The Front Row with MARK NELKE July 1, 2010
Lake City High's boys basketball team was practicing one morning this past winter, just prior to the 5A Region 1 tournament, when one of the Timberwolf players was injured.
Beven Rich, Lake City's athletic trainer, on a day off from her day job as athletic trainer and massage therapist at North Idaho Physical Therapy in Hayden, was relaxing at home in Spirit Lake when the call came from Kelly Reed, an assistant basketball coach at Lake City.
"It was like her first day off in months," Reed recalled. "She lives an hour out of town, but she immediately got in her car and drove in to treat him. Most people would have just sent him to the doctor or whatever, but she spent most of the day treating him so he would be ready for the tournament."
When told of what Reed had said about her, Rich just shrugged.
"That's pretty normal for athletic trainers," Rich said. "That's really common, which is kind of funny because (Reed) thinks that's a big deal, but that's just the way that we're trained."
Rich, Lake City's athletic trainer for the past seven years, was recently named athletic trainer of the year by the Idaho state coaches association. She will be honored at a state coaching clinic in Caldwell later this month.
"She is very thorough with her treatment and evaluation of the kids," said Reed, who is also Lake City's head track and field coach. "She doesn't baby them but she also knows when to have the athlete take time off, works really well with the athletes, and is extremely popular with all the kids."
RICH GREW up in Michigan and has been an athletic trainer since 1987. Years ago, she did a charity bike ride across the U.S. for the American Lung Association, and part of the ride came through North Idaho.
When Beven and her husband, John Bowman, were looking to relocate from southeastern Michigan in 2003, she remembered this area.
"We were actually looking for more snow that what we got in Michigan, and we've definitely had that," Beven said.
The athletic trainer job at Lake City had just come open, so she found the best of both worlds - a job in a physical therapy office which also contracts out employees to the local high schools as a trainer.
Beven and her husband own Mountain View Cyclery and Fitness in Hayden. They were looking for a part of the country with four seasons, and they live out in the country with horses and dogs and cats, etc. Before she moved out here, a minor league hockey team in Michigan was interested in hiring her, but she wasn't interested because she didn't want to be away from home that often as her animals are "like kids to me," she said.
She said she wouldn't be interested in being a trainer for a college team for the same reason.
Rich said she was "really surprised" to be nominated for such a statewide award, much less receive it.
"I'm just the type of person that, I like to be in the background, I don't like to be that visible," she said. "The way we learn to function as athletic trainers is, you want to be the kind of person that people don't realize you're even there, until you're needed, and then you do your job."
Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via e-mail at [email protected].