EUGENE – When Brandee Barbee saw Oregon quarterback Dante Moore take a big hit over the middle of the field against USC, her first thought was, “I have to go.” »
And the Ducks’ senior athletic trainer was able, in about four seconds, to fend off Moore’s worried teammates before immediately stabilizing his head and neck. The star quarterback was stiff on the ground in a fencing stance when he arrived, and players were swinging over Barbee and Moore in a tense moment.
After the crowd cleared, Moore was carefully loaded onto a stretcher and into an ambulance before being taken to Los Angeles General Medical Center, where he was diagnosed with a concussion but no additional injuries. It wasn’t until she handed him over to paramedics that Barbee removed his hands from his head.
“No matter what happens, if someone takes a big hit, you always assume there’s a neck injury,” Barbee told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “Our schooling is to assume there’s something going on in the neck, so you stabilize the neck. And you look for ABCs. Do they have an airway? Are they breathing? Is there circulation?”
Concussion experts praised the reaction time and treatment approach of Barbee and his coaching colleagues in the week following Moore’s injury, which captured the attention of the college football world during and after Oregon’s 41-27 victory over USC.
But the 31-year-old from Fontana, Calif., was ready for the moment. She and her colleagues in the Oregon sports medicine department had practiced this scenario during the offseason, as well as many other serious injury situations that could arise during a game or practice.
“At a minimum, our standard is that you practice every year, and so we practice every summer,” Barbee said. “Then we usually try to find another time to practice before the games start because, again, you never know what’s going to happen. We go through almost everything, every situation we can think of. We try different people in different places and just make sure our words are correct because no one wants to think about what you’re going to say. You just want to make sure it makes sense.”
Barbee is a trusted member of the Ducks team behind the team, having developed deep working relationships with Oregon players and coaches over the years since joining the football program in 2023. Prior to that, she worked with Oregon athletics and earned her master’s degree at OU.
The family atmosphere extends beyond Barbee’s daily interactions with the players, as the other coaches also look out for each other despite busy schedules, she said. Taking or replacing meals when another feels exhausted, or providing advice on a particular situation that a trainer may not have experience with.
But at times when a player’s health and potentially life are in danger, she said all personal feelings must be put aside.
“I hope this doesn’t sound cruel, but my job is my job,” she said. “It was actually very easy to get fixated on what I had to do. Obviously, I care about all the guys on the team, our staff, our coaches, everyone. We’re all here day in and day out. We all appreciate each other’s presence. But I’m here to do a job, and my job as an athletic trainer is to make sure that if someone comes down with literally something, I do that job and I do it well. Because their lives and their bodies are at stake.”
Barbee got into athletic training through her Fontana High School coach, Aubrey Prince, who she described as “amazing.” She completed her bachelor’s degree in athletic training at Cal State Fullerton before attending Oregon and serving as a graduate assistant from 2018 to 2020. Just under two years of work at USC preceded her return to Eugene.
Along the way, ensuring the representation of women – particularly Black women – in her field is a responsibility she says she enjoys immensely.
“Football is a male-dominated sport everywhere you look,” Barbee said. “In all positions, you see a lot of men, and so it’s nice to be the first, to be a woman, to be a black woman, and for people to see and recognize that. To say I represented the profession well.
“I’m just happy to be able to represent and hopefully give a young black girl, a girl all over the world, someone to look up to and inspire.”
Gn sports
