By Lisa Newman

The field was almost empty. The sky had recently turned black and the giant overhead lights beamed onto the faces of the few athletes still behind. When the wind blew it felt bitter and when it was still, the temperature was just above freezing.

Dianna Mastromauro stood about 20 yards from the end line. She shook her legs in an attempt to keep warm. In one hand she held a stopwatch and in the other, a clipboard.

“Ball!” she shouted as a girl in a red penny sprinted in a zigzag pattern toward her. The girl ran about five yards diagonally, turned and ran five yards in the other direction.

Mastromauro hit the stop button when the girl reached her and recorded the time. The girl repeated the same drill again.

Meanwhile, another group of students watched a girl grapevine along the edge of the field. A few yards away from them, a group recorded how long a girl could stand on one leg.

The students held clipboards that contained sheets of information on each player ranging from what they had for breakfast that morning, to prior injuries, to how much sleep they were getting each night. This process was a screening, which was the start to a much more in-depth program.

“We asked them questions about what they are already good at so we know we don’t have to work on those things,” Mastromauro said. “Then we asked, ‘If we could give you a magic pill what would you want it to do for you?’ In a sense at the end of the program we hope to give that to them. If a girl said she couldn’t turn as fast as she’d like, we’d watch her turn. We want each individual to fulfill their goals.”

The program may sound like its aim is to produce better athletes. But it reaches further than that. The goal is to prevent serious injuries, which plagued the women’s soccer team last season so much so that coach Ed Matz said his team might be “cursed,” while also helping the team improve on their weaknesses.

While the program is currently used by the women’s soccer team and is just in its initial testing phase, Mastromauro hopes to eventually expand it to cover all Northeastern athletics.

Mastromauro, a graduated senior midfielder for the Northeastern women’s soccer team and an exercise physiology major in her junior year, said she hopes the program she has started can transform the way Northeastern athletes train.

With her teacher and mentor, Darryl Elliott, and a few other students, Mastromauro has attended meetings, organized the first of many screenings and will soon map out the base program for the project.

“We’re hoping that it’s going to have a huge impact on the way the athletic program is run specifically at Northeastern,” Elliott said.

Even though Mastromauro has experienced the pain of an injury herself, her motivation for the project was based more on her reaction to others’ experiences than her own, she said.

“I know that I love these girls. I wanted something that could help them because they were always in pain,” Mastromauro said. “It killed me to see that these girls, who I am so close to, would die for this sport but yet they couldn’t play because they were injured. I don’t want anyone to have to experience that if I can help it. Soccer’s hard. It’s exhausting. You really have to fight to love the sport.”

A large part of the program is to also unify the community of support from athletic trainers, physical therapists and strength and conditioning coaches.

“The athlete can benefit from each part of the sports medicine field and each person is so essential to the overall benefit of the athlete and to the team as a whole,” Mastromauro said. “The factor that will make Northeastern better, is that all of these fields will be working as a unit instead of individually, which will bring many brains together to ensure optimal medical coverage.

From here, Mastromauro and Elliott will devise a base program that will be tested by the athletes during pre-season, the summer and during the actual season to see how successful it is.

She said she then hopes to present the program to the Northeastern sports department and the athletics director to expand the program to all sports, not just women’s soccer. She’s even taking a class on research in attempts to receive a research grant.

“This is cutting edge,” Matz said. “Some of the big time schools might have part of their staff doing this kind of thing but as far as Northeastern goes, this has never been done and I think a lot of people are excited to see how it turns out.”