How to provide high standards of medical care for ALL college athletes

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A quick housekeeping note: We’re excited to announce another huge commitment for Extra Points Library. THE Chicago State Cougars!

We have a few other “silent commitments” we’ll be sharing over the coming days, as well as plenty of non-university partners. If you’d like to learn more about how the Extra Points Library can save your department time and money, check out the Library here, or drop me an email.

I think just about all of you guys know that I graduated from Ohio State. Anybody who has spent any time near campus immediately understands that the place is huge. Enrollment is huge. The athletic facilities are huge. Their staff directory is huge, their budget is huge, and the expectations for success at every level of the university are huge. Also, the campus itself is huge…which is a problem when maybe you overslept a little bit before that 8:00 AM Macroeconomics class.

There are other schools like Ohio State…but there are way, way, way more schools that are not like Ohio State. That doesn’t just include mid-majors like MAC or Horizon League institutions, but also the hundreds of D-II and D-III institutions all over the country, schools that could never hope to staff their departments anywhere close to the level that Ohio State does.

There’s no Learfield General Managers sitting at Kenyon College, helping the Owls chase down sponsorship leads. Wright State does not have a small army of create content on multiple social media platforms for every athletic department. Ohio Dominican doesn’t have an athletic fundraising arm that goes ten people deep.

Athlete medical care is no different.

Dr. James Borchers, the president of the US Council for Athletes’ Health, and the CMO for the Big Ten. If anybody would know about what goes into providing athlete health care at the highest levels of college sports, it would be him. And he knows that what Ohio State and Michigan are doing simply isn’t practical for every other institution.

“Yeah, I think probably the biggest misperception is that there's a singular way that this [Athlete medical care and compliance] needs to be accomplished,” he told me. “If there’s a standard for the largest institutions, that doesn’t necessarily mean that has to be applied at every institution.”

He compared the situation to community hospitals. Will a county hospital in rural Minnesota necessarily have the same number of beds, MRI machines or rare snake venom antidotes as a major urban research hospital? No, probably not. But the small hospital doesn’t throw up its arms and assume that providing high quality care is too expensive or impossible because it isn’t a wealthy institution. Everybody still has baselines to reach, it just might be done differently.

So what might that look like in college sports?

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