Finding yourself wanting to exercise more during these stressful times? Kristie Rupp, assistant professor in the Department of Health and Movement Sciences, knows all about that. Her research focuses on increasing physical activity engagement, and she is also an avid runner herself. Regarding exercise during times of stress, Rupp says, “We definitely want to encourage people to be physically active while practicing social distancing! Walking or running is a great way to exercise and get outside, while still maintaining a safe distance from others. There are also a host of free workout videos on YouTube and other platforms that you can use to help you stay active indoors for those who have been instructed to do so. Now, more than ever, it is important to engage in regular physical activity to help promote overall health and personal well-being during these challenging times.”
The Human Performance Lab in the Department of Health and Movement Sciences
A name change and brand new facilities are bringing exciting — and cutting-edge — enhancements to Southern’s Exercise Science Department, renowned for its programs in athletic training, biomechanics, exercise physiology and more. The department recently was renamed the Department of Health and Movement Sciences, to better encompass its wide breadth of programs, and the department’s new address on campus — a 4-story Health and Human Services building — will enhance learning and research opportunities for students and faculty alike.
“Historically, our department has been rooted in the exercise sciences, which encapsulated the performance, rehabilitation, and physical education aspects of exercise and sport through human performance, athletic training, and education, respectively,” said Marc Robertson, associate professor of health and movement sciences. “The field has evolved as society has placed greater emphasis on the health benefits associated with physical activity, hence the departmental name change better represents the types of programs we offer.”
Just a few years ago, the Exercise Science Department encompassed only the undergraduate majors of Athletic Training and Exercise Science. Now, Southern offers an accelerated 3+2 (3-year undergraduate degree plus 2-year graduate degree) Athletic Training degree program, one of the longest running accredited programs in Connecticut, as well as undergraduate and graduate programs in human performance, physical education, respiratory care, and school health education.
A new Bachelor of Health Science degree program was added in fall 2019 to provide tailored educational programs to students who plan to pursue graduate health professions such as physical therapy, occupational therapy, and physician assistant.
When construction begins in March 2020 on the Health and Human Services building, these programs will be enhanced with new teaching and learning labs, expanded research opportunities for faculty and students, and interprofessional education programs with other health and human services professions. Many of these collaborative learning experiences will take place in the patient/client simulation center that includes six hospital rooms, four medical exam rooms, and a home simulation facility.
A dedicated human performance lab and a biomechanics lab will enable the department to expand its research opportunities with additional equipment for testing and analysis. High-tech components include motion capture technology and the use of force plates for movement analysis. A new piece of equipment called a BOD POD will allow students to measure body fat using air plethysmography (air displacement). The equipment will replace a technique known as hydrostatic underwater weighing, which required clients to sit on a special scale and be lowered into a tank of water to estimate their body composition.
“The person sits still in an egg-shaped structure while the measurement is taken,” said William R. Lunn, associate professor of health and movement sciences. “It’s easier for the participant, as there is no anxiety of needing to be submerged under water.”
Award-winning faculty still will be the cornerstone of the department, although the new space will offer increased opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. It’s what drew champion triathlon racer and student David Martin, ‘20 (a master’s candidate in exercise science with a concentration in human performance), to Southern and continues to fuel his success.
“What is so special about the program and the faculty at SCSU is that I’m surrounded by people who are as enthusiastic as I am about this field of work,” Martin said. “The classes are set up in a way that prepares you for real experiences we will face in the exercise science field. With research being conducted by the professors, we can be hands-on as students and learn as we watch our professors.”
Even after graduation, he added, “There is a huge focus on having a plan. I feel successful here, and I feel comfortable that my success will continue to grow and exceed my expectations because I have the support of this department.”
Department Chair Gary Morin also has his eye on growth, although it’s for the department’s capabilities and programs.
“Once the building is done, the technological capabilities will increase the quality of education students get,” Morin said. “It’s been — and will continue to be — an exciting evolution.”
When disaster strikes, Katherine Bequary, ’93, and David Denino, ’75, M.S. ’76, travel the country and the world — saving lives and providing solace.
David Denino, '75, M.S. '76, worked with many survivors in McComb, Miss., a post-Hurricane Katrina evacuation zone. [below] In Mosul, Iraq, Katherine Bequary, '93, works behind the front lines at a crisis-care clinic run by the organization.
