As students have settled into the swing of things this new school year, and are busy at work competing for a state title, it is not hard to miss one of the many new faces in the athletic department here at Erie: Skylar Tinsley. 

Fresh out of college, Skylar Tinsley landed herself a job at Orthopedic and Spine Center of the Rockies, earning the opportunity to be the athletic trainer here at Erie. 

“It seems pretty obvious our school has always been very sports heavy, but that comes with a high demand of injuries. Our school has always tried to provide in-house trainers, but until our district recently created this new contract with a different company, we never had full time trainers. I think that they’ve found that it’s necessary to have a full time trainer, just to be able to provide the services to our students in building,” Courtney Stenesa, the athletic secretary, states. 

Justin Carpenter continues to back this up, saying, “[I]t is important to employ a good athletic trainer, just so parents and the kids both feel safe when they’re competing, [and] to be able to compete at their best. You have to feel safe and secure when you’re going to be something”.

Tinsley, being a fresh new face at Erie, has seemed to provide the athletes with confidence to feel successful coming off an injury, and has given them someone they can trust when it comes to their health. 

“I would love to think they trust me because they know I have a good knowledge base on what I’m doing. But I think I’ve also worked very hard to build individual relationships with our athletes that focus around who they are as a person, not just who they are as an athlete. I think that that helps build the support too,” Tinsley explains with a smile. 

Along with building meaningful relationships with the students she works with, she also explained that,  “My main goal is to return them to sport as quickly and healthily as I can. You want young athletes to enjoy their sport so they continue the play, and so they’re not constantly playing through pain”.

Though Erie has always supplied some sort of athletic trainer to the students here at Erie, there has been a noticeable shift in confidence with the arrival of Skylar. 

Carpenter states,