Harrison fulfills dream of being athletic trainer

Boulder City High School head athletic trainer Katie Harrison digs her heels into her position, aiding student-athletes as fiercely as she can for her third year.

During the spring sporting season, she has time to exhale, compared to the very busy fall season, specifically football.

She said as soon as the bell rang, she had upward of 20 students in her office needing assistance, whereas, in the spring season, she’ll have one to three. Football is a busy time and it brings more injuries for athletes than other sports, most notably concussions.

The Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association (NIAA), has implemented new initiatives as recently as July, with plans to get students who are concussed the resources and assistance they need to return to field and classroom.

“CCSD and NIAA added a return to learn protocol on top of the return to play protocol,” Harrison said. “So now, if an athlete sustains a concussion or has symptoms of a concussion, then they have to go into a return to learn. So that might be extra accommodations for their classes, they’ll get extra time on homework and assignments, quizzes, and tests.

“And then for return to play, once I say that they have a concussion, they now have to go see a doctor, and we have a couple of physicians who do specialize in concussions, so I try to send them there for better care. And then once they get diagnosed with a concussion, then there’s a five-day return to play that they have to go through. And they can do that simultaneously with the return to learn as well. I can do days one through three with them, and then when the doctor signs them off saying, ‘yeah, you can go back to play,’ then we do day four and five.”

This Return to Learn initiative is brand new, but the Return to Play plan has been around for longer, since before Harrison began working with Dignity Health in 2021. This initiative aligns with Harrison’s goal to be there for the kids and get them the treatment that they need.

“What I love the most is just being in the action and just getting to be there for the kids,” Harrison said. “I picked high school because most people want to work pros, college, I’ve done it. I worked Major League Lacrosse and I’ve done rotations at junior colleges this past summer. I worked with the college baseball league, but I love the high school kids because you can still kind of help form their brains and mold them to be better humans. I just love the interactions that I get and the relationships that I make with the kids and parents.”

Harrison was once a student-athlete herself. She played softball for 10 years and knew the feeling of avoiding the athletic trainer because she never thought she needed to see them. However, she said that this shouldn’t be the case because athletic trainers like her are there to help the students perform the best they can. She has seen the experiences her students go through firsthand, which pushed her to this career path.

“When I was a junior in high school, we had to write a paper of what we wanted to be, basically, when we grew up,” she said. “So, I really didn’t understand athletic training until I got to college. In my junior year when we had to write our paper, my older sister told me about her friend who was going to Cal State Fullerton majoring in kinesiology. So, I researched that and I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds fun. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.’ I went to Cal State Fullerton, and I majored in kinesiology. One of the classes that I took was Intro to kinesiology, which tells you all of the things you could be with a kinesiology degree, which is actually nothing. You need other certifications. So, I found athletic training and I took an Intro to athletic training class and I fell in love with it. Like this is what I want to do with my life.”

After college, Harrison needed to complete internship hours under a certified athletic trainer, so she started at a high school in 2009 and fell in love with it ever since.

“Just getting to be on the sidelines, in the action, getting to see the injuries firsthand and just some of the injuries that I’ve seen are gnarly, so just getting to be there for the athletes whenever that happens and getting a front row seat, getting taken out by football players, which is not fun, is just part of the job,” Harrison said.

Since moving to Las Vegas in 2020, Harrison has been the athletic trainer with Dignity Health at a handful of schools in Las Vegas, with Boulder City High School being her favorite. She said that it differs from the other high schools she has worked with because it has fewer students. She said that she can have a better relationship with the athletes, in which they know that they can trust her, whereas in other schools that tailored experience is not as possible.

Additionally, every high school is supposed to have an athletic trainer in CCSD. Dignity Health covers all of the public schools and a couple of the private schools, and Harrison said another company covers the other private schools for home needs. She sometimes encounters students whose schools don’t have athletic trainers, and this encourages her to share things with those students on techniques to help them recover free of charge until they can speak with another athletic trainer. Harrison said that they’re hoping to get all of the schools coverage at all times.

Harrison has a long resume of athletic training experience but plans to stay at Boulder City High School for a long time. She loves the high school level and the level of care that she’s able to give her athletes, and is doing what she always wanted to do.

“I love it here,” she said. “In Boulder City and at the high school level, I always wanted to do high school. When I was in the program, I only did one rotation at a junior college, and then I did one rotation at a physical therapy clinic, and then my other three were at a high school because they knew this is what I wanted to do.”