In 2008, JoEllen Sefton received a phone call from U.S. Army Major Todd Burkhardt at Fort Benning that went a little bit like this:
“Dr. Sefton, the commander of our training unit tells me we have way too many injuries and we need to fix it. Can you help?”
Sefton’s response was immediate, methodical and effective. A leading expert in athletic training and injury prevention at Auburn University’s School of Kinesiology, Sefton developed what would become the Warrior Athletic Training Program, embedding graduate student athletic trainers within the units at Fort Benning and implementing evidence-based interventions to reduce musculoskeletal injuries and improve physical readiness in training units.
The success of that program ignited Sefton’s research and changed the trajectory of health for tactical athletes. Named the recipient of the 2024 Award for Excellence in Faculty Outreach, Sefton has spent the past two decades spearheading research and outreach to improve performance while reducing injury for military, police, firefighters and first responders.
“All the work that we do here is to solve a problem and to help people,” Sefton said. “Our scope is tactical athletes and how to keep them safe and healthy. If it’s not going to make a difference in somebody’s life, then we don’t spend our time on it.”
Called to Service
In 2008, JoEllen Sefton was tapped by the U.S. Army at Fort Benning to take a look at their basic training problem. The problem: injuries keeping new recruits from reaching their goals in physical fitness.
“The first thing I did was travel to Fort Benning to view how they trained their soldiers,” she said. “I could immediately see things that needed to change, and we started talking about how I could help his battalion.”
She began a first-of-its-kind research program on military tactical athletes, employing Auburn graduate students to develop protocols on measuring the trainees’ health, fitness and other factors.
“The research showed that in one week, the trainees get the physical activity that most people would get in a full month,” Sefton said.
Sefton and her team discovered that the majority of the injuries were overuse injuries, especially stress fractures that couldn’t heal quickly because of the accelerated training. She set out to make the unit more resilient by implementing injury prevention research.
Sefton developed what would become the Warrior Athletic Training Program, positioning graduate student athletic trainers alongside soldiers at Fort Moore and applying proven strategies to lower injury rates and enhance physical performance. They also examined nutrition and other health factors to improve trainee performance. And, perhaps most importantly, they trained the soldiers to understand why they shouldn’t hide injuries.
“It took a lot of education to teach them that if they report it and get help from an athletic trainer right away, they will be back into training in a day or two. If they hide it until it gets really bad, they can be out for months,” Sefton said. “It was an enormous culture change to go from the ‘We don’t want to make ‘em weak’ mindset to one of achieving training goals while reducing injuries.”
Over the course of eight years, the Warrior Athletic Training program served more than 860,000 soldiers in training and cadre, treated more than 510,000 new injuries, saved 1,692,872 soldier training hours by reducing lost training time due to injury and saved the Army more than $30 million in medical costs.
In addition, the program fully funded 85 graduate students as they earned their master’s degrees at Auburn in the School of Kinesiology.
Warrior Research Center
In 2010, Sefton founded the Warrior Research Center (WRC) in the College of Education. With a mission to maximize soldier readiness through improved health and performance, the WRC enables tactical athletes to safely complete the occupational demands of their jobs.
“The WRC has become the go-to place for Auburn researchers, industry, small businesses and government organizations to find the resources needed to solve problems,” Sefton said. “I’m proud that the work of the WRC is built on a foundation of solid, peer-reviewed, evidence-based science.”
“The work of the WRC has changed how the Army trains and cares for soldiers,” Burgess said. “The Warrior Athletic Training Model, a WRC program, has been expanded to Army and Air Force training locations nationwide. The work of the WRC has saved the military millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lost training hours.”
The WRC has also expanded its work to help first responders in and around Auburn.“We work with Auburn firefighters, specifically on heat issues,” Sefton said. “We have an environmental chamber on campus where we can exercise people in heat and study its cognitive and physical effects.”
In addition, the Auburn Police Department tapped Sefton and the WRC when it became aware its officers had high rates of cardiovascular disease. The request for help resulted in wellness screenings, a series of workshops on fitness and an embedded graduate student who helps in the police and firefighter gym on Ross Street, answering their questions and helping them achieve their fitness goals.
“Our goal: get someone back to their job and keep them alive,” Sefton said.
To date, the WRC has generated more than $13 million in funding for its research, all dedicated to generating solutions for military tactical athletes and first responders.
What’s next? BOLT
Currently, Sefton and the WRC are working with the Air Force to develop BOLT, a comprehensive performance initiative for military service members attending Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Armed with a $500,000 grant, Sefton and her team are creating a method to improve service members’ quality of life and professional performance.
In the early phases of the project, Sefton and her team from kinesiology are on base several days a week administering health screenings and building programs for individuals that include personalized fitness plans, nutrition advice, cognitive performance improvement and stress reduction techniques.
“We’re trying to get them to look at a holistic kind of health package and then we’ll evaluate: did the participants come see us? Did those that did come see us get better?” Sefton said. “This is really a beta year, but our hope is that we’ll be able to demonstrate these interventions are necessary and effective and that we’ll be able to scale up the program to other Air Force schools.”
