Hi everyone, welcome to Sudbury interviews.

Today we have Cassie friend she's a certified athletic therapist working with active therapy plus on Lawrence St.

and we'll be discussing her career today.

Before we begin, you can find us on Sudstown and join the conversation.

If you would like to be a guest on the show, please reach out.

Hey, Cassie, how you doing?

I'm.

Great.

How are you?

Great.

Thanks for coming on the show today.

I'm really excited to be here.

So what does a certified athletic therapist do?

So the best way to describe it is I like to say that if at least for me personally, I treat very similar to a physiotherapist.

So I do a lot of clinical work.

So I do a lot of hands on soft tissue work, muscle release, a lot of exercise prescription.

That's a big thing, working on strength and mobility as well as different types of modality machines just to help people of any athletic ability or career or age get back to any sort of activities that they like.

The one main thing that sets us apart from say, other health professionals like physiotherapists and chiropractors and all that is you will often see us on sidelines of sporting events.

So I work a lot with local and provincial sports teams, providing emergency care and injury prevention techniques and first aid to multiple different levels of sports.

Great.

Are you seeing?

So when people get hurt at sports games, you're there to to support them.

Yes, so say someone goes down in a football game on the field, I would be the first one to run out to make sure that a what they're dealing with isn't a life threatening emergency.

So if that's the case, then I make the proper calls and I handle it until someone more qualified like a paramedic would arise.

But if it's something more like you rolled your ankle and now it's sprained, OK, well, let's safely get you off the field to the side.

Let's assess if it's if I think it's broken or if it's just a sprain.

And then some things to just make the pain manageable.

See if it's safe for them to return to the game or if further follow up is necessary, like say, going to the hospital for X-rays.

So when you're, when you're going to school, you're, they're training you on how to identify these like these wound wounds or whatever.

Yeah.

So this program, in order to become an athletic therapist, most programs are four years in length and we go into quite a bit of detail in terms of the entire musculoskeletal system.

So all the muscles, bones, joints, all of that, as well as a lot of different emergency procedures.

So actually in order to be a certified athletic therapist, you also need to be a certified first responder within Red Cross.

So we are updating those skills, some of them yearly and some of them every three years to make sure we're always prepared for emergency situations like that.

Great.

So this is this is a neat little question here because I honestly don't know the answer to this, but what what's a concussion in a general sense?

Like what is that when that happens to someone?

So a concussion really is a type of mild traumatic brain injury.

So what a lot of people don't realize is concussions can actually happen without you directly hitting your head.

So it could be a jolt where you fall or anything that really causes your brain to move within your skull and cause changes in with how your brain works.

They're really technically invisible, like you can't see them on say ACT scan.

So some people think, oh, you can't see them, they're not that serious.

Well, no, they are.

They can be very serious and there's lots of different symptoms and severity and really everyone's different when it comes to what a concussion looks like for them and how it affects them.

It's great.

Yeah, that makes sense to me for sure.

So you did your schooling at Laurentian, right?

I did my first degree at Laurentian, so I went to Laurentian for sport and physical education, not necessarily knowing what I wanted to do.

I originally thought I would want to go to Med school or maybe become a physiotherapist because that's what I knew more about.

But then during that degree I had to complete an internship as a requirement to pass.

And that's when I came across the owner of Active Therapy Plus Kim was looking for some students to have for internships to help out.

And I was like, well, I don't really know what athletic therapy is, but I'll give this a shot.

It sounds interesting and I liked it so much.

I kind of changed directions of what I wanted to do with my career and that's when I went to Sheridan College after I graduated from luncheon and did the four year athletic therapy program there.

Nice, how did you like going to that college?

I liked it.

The professors were really good.

I learned a lot.

It was very busy between classes and we have a lot of in person like hands on internships or practicals where we work with sports teams and clinics throughout the communities.

So balancing that on top of classes, even though it was great hands on learning, sometimes it was quite chaotic and crazy, but in the end it definitely allowed me to get the hands on experience that I needed to go into the workforce when I graduated.

