MELBOURNE, Fla. — High school sports are beginning for the new school year, and Holy Trinity is working with Orlando Health to provide student athletes with access to medical care, injury rehabilitation and sideline coverage.
The collaboration is in its second year. Last year, physicians volunteered 36 hours of sideline medical coverage at all Holy Trinity home football games, and 50 athletes were cared for over the course of the season.
Holy Trinity 11th-grader Peyton Mathis, a track and field athlete, said she competes in the 100, the 200 and the 4×1 relay.
In the relay, Mathis is the anchor who takes the baton to the finish line. She also plays softball, and it was on the softball field that she suffered a groin injury during a national tryout.
“I had slid into a base and it just pulled the opposite way,” Mathis said.
Through the school’s partnership with Orlando Health, Mathis began rehabilitation right away and returned to sports in less than a month.
James Phillips, Holy Trinity’s athletic director, said that access to expert care is something the school wants for all of its athletes.
“We are trying to provide a safe environment for them to compete, and working with Orlando Health certainly provides us to do that,” Phillips said.
Dr. Kyle Cox, an orthopedic sports medicine physician with Orlando Health, said athletes can face added risks when they increase activity at the start of a season.
“Students have spent time over the summer; they have varying degrees of activity in that time frame, then they start ramping up acutely when the season starts, and that exposes athletes to different levels of stress and contact,” Cox said.
Mathis said the process helped her return to sports quickly.
“I’m so grateful, it’s such an easy process, and we can get back playing right away,” she said.
Florida law requires student athletes to receive a pre-participation physical before playing sports. A total of 127 Holy Trinity student athletes received them at an event in Melbourne in July.