EVERY year I see some cheesy ‘acknowledge your sports volunteers’ awards from one organization or another. With all due respect to those volunteers who have done the hard yards, I think there should be another category.
You couldn’t call it the Cheers People Who Clean Up Blood and Bones awards, but after a hellish start to my team’s rugby season, I think there should be a Zambuck Award.
You don’t often hear the word zambuck today, but it used to mean the ubiquitous St John people and ambulance officers who strolled the sideline of every game before rugby teams started to get get physios, massage therapists, and in one famous case, a holistic healer.
When I started playing big boys rugby after high school, the only tape you saw was the insulation tape holding up your socks. If you did happen to have a nasty obvious injury to a major joint, the prevailing theory was not to have tape on it, as this just made you a target.
Now we have players taping ankles, shoulders, wrists, knees, elbows, and even donning special lifting tape.  Our initial tape bill for the first two rounds of the season is $749.76 + GST. That’s nearly 200 wholesale quart bottles of beer!  But I digress into another area of interest…
In the last eight years of managing rugby teams, I have had two outstanding physios. Ange (risk averse) and Sarah (not as risk averse, but definitely more serious). Both have had to have the chat (“unless the player has been knocked out and/or are dying/bleeding profusely/broken in some way, they are not to leave the field”), and both have been worthy of awards.
Sarah is new to the scene and has had to deal with a hemiplegic migraine (which presented as a mild stroke), heat stroke, concussion, a broken thumb, broken nose, dislocated elbow, knee cartilage damage, some unpronounceable lower back injury, and other less severe injuries which we put in the Harden The **** Up (HTFU) category. All in five weeks.
Ange, the long-time previous physio, who has moved on to bigger and better things, was the queen of HTFU after a shaky start.
A player went down in her first game. She ran across the other side of the field, treated him, ran back and breathlessly said to the entire sideline’s great hilarity, “he’s a bit tired and wants to come off.”
From then on, despite being a stickler for head injuries and once having to carry a 110kg prop off on her tiny frame, she (and strapping tape) held the team together for a finals win and several semi-final appearances.
I tried to nominate her for a volunteer award, but was told that because she treated some injuries in her practice and received ACC for them, she wasn’t technically a volunteer. Gaaaah!
Putting aside this pedantry, I think it’s time that the silly ‘cheers volunteers’ awards had a category for physios, masseurs and other who fall into the ‘zambuck’ category. Without them, in the clearly much softer world of sport these days, we wouldn’t have teams.  
And while myself and others may do it for the love of the sport, I can guarantee that the zambucks probably have much more interesting things to do of a weekend that doesn’t involve strapping hairy ankles and mopping up blood and teeth.  But they still do it uncomplainingly.
So, instead of giving some old coot who has run interminable meetings in a freezing hall for 30 years an award, how about the zambucks for a change?