March is National Athletic Trainers Month! As the first in a series of articles focusing on Brandeis Athletic department staff, we spoke with the newest member of the Athletic Training staff, Mandy Nicoles.
Nicoles joined the Judges’ staff in January of 2020, shortly before the onset of COVID-19. A native of California, she came to New England to attend Boston University. Initially drawn to BU’s physical therapy program, she enrolled in their athletic training program with the hopes of transferring to PT. “Athletic training is kind of an unrecognized profession in California,” says Nicoles. “So I didn’t know much about it. But when I got to BU, it turns out, you can’t transfer between the programs. So I call going into the athletic training program the best mistake I ever made, because it’s really what I wanted from the beginning.”
As someone who has played sports and been involved in sports for as long as she can remember, Nicoles sees athletic training as a combination of two other noble professions. “My parents have an assignment that I wrote in elementary school,” Nicoles recalls. “It asked what I wanted to be when I grow up, and I said either a doctor or a teacher. And I think athletic training really combines aspects of both professions.”
Nicoles returned to her native California for graduate school with the intent of staying, but discovered herself returning to New England at every opportunity, making the move permanent in 2007. Boston reminded her of the San Francisco area where she spent some formative years, with the added layer of a robust network of opportunities in her field of work.
It’s that community of athletic trainers in Boston that has led Nicoles to become involved in some of the most valuable work of her career. After returning to the area permanently, she accepted her first full-time head athletic training position in 2007 at Pine Manor College in Newton. At the time, PMC was still a small, women’s only institution, meaning Nicoles worked with about 70 student-athletes across seven sports, many of whom doubled up on teams to keep rosters full. It was as part of this small community that Nicoles first worked with a transgender athlete.
“I met him as a first-year, and he mentioned that he wouldn’t be around for his senior year because he was planning to start transitioning,” Nicoles said. “I did some research, and at the time, unfortunately, the NCAA policy didn’t allow his participation at a single-sex institution.”
Nicoles was able to see her student-athlete navigate a series of life milestones regarding his transition: adjusting to medications; undergoing the transition with his immediate family’s support; suspending hormone therapy in order to please a family elder who was gravely ill; and finally undergoing surgery to complete his transition.
Since that initial work, Nicoles has continued to be a staunch advocate for transgender student-athletes. She has presented at national athletic training conferences and consulted with local colleges and universities on their transgender policies, including helping Brandeis to draft its document over the course of the past year. “This is a huge issue that athletic departments need to be prepared for,” Nicoles says. “And it’s become really important to me to help them do that.”
Two years ago, Brandeis welcomed Schuyler Bailar, the first openly transgender NCAA athlete and swimmer at Harvard, as a speaker shortly after his final collegiate meet. Recruited as a member of the women’s team for the Crimson, Bailar transitioned during a gap year and returned to Cambridge to compete for the men’s team. The NCAA's policies were thorough and they and Harvard followed through, allowing him to compete for one of the best Crimson teams in decades in 2019. Because of the precedents set by Bailar, Nicoles was able to experience the fruit of seeds that she had seen planted back at Pine Manor come to bloom. Now a decade later, at Emerson College, another transgender student-athlete came to her attention. “I was amazed at how smoothly the process went,” Nicoles remembers. “It was kind of tedious because of the paperwork the NCAA required, but it was a cool moment to see the writing match the actions.”
In addition to helping advise on Brandeis Athletics’ transgender student inclusion policy, Nicoles has treated transgender student-athletes on the Judges’ rosters. She has also worked with women’s basketball assistant coach Aseem Rastogi to develop diversity-programming based on LGBTQ issues for the spring semester. Nicoles sees her experience with transgender student-athletes as an important way to help the department navigate issues that arise when they are presented with a new situation. “It’s OK to make mistakes,” Nicole remarks. “Having ten-plus years of experience, I consider myself somewhat of an expert, but I’m still learning, too. What’s important is finding ways to minimize those mistakes.”
Away from Brandeis, Nicoles stays involved with sports. She plays in a full-contact flag football league each fall, as she has for eight years, and she often finds herself in the dual role of player and athletic trainer. “Everyone in the league knows what I do,” Nicoles notes. “There was one year where I think I diagnosed three ACL tears and relocated five shoulders.” She has also taken up cycling, taking part in the annual Harbor to the Bay charity ride from Boston to Provincetown, raising money for HIV and AIDS organizations. Nicoles has raised nearly $4,000 for the charities. “Football and cycling have really been able to keep me sane over the years,” Nicoles said.
Because of the pandemic, Nicoles has only been at three varsity contests so far: the Eric Sollee Fencing Invitational last February, a baseball game in Northboro last March, and the UAA Indoor Track and Field Championships in New York, also in March. The bulk of her experience at the start of her Judges’ career came through the computer, over Zoom. When teams and staff returned to campus last fall, for limited practices and departmental training sessions, things started to feel like they were getting back to a small semblance of normalcy. “Seeing people at our diversity training, it felt like I was part of a staff, part of a community,” Nicoles says. “It was awesome.”