McGuire, who’s married to the former Allison Beightol, is measured and soft-spoken, but don’t be deceived, O’Connor said. “I can promise you he’s a fierce, intense competitor. Like the old saying, he’s a guy that hates losing more than he loves winning. And I can tell you that he’s calm and he’s respectful, but he is a really intense trainer, and I love that, because it’s in line with what I believe it needs to be about for these guys to experience.
“That said, he’s compassionate and, most importantly, he’s incredibly well-read. He goes out of his way to learn everything going on with baseball players and the overhead throw. He’s not just satisfied doing what he’s always done. He has spent the time and the resources to continue to keep up to date with what’s going on in the care of baseball players.”
McGuire acquired that knowledge through relentless study.
“This is what I tell my interns and GAs: that the first five years at your job, your coaches are going to be much better at their job than you will be at your job,” McGuire said.
Early in his tenure with UVA’s baseball program, McGuire said, he’d get home at 7 or 8 p.m. and eat dinner, “and then from 9 to 11:30 every night, seven days a week for the first two or three years, I would just read journal articles and books. I felt like I needed to really catch up.”
Great @uva_ortho baseball shoulder and elbow conference with case presentations highlighted by @UVABaseball legendary ATC Brian McGuire talking pearls on pitcher rehab. pic.twitter.com/g2TmAkhbsl
— F. Winston Gwathmey, MD (@winstongwathmey) January 6, 2023
Having a committed athletic trainer is “vital to the success of any sports organization,” O’Connor said, “because first and foremost you’ve got to keep [the athletes] on the field, right? And when you play the amount of games we play in a baseball season, keeping them healthy and keeping them on the field so that we have them available is incredibly important. And let me tell you, it can be miserable if you have an athletic trainer that is not high quality, because there are so many things that are going to happen. I could tell you a hundred stories about situations that Brian McGuire has managed to help us win baseball games.”
McGuire grew up in Smethport, Pa., a small town about 95 miles south of Buffalo, N.Y. His sport of choice was not baseball, but wrestling.
“I loved the one-on-one, combative [nature of…