To Herring’s stage, it was his position as a staff doctor for NFL and MLB teams—he also worked with the Mariners right until stepping down from that role in new years—that aided him generate legislation to make kids safer. For all he has finished exterior of athletics, such as co-founding the Sports Institute at UW Medication and serving as the co-health-related director for orthopedic well being and sports drugs for UW Drugs and co-professional medical director of the UW drugs sports activities concussion software, Herring’s do the job in sporting activities and in the area of concussion in unique that will maybe be his greatest legacy.
“In our entire world, he is an complete legend,” said Seahawks VP of well being and player general performance Sam Ramsden, who has worked with Herring due to the fact 1999. “An complete legend. But he is also just very humble, very modest. You would in no way know who he talks to and who he rubs elbows with. You would by no means know how very well-identified he is. And he also just tends to make you feel like you have been the only one. You’re the most essential detail at the time.”
Stated Stricklin, “He is been actually sort of a guiding mild for three decades. He has not only held the line when it comes to individual treatment. He is pushed the envelope with regards to player, well being and security. He is always really set that very first and he is lived that.
“He tactics that way, and not just with our players but with any of his sufferers. You can listen to persons say, ‘I felt like I was the most crucial human being in the world when I bought finished with him.’ That’s just him as a legitimate human. Not to mention him getting an exceptional medical doctor. He’s carried out a lot of stuff. He transformed the way that the NFL managed concussions.”
When the NFL began using head accidents much more severely, building a concussion protocol just about every staff must adhere to, the league worked closely with Herring, for the reason that he experienced all those protocols in put with the Seahawks extensive ahead of it grew to become the norm for the NFL.
“A ton of the techniques that had been adopted in the past 5 to 6 many years, the Seattle Seahawks have been executing for a genuinely prolonged time, and that is due to the fact of Stan,” Stricklin claimed. “Which is mainly because of investigate. That’s mainly because of looking at and discussions, and due to the fact this is the proper way to do this when it will come to head harm. He revolutionized the way that we take care of gamers with concussions, and he has championed that hard work at all stages.”
As 1 of the team’s longest-tenured workers, director of products Erik Kennedy is aware Herring as well as just about everyone in the creating, and as an individual whose career will allow him to establish potent relationships with players, Kennedy has found initially hand Herring’s effect on gamers.
“When he arrived here, he introduced just heart, care, and passion,” Kennedy said. “And the way he treated persons was just phenomenal. If anybody’s interacted with Stan, he tends to make you sense like you’ve got regarded him. It really is just the way he treats people. He is stylish. He is specialist. You’d be hard pressed to discover any one who does not say a little something optimistic about that gentleman.”
Less than Pete Carroll, the Seahawks have taken participant basic safety really severely, from how they handle gamers with concussions to switching the way gamers tackle—and educating that technique to coaches at all ranges via tackling educational videos—but NFL groups haven’t usually taken head injuries as significantly as a doctor like Herring would have liked them to.
“Remaining 1 of the guys at the chopping edge of the recognition of it, he has been a voice,” Carroll claimed. “When a great deal of people today did not want to hear or failed to want to hear it, he is been shouting. I don’t know if any individual could be additional of an advocate than our soccer and the way we have finished our things. And we have usually dealt with Stan and his men, how they feel and how they instruct us what we must have an understanding of and how we really should value the urgency and in the sense of seriousness about it, and that is what we have carried out. And he is been element of all of that, you know. It would not have been the same with no him.”
Herring’s enthusiasm for supporting persons recover from personal injury goes back again to his times as a scholar at the College of Texas when he experienced a spinal injuries of his personal, and from his childhood when his brother had what he known as “actually major ailments and disabilities.
“I like supporting men and women get much better,” Herring said. “I experienced that style for assisting folks who had been battling. When I went to health-related college, soon after we observed patients, I might go back again and get them out of bed and exercise with them and speak to them about their daily life. I’m attracted to the area of physiatry simply because it can be multi-disciplinary treatment for persons who are struggling with personal injury or disability. You assume of stroke or spinal twine personal injury or mind harm, but it dawned on me far too that persons who are in a position bodied also struggle with injuries. So I was captivated to the industry and instruction as anyone who took treatment of the most complex brain harm and spine injury. I was in a position to apply those techniques to energetic people today and athletes.”
And for far more than 30 yrs with the Seahawks, and the 49ers prior to that, Herring has served hold gamers risk-free and preserve the sport of football safer at all ranges.
“1 of the attractive things about Stan is that, variety a person, he doesn’t care that it truly is expert soccer,” Stricklin reported. “He understands the aggressive part of it, but he cares about the individual. In this circumstance, it is really the gamers and he is unrelenting in his beliefs, in his integrity. There has hardly ever been a time where by I have witnessed him waiver in a stance. If anything at all, like if there is pushback, he’ll just get much better in it.
“He’s unrelenting when it comes to that form of things, and that’s definitely refreshing to see. For a prolonged time, we have applied him as a moral compass.”