Seattle Children's Puts Athletic Trainers in Two Dozen High Schools. Most Schools Have None.

Seattle Fitness Magazine · 19 Sep 2026

• ~40%2022 schools with trainers
• 5k+events covered yearly
• ~70%2022 minor cases

The sideline most schools don't have

Most schools have no athletic trainer to call on when a kid lands badly or takes a hit to the head.

Seattle Children's said so itself, in a February 2022 article about its athletic training program: "only around 40% of schools have access to athletic trainers." The piece names no state, no county and no source for that number, so it stands exactly as written, a figure the hospital put on itself with no geography attached.

Where Seattle Children's has a trainer, the person who meets an injured kid on the field is licensed as a healthcare provider through the Washington State Department of Health. Where nobody does, the record says nothing about who steps in. Seattle Children's calls its own team the largest of its kind in the region. It also describes the trainers, in its own words, as people who "play a role in equity and access to care for kids around the region."

A license, not a whistle

A trainer running a gym class and an athletic trainer working a sideline are not the same job under two names.

Seattle Children's athletic trainers hold licenses as healthcare providers through the Washington State Department of Health, earned after a degree from an accredited program and a board of certification exam built specifically for the role. As of the 2022 article, most carried a master's-level education on top of that credential.

The 2022 article drew the distinction plainly: unlike a personal trainer, a certified athletic trainer has passed a secure national board exam after a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution. The role also sits inside the hospital's Concussion Program, where trainers evaluate athletes against Seattle Children's own guidelines and those of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association. That is the credential doing the work most parents assume a whistle and a clipboard already cover.

What the job covers

In 2022 the hospital described its trainers as being with their athletes at least five days a week, on the sideline at games "when most injuries occur" and in the gym or training room during practice in between. The scope runs wider than a taped ankle. A trainer stabilizes a cervical spine or responds to a cardiac emergency when one happens, evaluates a concussion against the guidelines set by both Seattle Children's and the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, and maps the return-to-play progression that decides when a kid goes back to the sport.

Much of the job is quieter than any of that. The program's own page describes teaching athletes, coaches and parents "prehabilitative" exercises "to promote strength, stability and balance before kids take part in sports," work built for injuries that never happen rather than ones already underway. Erin Krauth, who manages the program and worked as an athletic trainer at Roosevelt High School before taking it over, told Seattle Children's in 2022 that around 70% of what trainers treat is minor. A rolled ankle, not a helicopter.

Two numbers, four years apart

The program's current page says its trainers "provide coverage to more than two dozen public high schools across the Puget Sound area."

The 2022 article, last updated in May 2024, says something more specific: "nearly 50 athletic trainers from Seattle Children's are embedded in 42 schools from Tacoma to Woodinville."

Both figures come from Seattle Children's about itself, one live on the site today and one published four years ago, and the current one is the smaller and looser of the two. Nothing in either version explains the difference, and no reporting done here can close it.

Who the coverage reaches

The equity case Seattle Children's makes is specific about who the coverage tends to reach.

Krauth said in the 2022 article: "We reach a larger number of students who don't have access to clinics and medical care. We see a lot of athletes who have parents who don't speak English, and it can be challenging for kids to seek medical attention." She added that the program works in "a lot of low-income schools in the area," and described trainers as fixtures rather than visitors: "They get to know the kids, parents and administration.

They become a member of the school's community." Seth Wayne, an athletic trainer at Evergreen High School, put his own job in similar terms that year: "We are the eyes, hands and ears of the care team and a liaison between the providers and patient." Wayne had advice that year for anyone whose school has nobody. "If your school doesn't, advocate for one," he said. "We're here to help."

From Tacoma to Woodinville

Two of the schools on that map have names in the record.

Evergreen High School had a trainer in 2022, when Seth Wayne was working its sideline. Krauth worked Roosevelt's before she moved to running the program. The 42 schools named that year ran from Tacoma up through Woodinville. The sports the current page lists run from football and soccer through wrestling, gymnastics, swimming and cross country; the 2022 article added one the page does not, roller derby.

Seattle Children's counts more than 5,000 sporting events covered each year, and tens of thousands of assessments and treatments across the region on top of that. That is the covered side of the count. The schools outside it keep no such tally, because there is nobody there to keep one.