So by the looks of it here on your website, you're doing work with the Sudbury Lady Wolves team.

Yes.

So the last previous two seasons I worked with the U15 AA Lady Wolves team basically providing coverage for their games, whether home or away.

They would usually do a few tournaments every year.

That was a really great experience because most most youth hockey teams just employ parent trainers for their medical staff.

So to get a team that was willing to actually bring a certified medical professional on board was kind of a big switch, especially within stud breaks, it's not seen very often.

So when you were like a little kid, were you, did you know you were going to, Oh, you said you didn't know you were going to be doing this, right?

Yeah, I wanted to always be like something within sports I like, like I grew up playing hockey and basketball and really just trying a bunch of different sports.

But I was never really skilled enough to make it to any sort of higher level playing wise.

So I would knew I wanted to stay within the sports realm, whether it was coaching or medical wise.

I just never quite sure was sure how I would make that happen until I discovered what athletic therapy was.

And are you working with the Sudbury Spartans football team?

I am, yeah.

So I am their head athletic therapist for all their teams.

I've been doing that.

I started that in the summer of 2022.

I first moved here and the owner, Cam, was looking for someone to cover those teams.

And I wasn't really sure what it was all about, but I said I would.

And ever since each season the organization keeps growing and adding more teams.

So I'm always busy with them and honestly football is probably one of my favorite sports to cover so I thoroughly enjoy it.

Are you mean do you mean there's more than one Spartans team?

Yeah.

So when I started back in 2022, all they had was the men's team, so the adult men's team and AU16 boys team.

Since then though, this past summer we had those two teams plus AU18 boys team, AU 16 girls tackle team and A19U girls tackle team.

Wow.

So we've now added girls tackle football to our program here in Sudbury.

Dude I always thought that the Spartans were like the Spartans, the one team.

Yeah.

And it was like that for a long time.

And then they eventually started adding the youth programs within it and it's grown a lot.

Wow.

So if we go to a Spartans game, we're going to see you like, behind the bench.

Yeah, you'll see me on the sideline of the bench.

You'll probably see me running around like a chicken with my head cut off some days because there's always something going on.

But yeah, I'll be on the sideline.

And then like I said earlier, if someone goes down getting injured, I'm the first one to run out onto the field to make sure they're OK.

And yeah, just basically make sure everything runs smoothly on the sideline.

Usually for the Spartans team, sometimes I have to help out with the away team.

It just depends on who's coming and who, if the team has someone travelling with them.

So it changes often week to week.

So the Spartans are playing what and like other cities?

Yes.

So they usually have a mix of home and away games, not always even home versus away, but there's specific teams within each team.

The youth, junior boys and the junior girls and the men's team all play in three separate leagues, so the scheduling sometimes gets a little chaotic.

I'm in charge of making sure all games are covered, whether home or away, and that I have enough staff to make sure all games have the proper coverage.

But yeah, it's rare that they would never all be at home at the same time.

So there's more athletic therapists helping out with this job, right?

Yeah, so this past summer I had another certified athletic therapist helping me, and then I had two students as well helping me.

And you're covering the away games too.

Yeah.

So if we're at Sudbury's playing down in Toronto, say if I have a staff here that can go, we'll travel on the team bus with them.

That's ideal.

But if there's been a few times where there's too many games happening, So if that's the case, then I'll make sure to reach out to some other athletic therapist that I know in the area we're traveling to and have someone from, say, local to that area cover our team for that game.

That's really cool that you hop on the bus, Gus, and go with the team to Yeah.

So football being like a pretty physical sport, I would imagine.

Like do you see injuries on a steady basis, more or less or?

Yeah, it's pretty rare to go through an entire game without at least one injury.

That's the unfortunate side of football.

But most of the time it's not anything super serious.

I've had to call ambulances a few times, but that's definitely not the norm for every single game.

But you'd never know what you're going to walk into when you go to a football game.

It can either be super chill and easiest game you've ever covered, or it can go downhill very quickly.

Do you ever see like, tensions between specific teams?

Like these two teams don't like each other more than others kind of thing.

