Corrected: A previous version of this article misspelled the last names of John Horsley and Joaquin Garcia.
To keep student-athletes safe in sweltering heat, some schools spend millions of dollars to build climate-controlled facilities for practice and competitions. Others buy their athletes individual safety equipment, like cooling vests, which can cost up to $400 per vest.
But there’s an alternative that’s free and rated highly effective by experts—building educational awareness around heat safety.
Athletic trainers are trained medical professionals who teach students about safety and can respond to medical emergencies, heat-related or otherwise. According to the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine, two-thirds of high schools employ a certified athletic trainer.
As heat waves stretch further into fall and spring, protecting student-athletes from heat-related illnesses has to be a top priority for every school, experts say. But there are resources for schools that don’t have the funds to invest in new facilities, technologies, or hire athletic trainers.
For example, the National Federation of State High School Associations, an advocacy organization for high school sports and fine and performing arts programs, provides over 100 courses available for students and coaches on sports safety. Most of those are free, according to Karissa Niehoff, the chief executive of the federation. One lesson focuses solely on heat, Heat Illness Prevention, has been accessed by more than 3.4 million users, according to NFHS. Six others touch on heat, like the Collapsed Student and Emergency Action Planning.
The organization has also sent 5,000 free wet bulb globe thermometers, tools used to determine if it’s too hot to practice sports, to schools around the country since 2021. In addition, NFHS has provided 1,000 free automatic electronic defibrillators, a portable device that can be used to treat a person in cardiac arrest, a severe side-effect of heat stroke, to schools and state high school associations since 2018.
Though NFHS no longer sends these devices, due to the grant program that funded them coming to an end, the organization still remains a source of information for schools across the nation.
“Getting those things in the hands of schools can help alleviate budget concerns,” Niehoff said. “But truth be told, the desire to get educated, the desire to educate coaches, that’s free.”
How to spot heat illness in student-athletes
The initial signs of someone experiencing heat illness can start with muscle cramps and then increased sweating. Some affected students feel faint and dizzy and have clammy skin, while others may experience nausea and vomiting.
Upon first experiencing symptoms, student-athletes should get to a cooler area or attempt to cool down their bodies. For example, students can move to the shade, drink water, apply wet, cold towels to the head and legs, ice packs to the neck, armpits, and groin, or take a cool shower.
Some students are not able to cool down and can get dehydrated to the point where they stop sweating altogether. At this point, the student’s brain starts to malfunction, and the student may slur words, come in and out of consciousness, or pass out altogether.
“Heat exhaustion can very easily turn into heat stroke if not taken care of immediately,” said John Horsley, the lead athletic trainer at Westwood High School in Austin.
Athletic trainers or coaches should cool the student down to below or exactly 102 degrees, potentially through immersion in cold water, before transporting them to the hospital, he said.
Long-term effects of heat-related illnesses include organ failure or seizures, and those who have gone through a heat illness once are more likely to experience it again, said Martha Pyron, a physician at Austin Regional Clinic who specializes in sports and musculoskeletal medicine. Heat strokes are also fatal: There were 67 deaths as a result of heat stroke between July 1982 and June 2022, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research database. An analysis of that data shows that 66 deaths were of males, ages 13 to 18 years, most of whom played football.
“Football is a huge deal. Pushing yourself to your limits to become a better athlete, sometimes it is difficult to determine [when to stop],” said Pyron. “I think that most people think intuitively, you will know how to manage it, and it won’t be as big of a deal, but it can really [sneak] up on you.”
Heat safety resources for small schools
Though Texas employs the most athletic trainers in the country as of 2023, the state has resources for smaller schools that don’t have those staff. The University Interscholastic League (UIL), which is based at the University of Texas at Austin, has videos and articles on heat illness and safety.
UIL requires coaches to do learning modules yearly and present to students on the topic of athlete safety, including heat illness prevention, said Horsley.
The videos on the UIL website show viewers how to immerse someone experiencing heat illness in a cold tub and how to apply the Tarp Assisted Cooling Oscillation. That strategy is used when the athlete can’t be moved to do a tub immersion, so instead, others bring ice and cold water to them.
These resources are especially beneficial for schools without athletic trainers, said Horsley.
“We do have to rely on coaching staff for the health and safety in some of those smaller situations,” said Horsley. The goal is “to help those folks who are not brought up [with grounding in] these things.
Student-athletes should also be educated on how to prevent heat illnesses. High schoolers might not be aware that they’re beginning to experience symptoms and often play through it, said Pyron.
“They may just keep pushing themselves and not realize that there’s a problem,” she said.
If a student requires more time acclimating to the heat when temperatures are potentially unsafe, coaches can work with that athlete on a plan that takes practice at a slower pace.
“When you’re talking about heat illness, it is the one injury that’s 100% preventable,” Niehoff said. Everyone working in youth sports, she said, needs to “take responsibility for making sure it doesn’t happen to the best of their ability.”
