Wednesday, April 24, 2024
This weekend in Arlington, District 6 of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association will have its annual meeting in Arlington.
Thousands of trainers from Texas and Arkansas will be in attendance, including Gran-bury resident Eddie Lane.
In 1955, 64 years ago, NATA had its first meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska. Less than 200 people showed up – including Lane.
Lane, now 90, is one of two living charter members of NATA, which began in 1950. He had an athletic training career that spanned from 1949-1990 and took him across the country, from a student assistant job at Southern Methodist University in Dallas to Washington State University to a stint with the U.S. Olympics wrestling team in 1968 and 1972.
This coming Friday and Saturday, District 6 – also known as the Southwest Athletic Trainers Association, or SWATA – will announce that it is moving its Hall of Fame permanently to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in Waco, a move that Lane personally spearheaded. (Lane is a member of the SWATA Hall, as well as the NATA Hall.) He will also be honored as a 70-year member of NATA.
Now that his training career is over, Lane said his sole focus in life is raising awareness and recognition for athletic trainers.
“We don’t go out and seek (recognition),” he said. “It’s just not in our nature to promote. We’ll take it if it comes, but we won’t promote it.”
DECADES OF GROWTH
When Lane first came to Texas, there were eight athletic trainers in District 6. Most sports teams had a teacher or volunteer medical professional that did little more than tape ankles on the sideline.
Now, NATA has over 43,000 members, and at one point was is the second largest medical association in the nation, behind only the American Medical Association.
“There’s so much history involved with athletic training and the growth of it,” Lane said.
Lane said the spike in membership is the biggest change since he began his career.
The second? Education.
In 1970, Texas became the first state to require licensing for athletic trainers. Now California is the only state that does not require licensing.
“The NATA had always wanted to take the athletic trainer above a guy that just put on Band-Aids and rubbed people down,” Lane said. “And we all wanted to be qualified. So that led us to a strong education program.
“An athletic trainer graduates at the master’s level. A bachelor’s degree isn’t good enough anymore.”
In fact, Lane says, even his 40 years of on-the-job experience wouldn’t qualify him to start training again.
“Right now, I wouldn’t know enough with what I know after 40 years to work today,” he said. “The level is so much greater.”
Lane was the athletic trainer at SMU from 1960-1972 before becoming one of the first four trainers at Dallas ISD in 1972. There, education and development were again Lane’s focus.
“My goal there, and my task that was assigned to me, was to develop athletic training in the entire school system,” Lane said. “And eventually put an athletic trainer in every high school, which was 19 at that time.
“Last time I heard, there are now 32 athletic trainers in DISD.”
FULL OF STORIES
Through his career, Lane has interacted with some of the greatest athletes and characters in sports.
He lived next door to legendary sports columnist Bud Shrake in Dallas, and played poker with other writing legends such as Dan Jenkins (“the most profane man I’ve ever met,” Lane said) and Gary Cartwright.
He refuses to name one athlete as the best he’s ever seen, because, as he says, “they can all still probably whip my (expletive.)” But Dan Gable, a 1972 Olympic gold medalist in freestyle wrestling who completed the entire Games without ceding a single point, and Jerry LeVias, who was the first black scholarship athlete in the Southwestern Conference while at SMU, stand out in his mind.
Lane left Dallas ISD in 1982 and became the head trainer at Irving High School. He retired to Granbury with his wife in 1993, in no small part because of his love for the Brazos River.
Though he was born in Ohio, Lane has spent an inordinate amount of time traveling through Texas. He walked from the tip of the Panhandle down to Granbury with writer Jon McConal for a book called “A Walk Across Texas,” and later drove 4,200 miles with McConal for another book, “Bridges Over the Brazos.”
PRIDE IN HIS WORK
Get Lane talking about one of his passions – be it athletic training, canoeing or anything else – and he’ll chew your ear off for hours with stories, as he readily admits. He has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the history of his field, can rattle off where old trainers got their starts and has strong opinions on how District 4 – the Great Lakes Athletic Trainers’ Association, consisting of Ohio, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois – is really the birthplace of modern athletic training.
It’s clear that Lane has immense pride in athletic training, which is why he’s now so concerned with promoting the field’s importance.
“One of our ambitions as an athletic trainer is to be a recognized as an athletic trainer,” he said. “Not a personal trainer, not a horse trainer – and I’ve had people say, ‘oh, what horses do you train?’”
One of his “bucket list” goals is to be the first athletic trainer inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame. It’s why he worked so hard to ensure the SWATA Hall had a permanent place inside the Texas Sports Hall’s building in Waco.
“I’m kind of going in the back door,” he said. “But I’m taking a lot of people with me.”
grant@hcnews.com | 817-573-7066, ext. 254
‘The NATA had always wanted to take the athletic trainer above a guy that just put on Band-Aids and rubbed people down.’
-Eddie Lane,
on the NATA’s early days