Sometimes, yeah, there's a often I'll hear coaches or players talk about that stuff.

I try to remain neutral to that sort of thing as a medical professional, especially if I do have to provide help to that other team.

I got to make sure that everyone gets the same treatment and that everything is fair that way.

But you definitely see some rivalry and competition and some things get heated.

There's some northern Ontario rivalries that happen, but I feel like that common in pretty much every sport.

Yeah, cool.

It's really neat.

Like it's, this is something that I was largely unaware of as a career or profession.

So it's good to be educated on it for sure.

So there's a photo of you here on your Instagram with like, I don't know if it's a tool belt, but it looks like he got some tools sticking out of your belt.

Like what?

What kind of tools are you working with for this job?

So that, so that, so that's my little personal kid.

A lot of people, we call it our Fanny packs because they do look like little Fanny packs, but you can get them in different sizes, shapes.

Every athletic therapist kind of differs a bit in terms of what they specifically put in their kit.

For me personally, I keep things that would be required in the emergency situation, like my blood pressure cuff and my stethoscope and my little thing.

It's called a pulse oximeter.

So you put that.

It's the things you sometimes see get put on the tips to your fingers that tell you, like the percentage of oxygen that the person is breathing, as well as like their heart rate.

So I always have that in my Fanny pack no matter what.

And then basic things like band aids, gauze, dairy strips, so if someone starts bleeding and I need to wrap them up quickly, it's already right on me and I can easily grab it.

I'll keep things like scissors.

So if I have to cut anything or something, we call the tape shark, but it's basically like a cutter tool that you can stick between the tape and your skin.

So if your ankles taped, you kind of just put it in there and you push against it and it has a blade where it cuts the tape, but it's kind of concealed so you don't cut yourself with the blade.

It's really hard to explain without actually showing you what it looks like, but anyone who's had their ankle taped probably knows exactly what I'm talking about.

So I'll always have that on me.

And then the rest of the stuff I have in my kid is very much dependent on what sport I'm covering.

So say if I'm covering hockey, for example, there's always risk with the skate blades that someone could cut a major artery in their thigh.

So I'll keep a tourniquet in my Fanny pack.

So if I have to run out onto the ice and that's the case, I can quickly put that on to stop the bleed.

But that's not necessarily something I would keep in my kit when I'm covering football because that's not really a big risk in football.

Wow, yeah.

It varies based on person and what sport you're covering and like what level of sport you're covering, but every AT you ask would probably say something a little different.

So you're like the first line of of defence or the the first on the scene, you're on the scene for the game.

That's, that's really good to have.

And I was, I was unaware of it, like I said earlier.

And so you can technically join like climb and and go to other cities and like, I'd imagine there's a high demand for this job.

Yes and no.

So if you watch like high level sports, they'll always have a TS there as well as higher level will have often have like a doctor on site, a sports Med doc.

But that's not something we really see in Sudbury's per SE.

Usually in Sudbury it's I would be the first person there in the highest trained unless I call paramedics to come.

But saying bigger events they would have usually higher trained staff.

But there's still a lot of sporting organizations, especially minor sports, are with kids that rely on either parent volunteers that have some sort of medical training or parent volunteers that take the bare minimum first aid training.

And then they put them on a bench and hope that nothing serious happens, which is still very unfortunate.

But hopefully by getting the word out about athletic therapy and the importance of having someone trained on your sideline, that will slowly continue to change.

And it has been changing over the years.

So you must really love the game too.

Like the sports?

Yeah, I will admit it's taken me a long time to figure out the rules of summer sports like especially football, because I never played football growing up.

So in the last Four Seasons I've been working it.

It's been slow, but I am getting better.

But then sports like hockey, where I've played it, I get really into it and sometimes I cheer a little too loudly.

Nice.

So what's this cupping therapy?

I've actually done this before with the therapist.

But tell us about cupping therapy.

So cupping therapy is a type of modality that can practice for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine.

But then more recently in modern times, it's been brought back popular.

A lot of people started talking about again when they saw Michael Phelps at the Olympics and you could see all those circle marks down his back.