Think of the worst human tragedies of the last 15 years — earthquakes, hurricanes, mass shootings. Chances are Katherine Bequary, ’93, or David Denino, ’75, M.S. ’76, were there to help.
Bequary has traveled the globe as executive director of NYC Medics, coordinating emergency care in places few are willing to go — from earthquake-torn Haiti and Japan to the remote mountains of Nepal. In summer 2018, she returned from one of her most challenging assignments yet: running a crisis-care clinic in Mosul, Iraq, just behind the front lines in the fight against ISIS. Bequary says more than 10 percent of the trauma casualties reported in the city were children, many of whom died before they could reach a hospital.
The clinic, which moved with the fighting, did whatever was needed — starting IVs, applying tourniquets, inserting chest tubes — to stabilize victims and help them survive the journey. Staffed 24/7, it provided life-saving care to more than 2,600 patients in the span of a year, many of whom were civilians shot by ISIS snipers while trying to flee the city.
“Every mission always has a powerful message or takeaway, but I have to say Iraq, by far, has been the most important work I’ve ever done,” says Bequary, 49.
“Not only for the medical intervention our team provided,” she adds, “but for the hope that comes with seeing so many people putting themselves in a conflict zone to help a stranger.”
Psychological first aid
Closer to home, as the mental health lead for the Connecticut/Rhode Island American Red Cross, Denino, 66, manages teams of mental health volunteers dispatched to disaster scenes around Connecticut and the country. He administers what he calls psychological first aid, setting up mental health triage based on patients’ levels of distress. If someone needs medication or a hospital, Denino works to connect them with services in the community.
A licensed professional counselor and director emeritus of counseling services at Southern, he trained as a Red Cross crisis responder following the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.
“When I watched the towers go down, I felt paralyzed,” recalls Denino. “The call for help went out far and wide, and I couldn’t do anything because I hadn’t been vetted.”
Too late for 9/11, he was sent to New Orleans a few years later, assigned to the shelters housing residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Subsequent missions included hurricanes Sandy, Irene, and Harvey as well as the mass shootings in Sandy Hook, Conn., and Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, Denino worked in the family assistance center, offering counseling and comfort to people who survived the shooting or lost loved ones. Staged in a conference hall “three times the size of Costco,” he remembers the center being eerily quiet despite being filled with concertgoers and workers, mostly in their teens, 20s, and early 30s.
David Denino, ’75, M.S. ’76, finds a moment of comfort in the midst of helping others.
“A lot of them were struggling a couple of days out with sleeplessness and anxiety,” he says.
In addition to counseling the victims, Denino also kept an eye on the mental health of his fellow volunteers, helping them process their emotions and cope with stress. He earned the 2017 Meritorious Service Award from the National Behavioral Intervention Team Association (NaBITA) for his work in Las Vegas and in Texas after Hurricane Harvey. In 2018, he served as the organization’s president, leading efforts to prevent suicide and violence on college campuses and K-12 schools. In July 2018, the U.S. Secret Service issued a report concluding that the most effective way for schools to prevent targeted violence is with a behavioral intervention team — heightening the focus on NaBITA significantly.
Southern roots
Now living in Wallingford, Conn., with his wife, Vanessa [Pomarico] Denino, ’92, M.S.N. ’98, Ed.D. ’18, and two dogs, Denino traces his interest in counseling to his days as a resident adviser at Southern’s Neff Hall. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in recreation and leisure, he stayed on for a master’s in counseling and landed his first job at Southern right out of grad school.
He spent 37 years at the university, retiring as director emeritus of counseling services in 2009, and he still teaches in the clinical mental health program. In 2007, he received the J. Philip Smith Award for Outstanding Teaching, one of Southern’s top faculty honors. He credits his mentor, James Brine, professor emeritus of counseling and school psychology, with steering him toward higher education.
As the executive director of NYC Medics, Katherine Bequary, ’93, has organized aid efforts around the world, including Nepal.
Bequary, who lives in New York City, came to Southern as a physical education/athletic training major intending to be a physical therapist, but says the university prepared her well for her eventual, if unexpected, disaster-relief career. She credits Gary Morin, professor and chairman of the Department of Health and Movement Sciences, for teaching her that physical and emotional healing go hand-in-hand.
