AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tournament Experience

One of the best things about USC's sports residency program is the ability to be flexible with schedules.  These past few days, I had the opportunity to cover AVP's Professional Beach Volleyball tournament in Huntington Beach, CA.  Now I'm not gonna lie, working on the beach was pretty awesome.  However, it was the full experience that made it such an unbelievable learning environment.  

The event was being covered by full team of healthcare professionals: PT's, ATCs, DCs, MDs, MT's, and EMT's.  WIth the diversity of the group, each athlete was ensured to get whatever treatment they needed.  I covered the Thursday qualifying round and the Friday rounds.  My duties included stretching, assessing, treating, and taping athletes.  It had the luxury to have different professionals right next to me when I needed to refer out to them.  What I really loved about this event was each sports medicine professional was there to teach each other something new.  I learned different kinesio tape methods which was very helpful for me.  Also, I was able to see how different healthcare professionals approached their treatment with the athletes.    

In addition to working the event, when there was down time in the medical tent we were allowed to cover the games and watch the games.  It's amazing to see these athletes cover so much ground in a short amount of time.  Many of these athletes are in amazing shape and would come in regularly before and following games to get soft tissue work even if they didn't have an injury.    

The one thing I took away from working this event, besides how much fun it was to work on professional athletes, was the amount of collaboration between all of the sports medicine professionals.  We all were able to work efficiently and effectively together to help each athlete the best we could.  It goes to show that a team of different sports medicine professionals can work together for the best treatments.  

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