Randy Matthews has been helping San Angelo athletes for over 40 years

Randy Matthews is a seasoned professional with 41 years’ experience. He genuinely cares about his clients. Yet no athlete wants to see Matthews looking down over them.

That’s because Matthew is a certified athletic trainer, and if he’s looking down at an athlete on the playing field, the athlete is injured.

Injuries play a huge role in high school football. Avoid them and your team has a chance to reach its potential. Experience too many injuries and it can wreck your season.

Athletic trainers represent a side of football the public sees only when something bad happens. Trainers must develop a toughness for constantly dealing with adversity. Injuries are one of the bad experiences in sports. There’s nothing a trainer can really say to ease the pain of an injured player, his coach or his parents.

“It’s the reality of it. There are always going to be injuries,” said Matthews, who grew up in San Angelo and has spent all 41 of his years as an athletic trainer in the San Angelo area. “One of the challenges of what we do is seeing all these emotions and components.

“But 99 percent of the time, we see the kid get back on the playing field. They did all the work. We provided the instruction, guidance and counseling. To know you played a little part in helping him on his way back, that’s the rewarding part. It makes you feel like what you do is worthwhile.

“It never gets old.”

Matthews has seen dramatic advancements in medical technology and surgical techniques since the 1970s. MRIs, which can reveal a specific knee injury, have replaced exploratory surgery that might reveal nothing major. Torn ACLs that used to sideline athletes for 12 months can now be rehabbed in 4-6 months.

Matthews also has been at the forefront of concussion education and return-to-play protocol. The importance of learning more about brain injuries can’t be overstated.

Athletic trainers often work with – or cover – one team. Matthews was Angelo State University’s head trainer for 20 years from 1977-1997. He currently is director of sports medicine for San Angelo Community Medical Center. Like most sports medicine centers, SACMC sends athletic trainers to cover multiple high school games around the area.

Matthews has covered six-man games for the Garden City Bearkats the last three seasons. He attends their games on Friday nights, plus he spends much of Tuesday following up on injuries from the previous game.

It’s almost impossible for trainers not to become emotionally attached to the teams and players they cover, and Matthews said that’s OK – to a point.

“You have to be emotional. It helps you continue to give your ‘A’ game to everything you do,” he said. “You might not do quite as good a job if you don’t have a little bit of closeness. At Garden City, they treat me like a member of the coaching staff. It motivates you to do your job at a high level.”

There comes a time, though, when trainers need to detach their emotions as best they can and deal with injuries.

“It’s one of those knacks of being a good athletic trainer,” Matthews said. “You have to detach yourself and know that you have a job to do. You have to take care of the second- and third-team kids the same as the star player or a kid you are close to. You have to do that the right way every time.

“Sure, I’m emotional. But I love it when my team wins.”

Besides Friday night games, Matthews spends a lot of time with athletes during rehab. That’s another part of football the public doesn’t see.

“It’s the nature of the beast in West Texas that injured athletes can’t see an athletic trainer every day,” he said. “Because of that, a big part of the motivation has to be on the coaching staff and the athlete.

“There are peaks and valleys in rehab. You can have a good week followed by a setback. When they have a setback, you tell them it’s a long process and this is just a bump in the road.”

Matthews became a student trainer at Central High School in the early 1970s. He had been a football player, but after being diagnosed with mononucleosis and an enlarged spleen, he was unable to play his ninth-grade year. By the time he entered Central as a sophomore, he was a year behind his classmates on the field.

“I still wanted to hang around and be involved with the team. I just didn’t know how I could do it,” Matthews said. “Central had a full-time athletic trainer, and he asked me to come out and help. He was the first one to tell me that I could do this for a living.

“By my junior year, I figured out that I liked it and that’s what I wanted to do.”

He attended college at West Texas State (now West Texas A&M) because ASU didn’t have an athletic trainer at the time. After finishing college, Matthews returned to his hometown and became ASU’s first full-time athletic trainer.

He was inducted into the Southwest Athletic Trainers’ Association Hall of Fame in 2003. This year, Matthews was among the first class inducted into the Texas State Athletic Trainers’ Association Hall of Fame. Also in 2018, he was inducted into the ASU Athletics Hall of Honor.

“When I left to go to college, I had no plans of ever coming back home,” Matthews said. “But it all worked out. I wouldn’t change anything.”

Mike Lee writes a high school football column during the season. Contact him at michaellee7@att.net.