There is no off-season for the athletic trainers.
Fortunately, Lynne Neukom has both a love and a passion for Hillsdale College that fuels her through every jam-packed day as the college’s head athletic trainer.
“I can always say that if you leave with a smile on your face, you might be tired but you’re always happy,” Neukom said.
Neukom was hired as the head athletic trainer in 2008. Since then, she has arrived as early as 3:30 a.m. to the empty Roche Sports Complex on somedays. These precious morning hours are the only time the training room is not filled and bustling with athletes. In these quiet hours, mounds of paperwork are completed, Neukom said.
“This has been my week,” she said motioning to her desk piled high with papers. “These are all of the kids I’ve seen this week.”
Neukom works every day including weekends. Daily tasks include scheduling doctor’s appointments for athletes, working on injury prevention, treating present injuries and leading athletes through rehabilitation. In addition to this work in the training room, she also covers practices in the afternoons.
Neukom also serves as the Athletic Training Program Director, teaching at least six credit hours a semester and advising many students pursuing an exercise science degree.
Neukom’s staff includes her two “outstanding” assistant trainers, Peter Benjamin and Katelyn Terrazas, and a group of “hardworking” student trainers. Neukom views them as her teammates, and believes that she should do as much work as everybody else, even if that leaves her doing her least favorite task- cleaning the whirlpools.
“There’s three of us, and it kind of spreads you a little thin in places,” Neukom said. “You just have to be able to just roll with it and be really positive and keep a good attitude.”
Neukom explained that keeping this positive attitude isn’t hard when she gets to work in her favorite place. This 1991 graduate’s connection with Hillsdale College runs deep, as her grandfather was a Hillsdale professor and both of her parents are alumni. Neukom was raised in Hillsdale and met her husband, also a Hillsdale native, in the third grade at a piano lesson in town. Neukom knew there was no other school for her. Today, her passion for the college remains strong and she would choose no other path for her own children: Hannah, 13, Jacob, 11, and Keturah, 9.
“My kids know they have to be a Charger,” she said with a smile. “I want them to reap the benefits of working hard and just to be really good people, that’s what Hillsdale really does produce.”
It’s these “good people” who bring constant conversation, plenty of laughter, and new perspective into the training room each afternoon, making it Neukom’s favorite time of the day.
“Our college kids have a lot to say,” Neukom said. “I think that we are very blessed to be in a school that has very talented athletes as well as scholarly athletes. Conversations are really interesting in here, it’s never boring.”
Because of her actions and her constant presence, athletes know that Neukom genuinely cares about their well-being.
“She almost acts like a mother in a sense, you know she is going to do whatever she can to help you out,” senior basketball player Megan Fogt said. “It’s really comforting having a support system in the training room.”
However, Neukom’s genuine care is not confined to the walls of the training room or on the athletic fields. Most nights, she brings athletes home with her, allowing them to receive treatment while studying. Neukom justifies her job’s hefty time requirement with the time requirement that student athletes commit to their sports. She said she sees being an athlete as a full time job.
“It’s a huge commitment, on our part, and on the part of our families,” she said.
Neukom has developed this opinion over a lifetime of being involved with sports. In high school, she played volleyball and golf, but was at a loss for what to do when she arrived at Hillsdale College in 1987 as a freshman non-athlete.
“I wasn’t good enough to be a collegiate athlete, and one day one of my girlfriends said to me ‘Oh, just come down to the training room this afternoon,’” Neukom said.
It was there, in Hillsdale’s old training room, that she met Paul Beachler, Hillsdale’s head athletic trainer at the time, who would guide her through her career as an athletic trainer.
“Paul Beachler took me under his wing he has literally mentored me since 1987,” Neukom said. “I owe so much to him.”
Beachler remembers Neukom as a sponge during her first two years shadowing him in the training room.
“Every year she got better and soaked up more information,” Beachler said. “She turned out to be better at it than I was and that’s the accomplishment that any mentor wants.”
Years have passed and tables have turned; today Neukom is a mentor to her staff of student trainers.
“Since I walked on campus she’s been nothing but helpful and understanding,” said senior Faith McCoy, a student trainer. “And she’s really taught me that you have to pay attention to every single little thing that an athlete needs in order to treat them completely.”
