney says. "You practice so you can get used to playing with it. We had Monday off, which was great, but you can't really take another day off. You've got to prepare. Especially for Saturday, for Butler, we need to prepare as much as we can. But at the same time, we have three or four guys injured, so they need to get better so they can actually play in the game."

Preparation and prevention

The bulk of the work done in the training room is about injury prevention, not treatment. The tape on the ankle won't stop a player from rolling his ankle, but it will lessen the severity should it happen. The massage won't prevent soreness completely, but it will lessen the morning-after pain. The heating pad won't loosen a sore muscle enough to play on it, but it will loosen it enough so that it can be sufficiently stretched.

That's why Wood spends so much time in the training room -- more than any other player at Valparaiso. That's also why his hamstring injury is so maddening to him.

"I'm always in there," Wood says. "I take pride in taking care of my body. I'm always in there stretching, getting massages, in the ice tub, in the hot tub, just doing all I can to help my body. That's one of the most frustrating parts -- I take care of my body so well, so when something like this happens, it's really frustrating. Before this hamstring, I felt like it was the beginning of the season, while other people were wearing down."

Kenney's another guy who spends plenty of time in the training room, whether he's healthy or not. A half hour before practice and a half hour after practice, this is where you'll find him.

Of course, his back still will hurt when he leaves here and heads to the court. He could suffer another concussion at any moment. And he knows he probably won't feel 100 percent until sometime in April or May -- heck, maybe not even until his playing days are over.

But he's still here every day. And so is everybody else.

No, sports medicine is not an exact science. Not in the training room, at least. You can't prepare for an awkward landing on a fast-break drill. You can't prepare for an elbow to the hip. You can't prepare for being run over by a taller, heavier defender and spraining your ankle. You can't prepare for slamming your head into the hardwood. You can't prepare for every eventuality.

But you can sure try. Every athlete at Valparaiso does. Usually in here, in the ARC's cramped little training room. Usually around 3 p.m.

There's a comfort level -- a confidence boost -- that comes with the routine of the heating and the massages and the taping.

Over, around, under, around and around and around.

Then it's go time.

"Some of it's mental," Kenney says. "Just making yourself think that you're fine, so you're able to fight through it. When you come here every day at 3, you know it's practice time. You may be hurting, but so is everybody else. And so are the people on the other teams -- and they're still practicing, so you've got to just fight through it. That's why we're in here."