Anna Warmack, Engr ’23, ’24 (MS), loves to run. Far. The computer science graduate student runs the 6K for the Johns Hopkins cross-country team and the 5K and 10K for the track team. All the miles and laps add up though, and sometimes Warmack needs a place where she can recover from all that running. That’s where the new Bryan M. Krill Family Recovery Room comes in.
“After a hard day of running, your body’s tired; your mind’s really tired,” Warmack says. “In the Krill recovery room, you can sit and relax, laugh, and roll out your tired muscles, and you do feel pretty immediately better afterwards.”
With a gift from the Krill family, Hopkins Athletics transformed a basic room with some foam rollers and lacrosse balls into a hub for student athletes to restore their bodies and bond with their teammates. The new, upgraded recovery room includes trigger-point massage guns that pinpoint smaller areas of muscle pain and Normatec recovery systems that use air compression to increase blood flow and decrease muscle soreness.
According to Erin Long, assistant athletic director of Sports Performance and Wellness and head athletic trainer, recovery is one of the core pillars that her team emphasizes as an important part of a system to help student athletes stay healthy and perform at their best.
“If you’re not recovering your body properly, then you’re going to increase your risk for injuries,” Long says. “Recovery also allows your body to perform at a top level. If you’re sore and having issues because you didn’t recover properly, then you’re going to feel that out on the field, court, or mat, and you’re going to have a tougher time being able to perform the way you want to.”
As a former student athlete, track and field coach, and father to a student athlete, Bryan Krill witnessed how difficult it can be when an athlete can no longer compete due to injury or other circumstance.
“It can be really challenging when your ability to participate has been taken away from you,” Krill says. “So, the recovery room was really an opportunity for us to help the university get student athletes back out there because there’s a huge positive, social impact of being a part of a team.”
Bryan’s son, John Krill, A&S ’23, who played football and ran track for Johns Hopkins, experienced this firsthand. He arrived on campus his freshman year with a half-torn hamstring, and his sophomore football season was canceled due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
“I saw a lot of my peers who weren’t able to play because of injuries and other things that prevented them from being able to participate,” John Krill says. “So, it was really important for me that everyone gets the best opportunity to play, to really maximize their experience on the athlete side of their time at Johns Hopkins.”
In addition to providing a place to help student athletes improve physically, the Krill family wanted the room to be a space for teammates to be together and mentally decompress from the stress of injuries, athletics, and academics.
“It’s not just a place to physically recover from a workout or an injury. It’s an opportunity to really build fellowship with other student athletes to find a really good mental space,” Bryan Krill says.
“My favorite part of the recovery room is that it does provide a space for us to come together as teammates and just laugh and reflect on the hard work we put in and the races that we’ve done,” Warmack says, adding the sense of community cultivated in the new space has become a highlight of her time as a student athlete.
Topics: Alumni, Faculty and Staff, Blue Jays Unlimited (Athletics), Support Scholars