“It’s a big part of what we do [at NYC Medics],” she says. “We’re there to provide the physical care, but it’s so much more than that.”
After graduating from Southern, she held several jobs in the healthcare field before earning a master’s in public health from the University of Connecticut in 2010. She had just finished her thesis when the Haiti earthquake struck, and she learned through a friend that NYC Medics was mobilizing to help.
“I deployed with them and have been involved ever since,” says Bequary. In December 2019, she traveled to Yemen, which has been ravaged by civil war. NYC Medics is working to legally implement a program there and Bequary hopes to return soon.
‘Humbling and inspiring’
Asked why they do what they do, Bequary and Denino offer slightly different takes on the same answer.
“If I could just have people stand in my shoes for one day, they wouldn’t even need to ask the question,” Bequary says. “When people embrace us and open their arms to us . . . it’s the most humbling and inspiring experience in the world.”
She offers a story about a 3-year-old Iraqi boy she found wandering alone at the clinic. Through some detective work, Bequary eventually learned his mother had been a patient, shot in the stomach during a mass casualty incident, one of 60 civilians with serious injuries brought to the clinic in a single day. In the chaos, mother and son had been separated. Although critically injured, the mother survived, and Bequary was there for the joyful reunion: “He hadn’t spoken for three days, but as soon as he saw his mother, he just started crying out to her. He ran over and embraced her. It was incredible,” she says.
Like Bequary, Denino cites the people he helps as his inspiration. “With Katrina, I was talking to people who lost everything — everything — including members of their family or extended family, and the first thing they would do is hug you and say, ‘Thank you for coming here,’” Denino recalls.
He remembers the relief on one woman’s face when he was able to locate her elderly mother in a shelter, and recounts how some neighborhood families brought a home-cooked, fried chicken and biscuits dinner to the volunteers — a welcome change from the military-style MREs [meals ready to eat] they’d been dining on for days.
“You come home and it takes a little while to recover emotionally,” he says. “But when I’m out there, I feel good about it.”
One by one, members of the men’s basketball team ran towards the Vertec vertical jump tester trying to see how high they could go. With teammates cheering on, each athlete jumped as high as they could. After recording all of the scores, Lonnie Blackwell began explaining how he would incorporate strength and conditioning to see these values rise during the off-season. Blackwell is a graduate student obtaining his Master of Science degree in Exercise Science with a concentration in Human Performance. Blackwell also works for Jim Ronai’s Competitive Edge Sports Performance, a company based out of Orange, Conn., as a strength and conditioning coach. He also has certifications such as the NASM CPT and NSCA CSCS. Blackwell acts as the graduate assistant strength and conditioning coach for men’s basketball, men’s soccer, and women’s field hockey, with head strength and conditioning coach, Dave Hashemi.
The Department of Health and Movement Science’s Human Performance Laboratory, offers numerous fitness, performance, and functionality assessments to members of the SCSU community. Men’s basketball started the preseason by utilizing the lab with Blackwell to test their physical performance. These tests included: vertical jump, change of direction using the 5-10-5 test, and acceleration with the 10-yard dash. Blackwell used the lab’s zybek lasers in order to precisely measure the 10-yard dash. The team tested strength with a 1-repetition maximum weight for the squat and bench press.
Men’s soccer testing included the yo-yo intermittent beep test to evaluate aerobic fitness levels and to predict VO2max, and performed 1-repetition maximum for the squat and bench press to measure strength.
During the regular season, the girls’ field hockey team comes into the weight room two times a week. The strength and conditioning system in place utilized six different lift options. Depending on each athlete’s fatigue level and general fitness, they can choose a lift option that compliments them.
The soccer team and field hockey team is also utilizing GPS. The GPS technology operated by the human performance laboratory gives a researcher data such as distance covered, top-end speed, and work rate. The field hockey team uses this technology every Friday for practice, in order to estimate the training load. Men’s soccer utilizes the GPS to grab data from their games, such as training load. It also allows them to monitor their performance throughout the season.
Blackwell is well versed in GPS technology, as he is using GPS for his master’s thesis. His research will be utilizing data from various sports teams, to gain further understanding of how to prescribe programming to teams during the year and summer months.
