Enhancing Athletic Trainer Attentiveness With A Dedicated Goalkeeper Water System

FC Cincinnati is a professional soccer organization playing in Major League Soccer. Along with the first team they have a second team and an academy program. The academy program consists of multiple age groups with three athletic trainers. The goalkeepers within the academy program train off to the side from the rest of the team. With this separation the goalkeepers need their own water bottles which they gather for themselves. The current model sees the goalkeepers accumulating an overabundance of water bottles that the athletic trainer (AT) or athletic training student (ATS) must retrieve, fill, and return a proper number of water bottles back to the goalkeepers. The plan is to come up with a system that eliminates the need for the AT or ATS to retrieve, fill and return the water bottles back to the goalkeepers. The process will consist of a dedicated water rack, an empty water rack, and a process for the goalkeepers to bring the empty water rack full of empty water bottles to the AT, ATS, or placing the rack on the 10-gallon water jug before taking a new full rack of water bottles. A baseline of ten training days will be conducted to get current model numbers. Followed by ten training days after implementation of the new process to gather data. The new process dropped the number of trips that the ATS took to the goalkeepers practice area thus improving his attentiveness to the field training at hand. With attentiveness improved I recommend that any organization that is set up in the same manner adopt this process to increase their ATs attentiveness.