UB athletic trainers help dance majors get back on their feet

Victoria Parr battled through injuries when she was a dance major at UB a few years ago. During her sophomore year, Parr experienced awful shin splints that prevented her from being able to continue dancing.

“If I knew how to strengthen my calves and my ankles the right way, I could have prevented that injury,” she says. “And so that kind of always stuck with me, that dancers don’t always know how to take care of their bodies. They’re dancing a lot and they need help with recovery.”

Parr’s personal experience inspired her and fellow UB athletic trainer Marie Pettitt to begin working with UB dance majors on a weekly basis to help them better care for their bodies.

“I knew from my experiences and all my dance friends being injured in college, too, there’s a need for this,” says Parr, who received bachelor’s degrees in both dance and exercise science, as well as her master’s in athletic training, from UB.

She now specializes in dance/performing arts medicine as a certified athletic trainer with UBMD Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, where she works with Pettitt, who received her master’s in athletic training from UB after obtaining her bachelor’s in exercise science from SUNY Brockport.

The program began as a class project in which students were asked to assess need and implement care to an underserved population. “As we both grew up dancing and experienced injuries, we also experienced a lack of health care resources available to us with the knowledge of the demand and athleticism needed in the performing arts,” says Pettitt.

So, Parr and Pettitt, along with Sarah Krzyzanowicz, clinical instructor in the Department of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences and coordinator of clinical education for athletic training, formed a group of dance and health care professionals with an interest in expanding the health care resources for dancers at UB.

“We are very excited that a class project we designed where students explored how to provide athletic training services to underrepresented populations has come to full fruition,” says Krzyzanowicz.

“Marie and Victoria both worked on this project when they were students in our program, and we are so proud that they have continued to pursue ensuring that performing arts patients have equal access to the same health care that traditional athletes are used to,” Krzyzanowicz adds.

Through UBMD, Parr and Pettitt primarily provide athletic training services to area high schools; Parr works with Orchard Park and Pettitt is with Buffalo Public Schools. But they now have designated hours each week in Alumni Arena on the North Campus, where students from UB’s Department of Theatre and Dance can sign up for treatment sessions.

Dancing puts significant strain on the body, and injuries are common. At first, students were a little skeptical and perhaps even unwilling to sign up, out of fear they would be told they can’t dance for a long time. “There was definitely a lot of education at first and reassuring students that Marie and I are both dancers, we love dance and we want you to be able to dance better, stronger and get back to it sooner,” says Parr.

With dancers, Parr and Pettitt most often treat sore muscles, ankle sprains and back pain. “Depending on the style of dance and the choreography that a dancer is working with, we can also work on exercises or recovery strategies to prevent overuse injuries specific to that dancer’s physical demands of the semester or show,” says Pettitt. They’ve even worked with a dancer returning to dance after an ACL reconstruction. They also help dancers with recovery using soft tissue techniques including cupping and instrument-assisted soft tissue mobilization.

One day earlier this semester, Pettitt treated senior dance major Amanda Healy, who began experiencing foot pain during spring break. “The ball of my foot started to hurt really bad, especially in ballet class because I’m on my toes all the time,” Healy says. She got an X-ray, which ruled out a stress fracture, and learned that she had something called Morton’s neuroma, a kind of inflammation common in dancers.

Healy knew she couldn’t wait to do anything until the end of the semester when she returns home to Massachusetts for the summer, so she decided to start coming to see Pettitt in Alumni Arena. After just a couple of sessions, her foot pain lessened markedly.

“It’s so helpful that these appointments are available to us,” says Healy. “And then just getting these exercises they give you, it’s just like regular physical therapy — I can take them home and do them on my own to build up strength.”

Another senior dance major, Lily Colligan, agrees. “The treatments have helped me a lot with pain management,” says Colligan, who has received treatment for her hip and her foot. “It helps me dance better if I’m able to manage pain better.”