Even before he received his undergraduate degree, assistant athletic trainer Mike Carpino has been involved on the sidelines with Brandeis Athletics. A 2014 Graduate of Lasell, Carpino first made the short trek from Newton to Waltham as a junior, when he served his junior year as a student trainer, with head athletic trainer Lisa DeNicola and then-assistant Jason Byrne serving as his preceptors. Carpino worked with the basketball, baseball and softball teams and did a memorable job. 

“After I graduated, Lisa reached out to me and let me know that Brandeis was going to be adding a part-time position, and of course I took it,” Carpino remembers. “That was when I really got my feet wet as a true athletic trainer, and it couldn’t have gone better.”

Working with DeNicola, Byrne and Ron LeClair (now the head athletic trainer at Regis College), was a perfect working environment for Carpino to get started. After spending the year working part-time with the Judges, Carpino returned to school in 2016 to receive his M.S. in Leadership and Administration at Boston College, serving as a graduate assistant in the Eagles’ athletic training program. He enjoyed the DI experience, but was ready to move on after two years. He stuck around one more season at the Heights before returning for his third stint with the Judges at the start of the 2019-20 campaign when Brandeis added a third full-time assistant ATC position. 

Carpino had been an enthusiastic lacrosse player since the fourth grade. When a youth league sprung up in his hometown in Connecticut, his dad Richard, who played the sport through his youth in Watertown Connecticut, encouraged him to try it out. A new passion was born, as the sport sparked an excitement that he didn’t feel with soccer or baseball.

Carpino’s interest in athletic training started during his high school career. His teams didn’t have an athletic trainer until his senior season. That was the same year that Carpino took a human anatomy course in his final semester, which fascinated him to no end. “It changed how I looked at school,” Carpino recalls. “That textbook, I didn’t want to put it down!” After discussing his future with his high school anatomy teacher and guidance counselor, it was apparent that athletic training was a way to combine his two passions into one career path.

Given the academic workload expected of athletic training majors at Lasell, Carpino stepped away from the playing field in college. Though Brandeis doesn’t have a varsity program, he didn’t leave the sport behind entirely, getting an opportunity to work for the Boston Cannons of Major League Lacrosse for a couple of summers. As great as he found the experience of seeing some of the best lacrosse players in the world up close was, it’s still not even the top experience working with the pros that Carpino has had.

As a sophomore at Lasell, he got a job as a security guard at Fenway Park during Red Sox games. He’s now coming up on a decade with the team, and isn’t likely to step away any time soon. Carpino has experienced a pair of World Series championships, though his most memorable experience was the chance to tackle an interloper onto the field during a July game against the Blue Jays in 2014. Working on the third-base side, near the visiting dugouts, Carpino gets to know some of the visiting players as well as the Red Sox. Adam Jones of the Orioles was an especially memorable opponent. “It’s fun. You never know what you’re going to get when you work at Fenway,” Carpino says. “Kind of like being an athletic trainer, every day is going to be different.”

While working at Brandeis, Carpino has a fond remembrance of the 2016 NCAA Fencing Championships as a unique experience, but it’s the student-athletes that have really made an impression during his time here. 

“Every day coming to work is a joy,” Carpino gushes. “I think we work with some of the best student-athletes in the country. They are a diverse and personality-strong student body. They teach me more than I teach them. I love talking to them and getting to know them.”