LAKELAND (Oct. 6, 2011) – In a sport that remains heavily dominated by men, Florida Southern College’s Sue Stanley-Green knows what it takes to be competitive and achieve excellence as a female athletic trainer working on the football field. Her groundbreaking contributions to the profession were highlighted in the September 2011 edition of Training & Conditioning (T&C), one of the nation’s most sought-after sources of training information for sports medicine and conditioning professionals.

In “Women on the Field”, Stanley-Green discusses the challenges facing female athletic trainers who want to work in football or other male dominated sports, and she speaks from extensive first-hand experience.

Stanley-Green became the first full-time female athletic trainer hired to work football in the NCAA’s Southeastern Conference back in 1982 when she joined the sports medicine staff at the University of Kentucky.

Of that time, she said to T&C, “I was told consistently, as were my fellow female athletic trainers, that we weren’t good enough to work with the football team. We were female, so we weren’t good enough. That made us all pretty angry.”

Sue Stanley-Green is now the Athletic Training Education Program Director and an Associate Professor of Athletic Training at Florida Southern College where she has been for 12 years. She works alongside her husband who serves as the College’s Associate Athletic Director and head Athletic Trainer, a working dynamic they also enjoyed for many years as Athletic Trainers at the University of Kentucky. As the article highlighted, they are often considered “Mom and Dad” to their athletes and athletic training students.

In the article, Stanley-Green and other female athletic trainers discuss the pros and cons of making a career on the football field work. Among other traits, the women cite being tough, being knowledgeable, and not expecting the men to change their behavior just because women are present, as keys to success. “I felt I was entering their space,” Stanley-Green said. “If I was going to be shocked or offended, then I had made the wrong choice to be there.”

T&C reaches more than 28,000 sports medicine professionals who work with eight million competitive athletes every year. Both the National Athletic Trainers’ Association (NATA) and the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) evaluated and approved T&C for continuing education unit (CEU) credit, demonstrating the value and relevance those associations place on the material published by the magazine. (View “Women on the Field” in its entirety.)