District Athletic Trainer Reflects on 33-Year Career

Paul Steinbach Headshot
[Photo by John Clifford/Rome Daily Sentinel]
[Photo by John Clifford/Rome Daily Sentinel]

When Kelly Hoke, fresh out of college in 1986, became the first athletic trainer in the Rome (N.Y.) City School District's history, she had one request: an ice machine. When cell phone technology emerged, she was the first district employee to ask for and receive a brick-like mobile device that allowed Hoke to be reached day and night while tending to student-athletes competing at various venues in grades 7 through 12. But nothing — not education or ice or state-of-the-art connectivity — could equip Hoke for the shock in 2015 of responding to her own son after he was knocked unconscious during an eighth-grade football game. AB senior editor Paul Steinbach asked Hoke, who is retired May 24 from the only professional position she's ever held, about that emotional day and the changes she has witnessed in athletic training over the past 33 years.

When did you know athletic training was the career for you?
The reason I got into athletic training was because of a traumatic injury at Alfred University. I had a lacrosse player come in my freshman year there. I was a student athletic trainer. It was a Sunday morning in the spring of 1982. I was the only person there, and he had a ruptured spleen. And I knew what to do for him. He went unconscious right in front of me, and I was able to handle the emotions and get the right things done. And I remember my head trainer saying to me afterward, "You need to do this, because you were so calm." And I am. But it doesn't mean that I don't go home and throw up. I have a stomachache when someone gets hurt because I know how bad it is but I can't tell them. When you know the bad thing that happened to them, my mind just keeps going on what they're going to miss. They're all kids that I care about. They come to me and tell me their fears and their dreams. And when a kid can't play sports, that's a big dream that's lost.

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