Join us in congratulating Tim Gattenby for receiving this certificate of appreciation from the Badger Battalion!
Tim met Sergeant First Class Nathan Gear in the Natatorium in 2017, and they began talking about the physical requirements for cadets in the army reserves and army national guard ROTC. The requirements are such that 70% of people in the US would not be able to satisfy the minimum requirements to join any branch of the armed service. A significant reason for this is a lack of physical fitness. Of those who do enter any branch of the armed services, about 10 to 15% don’t have the physical ability due to injury or poor fitness to pass the basic minimum physical fitness requirements. Tim enjoys doing things that haven’t been done, he aims to be more open-minded about the spectrum of physical abilities and strives to help everyone progress and succeed. Together with SFC Nathan Gear, they recognized that we could and should do better than aspiring to meet the minimums, and Tim wanted to be a part of challenging the status quo. Thus began a relationship between the Badger Battalion, Kinesiology, and Adapted Fitness that continues to have a positive impact on UW ROTC cadets and cadre, and works towards optimizing health for all future recruits.
In the beginning, Tim offered to work with the cadets who struggled to meet the minimums due to lacking the physical requirements or who sustained injuries. While his impact on them was great, he knew that more could be done. In the second year of his partnership with Badger Battalion, Tim began working with the cadre (military leaders) along with the cadets. His goal was to help the cadre understand how to work with cadets in passing their tests while also avoiding injuries. All of the military leaders have now become involved. Master Sergeant Scott Patterson, Sergeant Andrew wolf, and Captain Adam Schwartz have all joined in with training not only for themselves personally but also as examples and encourage the cadets to work with Tim. On Wednesday mornings gym 6 of the NAT has been reserved for working with the battalion in injury prevention, consultation, and group exercises and most importantly lessons on life long healthy behavior change. Cadets run circuits in stations to allow them to work at their own pace during intense exercises. The goal of the stations is to make everyone feel welcome, open to express their needs and feel that they are allowed to work at their own pace. As a result, there will be an overall reduction in injury and increase in cadet retention.
Tim would like to “give credit to the armed services for seeing the deficits in the old style of physical fitness testing and greatly appreciates that they are in the process of changing the standards and creating better testing and training methods.”, he also applauds the Badger Battalion for wanting to reduce injury and recognizing that the goal should not be to pass the minimum requirements but rather to work with all students to allow them to excel and exceed those minimums. In the future, Tim hopes that his partnership with the Badger Battalion can grow and become more formalized- together, setting a better standard for physical training and testing in ROTCs across the nation. He also wants to expand the program to be able to involve more students in the kinesiology department in learning to train others for intense physical activities, reduce injury, and to help everyone on the spectrum of physical ability in their physical endeavors.
