Search for athletic trainer underway

Lyndon State College has been without a full-time athletic trainer for almost four months, but soon this will no longer be the case. 

"Dr. Sgherza is our acting athletic trainer with limited hours as he is very busy with his faculty position and his chairperson position in the [exercise science] department", said athletic director Chris Ummer about the current situation. "We're re-posting the search sometime in March, with the expectation of a better candidate pool for hiring August 1."

The athletic trainer position became available midway through the fall semester, following the resignation of athletic trainer Peter Guilfoyle.  He chose not to continue in his job at this academic institution in order to purse academics of his own. 

"I did resign at the end the fall 2010 semester," said Guilfoyle in an e-mailed statement.  "For a variety of different reasons, I decided to pursue a career change and returned to school full-time. I am pursuing a professional degree in physician assistant studies."

The athletic department had hoped to find a full-time candidate last fall to fill Guilfoyle's position. However, its search turned out to be a fruitless effort.

"We did post this position and conducted a search; unfortunately we had a relatively small candidate pool, which didn't really produce a person qualified for this position," said Ummer.  "So we went to plan B, and plan B was to contract somebody to at least have minimal coverage each day and for the varsity contests.  What we are doing now, Anthony Sgherza is the person we hired.  He does approximately 15 hours of training each week, and conducts evaluations, referrals, treatments, consultations for varsity athletes only, and then covers home contests."

Ummer says time was not on Lyndon's side when they conducted a candidate search in the fall. 

 "That's the other piece too, it was a really short hiring period, we had to go quickly with it," said Ummer.  "Whoever we would have hired would have had two weeks or ten days.  It didn't work out. We kind of had a hunch when we posted the position, we still wanted to give it a shot but it didn't work out."

While the current athletic training situation may not be ideal, Ummer says the college is still meeting conference and NCAA rules by providing a trainer for home athletic contests.

"I hate to say it this way but under the circumstances, we're doing the best we can," said Ummer.  "Now that we have the time and a better candidate pool, we'll be able to conduct a thorough search and find the right person for the position."