You're like, what is that?

And they kind of picked up a little more from them, but it's basically cops.

They could be made from glass, the ones I have, or more silicone type.

Summer plastic and they basically just create suction on the skin through either a pump or the silicone one.

Usually you can just press on it and they attach.

You can adjust how much suction there is on the skin and basically it brings blood flow to the surface and I find it really helps reducing a lot of muscle tightness and pain relief, especially if you have the person doing movements or stretches with the cups on.

You can do it like that or you can apply the cups stationary and they'll still be beneficial.

They improve circulation, so because you're bringing the blood flow to the area, some people find it promotes relaxation.

I think that's dependent on how much suction you put in the cups because if you're putting a lot of suction, it's not always the most comfortable.

And then there's other types of cupping that I don't practice, like fire cupping, where they actually set the cup on fire briefly before they put it on the skin.

That's not within my scope of practice.

I will never do that.

And then there's somewhere, they call it wet cupping, where they poked bunch of tiny little holes in the skin to make it bleed, and then they apply suction to bring that extra blood flow.

But again, I can't Pierce the skin in any way that's not within my scope of practice.

So that's another one that I can't do, but it is an option, especially with traditional Chinese medicine practitioners.

How how important do you think pregame stretching and warm up is in terms of less injuries?

Very important.

You need to get the blood flowing.

You need to get the muscles loose and warm before you do any sort of high intensity activity.

Now, doing the right warm up is very important.

That's probably the most important part.

You need to make sure you're activating and warming up the correct muscle groups for your sport and that you're doing the stretches properly.

I often see some athletes will go through kind of the motions of the stretches, but they're not fully getting into the stretch.

And then later they'll end up pulling their hamstring and wonder why it's like while you didn't properly stretch that muscle.

And yeah, it's a lot of people don't realize what how important the warm up is to their performance.

Not just for the muscle warm up and the stretching, but also the mental aspect of the sport.

Because a lot of warm up, you go through a lot of the movements and the skills that you need to be able to perform during your game or your practice.

So by doing some of those movements in the warm up, you're preparing yourself mentally to be able to do those at a higher level during your game.

The next question is going to be also the final question and this is what I call the daily segment, Cassie, and you probably heard it, It's the same question that I ask every guest.

And the question is, what is one thing that you feel would make Sudbury greater?

One thing that makes Sudbury greater is I mean in front the sports aspect would be making sure that every single sports team, league, high school, elementary school in this city has someone properly trained to cover all of their sporting events.

We've seen it time and time again in professional sports as well as amateur sports.

If something serious happens like a cardiac arrest, having someone there who is trained to deal with that significantly increases the chances of that person surviving and making a full recovery.

So if there's one thing that I want people to take away from this is realizing the importance of athletic therapists and medical professionals and providing a safe environment for their athletes and their children.

Sounds good to me.

Sudbury sports the top level in Ontario if they were able to have all their events covered by medical professionals.

So how would how would we like hire you?

How would somebody go about securing your services?

They can go about that a few different ways.

They could send me an e-mail.

I don't know if there's a way to get that posted my e-mail.

They can call the clinic I work out of that active Therapy Plus and ask to speak to me that way.

I'm very active on social media, so I have my Instagram account, Cassie dot AT People are more than welcome to message me through there.

If you're looking to book an employment treatment in the clinic with me, I also have the link in my bio on my Instagram that you can go on and you can see my availability and actually book appointments that way.

If that's easier for you rather than calling, there's a bunch of different ways you can reach out to me.

What was the clinic thing you mentioned?

You can call the clinic at Active Therapy Plus.

Right.

OK, cool.

Sudbury interviews everyone.

That's our episode for today.

I believe it's episode 37.

And we were speaking with Cassie Friend, who's a certified athletic therapist.

Thanks for coming on the show today.

Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure.

Anything.

Any last words before?

No, I don't think so.

Just if you would like to reach out, feel free.

I'm always open to chatting and giving more information.

Great.

Well, thank you again.

Take care.

Thank you.

You too.

Bye bye.