alumni today
Cover ing
All the
Bases
Sue Falsone ’00
(MS) got a lot of attention in spring training
after the Los Angeles
Dodgers made her the
first female head athletic
trainer in Major
League Baseball history.
“But the big story is not me being a girl,”
Falsone says. “The story is about the innovative
things we are doing from a training point of
view. The story is about the way strength and
conditioning coaches are now part of a medical
team who are all working together with the
field coaches. That’s the shift in mindset that’s
most important.”
Falsone has been working on a holistic
approach to training since she arrived at UNC
with a “PT” already behind her name. She added
a graduate degree in human movement, con-
centrating on sports medicine, and worked with
the UNC women’s basketball team. Falsone left
North Carolina with a firm conviction that
rehabilitation, training, nutrition, physical thera-
py and performance need to be interwoven
pieces for successful athletic conditioning.
In baseball, for example, there are a number
of actions that can lead to an injury: throwing,
sliding, running, hitting. They all revolve around
repetitive motion. Just like the players, the conditioning staff and the coaches have to work as
a team to prevent injuries. Without this collaboration, the experience on the field can lock the
players into a cycle of injury and recovery that
will gradually weaken them. “I need to be talking to the hitting coach and the coach working
Dodgers’
the cycle of
injuries
COURTESY OF ATHLETES’ PERFORMANCE
Sue Falsone ’00 (MS) was a physical therapist when she came to UNC for a graduate degree
in human movement, concentrating on sports medicine. She says rehabilitation, training, nutrition, physical therapy and performance need to be interwoven for successful conditioning.
with base-stealing,” Falsone says. “Together we
figure out what a player needs.”
This might not sound radical in an era of
holistic thinking about health, but professional
athletics can be a world of turf wars. Injured
players are sent to the physical therapy staff,
recover, hit the field and are asked to play as if
they are just like new. This sets them up for new
injuries. To break that cycle, Falsone is working
with Stan Conte, senior director of medical
services for the Dodgers. Conte is collecting
statistics on injury and recovery, hoping to
