Explosives Detecting K9 Receives All-Star Athletic Training Therapy

Inside the Indiana University men’s basketball athletic training facility, athletic trainer Tim Garl is using cutting-edge technology to keep a key member of the IU team ready for action.

Indy, the explosives-detecting chocolate Lab for IUPD’s K9 unit, was recently diagnosed with osteoarthritis, and his handler turned to Garl and the athletic training office for help.

“The same piece of equipment that Tim uses on the Hoosier star athletes, he’s using on my star athlete,” says officer Rob Botts. 

Indy and Botts are an integral piece of facility security for Memorial Stadium and Assembly Hall. They keep IU’s signature sports venues safe during game days, practice sessions and all major events. But that task was jeopardized one day earlier this year.

“I took him to get in the car to come to work, and you could tell mentally he wanted to get in the car, but physically he couldn’t do it. He kept making the attempt, but he just couldn’t take the leap to get into the car,” says Botts. After a trip to the vet, Indy was diagnosed with osteoarthritis. “Treatment was going to be a monoclonal antibody treatment called Librela and laser light therapy.” 

Enter Garl, who has worked as an athletic trainer for Indiana men’s basketball for nearly 50 years. 

“I’m the common denominator for the last 50 years of IU basketball,” says Garl, who thought he had seen it all until he added Indy to his patient roster. “We certainly didn’t hang a sign outside Cook Hall saying ‘veterinary care available.’” 

The kind of low-level light therapy that Indy’s vet recommended is a tool that the IU athletic training office was uniquely positioned to provide. Garl explained that the tool, known in the athletic training industry as photobiomodulation (PBM), can provide relief from a wide variety of conditions. 

“I used it on several players today, because you can use it to help discomfort from tendonitis or an actual injury,” Garl says. “There are many different modes, so the benefits can be different. There’s a healing mode, but also a pain control mode. For Indy, we use a healing mode.”

“We started with three times a week for six weeks, then we went down to two times a week for six weeks. Now, we’re on a maintenance program, doing it once a week,” adds Botts, “We’ll be in the athletic training office getting our treatment, and [shooting guard] Trey Galloway has been laying in there getting his treatment, so we’re around the athletes quite a bit.” 

Having arrived in Bloomington in the early 1980s, Garl says he likes to tell students that back then it was all about what you could do with your hands. Today, he says the industry is focused much more on research and innovation. 

“Now, there’s a lot more of what I call ‘noise.’ Everybody’s looking for something that’ll make them better, quicker and stronger. You have to rely on your instincts, especially when we get devices like the PBM light therapy,” says Garl, who recommends that other athletic trainers always review the research, find out where the new technology came from and learn all the interesting things about it. 

“What’s interesting about the PBM light therapy is that it came out of the veterinary field, so to use it now on Indy is really coming full circle,” he says. 

Both Garl and Botts recognize that there’s a big investment in training for a working dog like Indy, similar to the investment in training for a D-I athlete, so it’s important to get them back to functioning at a very high level as fast as possible. 

“Every day presents a new challenge,” Garl says, “and Indy was a new challenge.”