“Calleigh’s not only accurate from a medical perspective, but she treats us with compassion,” Stevens said. “A lot of the time, it’s a difficult decision for her when she has to make a call.”

Trainers’ goals are to tend to the ailments of athletes in a way that is safe, but also minimizes the time off the field. When one of Stevens’ teammates had forearm tendinitis, Fangmeyer the training staff focused on managing his reps and treating the injury on a week-by-week basis, allowing him to not miss too many games whilst still keeping the condition under control.

Such success stories, according to Berkstresser, aren’t all too rare.

“There’s a lot. You always have them,” Berkstresser said. “We had three football players this past fall who had some injuries—the average time would be about 6 weeks—and none of those guys missed a game.”

On a higher level, the sports medicine department supplements the work of every athletic trainer with cutting-edge research.

“One of the great things about medicine and athletics is that both of them are always evolving and changing fields,” Berkstresser said. “You’re constantly adapting and innovating, whether it’s technology, whether it’s from a medicine standpoint, or different manual therapy skills that are coming out. You really always have to evolve and make sure that you’re continuing to educate yourself as a health professional.”

At Harvard, Berkstresser is currently involved in aerobic and anaerobic studies on the heart, as well as a recently-launched project that aims to detail the biomarkers linked to concussions.

“Sometimes you can be challenged to do a differential diagnostic between a concussion and another ailment,” he said in regards to the pilot study. “Right now, there’s no objective data, you can’t MRI somebody, you can’t do a blood test—you have to go with what they tell you.”

The Harvard sports medicine department may be working on broadly-sweeping research, but for the athletes, it is the department’s day to day work that is most important.