Leah Toffelmire taping Jaxen Boyer’s ankle ahead of a game between the Wellington Dukes and the Trenton Golden Hawks. Toffelmire says her advice to the young woman interested in getting into athletic therapy is to adopt her mentality: “I’m a kick-ass woman in this profession and I’m going to say it like it is.” Photo by Jessica Schmidt, QNet News
By Jessica Schmidt [1]
WELLINGTON – The athletic therapist for the Wellington Dukes [2] has helped pave the way for young women working in sports.
Leah Toffelmire, a resident of Quinte West [3] and the athletic therapist with the Dukes for six years, says that when she first started with the team she was intimidated going into an environment where she was working with an all-male staff. She had to set some rules for the players that they weren’t used to – like not entering the trainer’s room in just a towel when getting treatment, something that had been normal for them before, she told QNet News in a recent interview.
But after a couple of weeks, Toffelmire said, she adjusted and got along well with the players. She was able to match their humour and settle into the group nicely, she said.
“I really strongly value my professionalism and … my demand for respect. So while it was intimidating, it also was pretty easy to roll into it.”
But Toffelmire has had to face some challenges entering a career that has generally had men at the forefront. There have been some situations with coaching staff and other professionals in her field, she said.
One such time was when she was still in college. One of the speakers for a placement with the Toronto Blue Jays [4] told her class he wouldn’t be accepting any female students for the position. It was because of how the players acted and how vulgar they were, he explained.
“I remember being really angry, in that who is he to say what I could or couldn’t handle?” Toffelmire said.
Also while she was in college, she also had an issue when one of her placement coaches didn’t appear to be impressed or happy that she had been brought to the team. It was probably because of speculation that the previous female student athletic therapist had gotten involved with a few of the players, she said.
Never to do that was something that was heavily enforced from day one of her therapy studies, she said, adding that those who broke the rule made it harder for women like her to get jobs in athletic therapy.
Toffelmire, 27, attended Sheridan College [5] in Brampton, from she graduated with an honours bachelor in applied health sciences and athletic therapy degree in 2014.
The biggest reason she chose to go to Sheridan, she said, was that there are only eight colleges in Canada that offer the athletic therapy program. Sheridan was the first to do so and is what she considers to be the gold standard, she said.
When she started college she didn’t want to work in hockey, she said – her sport of choice was rugby. She didn’t see the appeal in running out on the ice and handling players with a lot of equipment in the way blocking her view of any injuries, she explained.
But once she graduated, she ended up working three different jobs as an athletic therapist, and one of them was with the Wellington Dukes [2]. Even with dividing her time amongst the different jobs, she said, she always found herself thinking about being at the rink with the Dukes. That’s when she decided she wanted to work with hockey teams going forward.
Her advice to the young woman interested in getting into athletic therapy, she said, is to adopt her mentality: “I’m a kick-ass woman in this profession and I’m going to say it like it is.”
More women are becoming athletic therapists in hockey, and she hopes that change will continue to spread farther into the American Hockey League [6] and to the National Hockey League [7], she said.
A lot of people assume that what she does only applies to athletes, she said – a misconception that pushes people away from going to see an athletic therapist, or even becoming one.
“If you move or if you do things to better yourself or your body, then you’re an athlete.”
As an athletic therapist [8], Toffelmire said, she has a strong understanding of bones, joints and muscles, and the rehabilitation processes when there are injuries to those parts of the body. When an injury happens, she works it until she has returned the person to what is considered their base level – back to what they could do before they were injured.
It’s the same process whether working for the Wellington Dukes or in a clinical environment, she said. She assesses the injury and also looks to see how other parts of the body could be affected, and how she can prevent those other parts from being injured as a result.
Athletic therapy is the ability to show people they can exceed their expectations, she said.