Walton-Verona sophomore Thomas Mann wanted to stay involved in sports.
Another Bearcat sophomore, Brayden Donato, is on the wrestling team but wanted to stay involved with basketball.
And Nate Holtzapple wanted to “do something medical.”
Mann, Donato, Holtzapple are the equipment managers and trainers – the folks who wash stinky uniforms, mix sports drinks, tape ankles and treat injuries – the things you don’t automatically notice, but are just as important.
“We treat (managers) just as if they are players,” Walton-Verona boys basketball coach Mike Hester said. “They get the same gear, they go on the trips, they do everything that we do. That’s always how it’s been since I’ve been here.”
Mann is in his fourth year as an equipment manager. He played basketball from kindergarten to sixth grade and tried out for the seventh-grade team.
“Seventh grade was the first year that started tryouts,” Mann said. “I wasn’t very good, so I didn’t make the team. All my friends played; I still wanted to be around the team.”
Donato wrestles at 122 pounds, but it wasn’t his first love.
“Actually I played basketball my whole life,” he said. “I quit this year to do wrestling. I wanted to still be with the basketball team, so I decided to be a manager.”
Donato also has a familial connection – older brother Bryce Donato, is a student manager at Western Kentucky University.
“He says it’s a lot of work … he’s up late quite a bit,” Brayden Donato said.
‘Kind of a marriage’
Brady Jones is a trainer at Woodland Middle School and Scott High. The Augusta native and Bracken County grad played baseball at Mount St. Joseph University and graduated from Xavier University’s Masters in Athletic Training program last year.
Jones, a pitcher, sprained his ulnar collateral ligament and broke the growth plate in his right elbow in high school playing for the Polar Bears, but he didn’t have to have Tommy John surgery. He knew nothing about athletic trainers until he arrived at Mount St. Joseph.
“I basically lived in the training room at Mount St. Joseph,” Jones said. “Being a pitcher in baseball, my arm was always dragging. I got to see what they did.”
Jones and Holtzapple work at St. Elizabeth Healthcare – Holtzapple’s been Walton-Verona’s trainer for about 10 years after working at Pendleton County and Dayton. He played baseball and soccer at Lexington High School in north central Ohio.
“I wanted to do something medical, and yet I loved sports,” he said. “(Athletic training’s) kind of a marriage of the two.”
Holtzapple said he’s at least part psychologist – he said that “is part of the fun” of his job.
“I enjoy that ‘cause you build a relationship, you build trust with the athletes,” he said. “They’ll tell me stuff that they don’t tell their coaches or the parents.”
Holtzapple encourages athletes to share things with parents – especially the mental struggles.
“A lot of them have never been hurt before, so they don’t know what to expect,” he said.
Jones filled in at Bellevue to start the school year, and he went to preseason meetings with parents. He said athletes usually don’t hide things from him. “If they do, they don’t hide it well,” he said.
Football is the most dangerous sport. Holtzapple said a Walton-Verona football player’s injury five years ago (a dislocated elbow) was the most gruesome he’s ever seen.
“One of our running backs fell with his arm out, and the result was his arm pointing in a way it shouldn’t,” Holtzapple said.
Jones said the story of Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills football player who suffered a cardiac arrest during a Jan. 2, 2023 game against the Cincinnati Bengals and subsequently recovered, ‘gave more awareness to what we do.’
Jordan Wilt and his girlfriend Emily Weitzel also work at St. Elizabeth. Wilt covers Simon Kenton High School and Summit View and Twenhofel middle schools, and Weitzel covers Newport Central Catholic.
“We definitely bounce ideas off of each other and talk about certain situations if we’re not sure how to go about treatments or just weird injuries that we see,” Wilt said.
Wilt worked at Meadowview Regional Medical Center in Maysville before coming to St. Elizabeth, and he covered Mason County sports. He was on his way to his normal spot on the sidelines when a player dislocated a patella during a soccer match.
“It was less than 20 seconds into the game, and I guess wasn’t mentally locked into being there at the game yet,” Wilt said. “I just had to improvise on the fly really quick. It was the first traumatic injury I had seen.”
Laundry time
Mann and Donato are in the locker room by 3 p.m. most days. Mann runs the scoreboard during practices.
On game days, they have a routine – both mix sports drinks, put uniforms in lockers and fetch whatever a player might want.
After a game, there’s the smelly laundry.
“I don’t do all the laundry,” Mann said. “Usually, the coaches have already started it when I get here.”
Game and practice uniforms are treated differently.
“If it’s the game jerseys, what I’ll do, I’ll put them in the washer,” Mann said. “We just take them out; we don’t dry them, we just hang them up so we don’t ruin them. Practice jerseys, we dry those along with towels and stuff.”
And Donato?
“I don’t do the laundry,” he said. “I just fold it.”
Mann and Donato aren’t sure about career plans. Jones, meanwhile, wouldn’t mind working for a college or professional team, but he’s content where he is.
“Of course, I feel like everyone has that big goal of working with a pro sports team, but you don’t always get those opportunities,” Jones said. “I’d love to work college or anything baseball-related just because that’s what I played in college, of course. I will be happy to work high school … I know what it’s like to be hurt.”
