Meeting Institutional Needs

In a previous entry, I promised to discuss the searches my institution is undertaking this year. This is an update on our search in human performance/athletic training.

We have an excellent athletic-training program, which was enthusiastically reaffirmed last year by the Council for the Accreditation of Athletic Training Education. The program provides students with great opportunities to learn from and network with athletes and health-care providers on and off the campus. Its graduates earn places in excellent master’s and doctoral programs. The collaboration between the academic program in athletic training and our athletics program is a wonderful example of how departments can work together to enrich students’ experiences on the campus.

One thing the accreditation council strongly recommended, however, was the addition of another tenure-track faculty member to support the athletic-training program, which currently operates with one doctorate-holding tenure-track faculty member and an array of clinical faculty members who have a mix of teaching and clinical duties. At the same time, we have a growing program in human performance, which is also supported by one doctorally qualified tenure-track faculty member, and has significant overlap with the athletic-training program.

A crying need in the athletics program is improved support for strength and conditioning. Ideally, the athletics program would get a full-time strength-and-conditioning coach. However, the money is just not there to make that hire now, and so we need to figure out how to improve our work in that area while addressing other program needs as well, all the while protecting the physical well-being of our student athletes, which is the primary job of our athletic trainers. This whole complex situation is typical of how things work at small colleges and universities. There are always a few more needs (real needs, not just wants that someone thinks are needs) than can be met with current resources.

Fortunately, we were able to develop a financing plan for a new position in athletic training. Initially the athletics department suggested that we allocate that position to strength and conditioning since clinical training is reasonably well covered; however, financing for the position is actually predicated on the academic recommendation from the accreditation council, so we are not going to shift the emphasis. In addition, adding a new faculty member in athletic training will enable us to shift our master’s-level trainers back to doing more clinical work with student athletes without reducing our academic program, which should help all the departments involved.

We’ve arrived at a compromise. We’re listing strength and conditioning in our ad as a highly desired qualification for potential candidates. Realistically, though, there are not a huge number of doctorate-holding certified athletic trainers who are also certified in strength and conditioning. Whether we’ll be able to find such a person who is also willing to move to Storm Lake, Iowa, is an interesting question. But we’re going to try.

When small institutions such as mine hire, they often try to cover the widest range of needs possible. As this story shows, there are multiple factors that go into making hiring decisions, and it also partly explains why job advertisements sometimes include wide-ranging qualifications. It’s not an optimal process, but we almost always need to stretch to fit as many hopes into an ad as possible.