By Kenny Berkowitz
Kenny Berkowitz is an Assistant Editor at Training & Conditioning.
Training & Conditioning, 14.3, April 2004, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/tc/tc1403/growinggoals.htm
By his senior year of high school, Chris Mathewson had set his sights on the perfect job. He was determined to become head athletic trainer for the Denver Broncos. And he was committed to overcoming any obstacles that stood in his way.
At Cheyenne (Wyo.) Central High School, which had no program for athletic training student aides, Mathewson shadowed his athletic trainer and started studying on his own. At the University of Wyoming, he completed a pair of internships with the SMART Sports Medicine Clinic and the Arizona Cardinals, and graduated in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in exercise physiology.
Next, he and his wife—a certified athletic trainer and physical therapist—moved to Denver, where Mathewson started looking for any job in the field. One call was to Ponderosa High School in suburban Parker. As luck would have it, the school had just lost its athletic trainer an hour before, and Mathewson walked into the job two days before the beginning of the fall semester.
At the time, he’d never worked at a high school, and he was set on pursuing his dream of working in the NFL. Ten years later, it turns out his high school dream was a little out of focus. Mathewson got a taste of the NFL, spending two summers as an Assistant Athletic Trainer with the Broncos, but he’s still at Ponderosa, and there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.
"It’s been great to work with professional athletes, but I’ve decided that’s not what I want to do," says Mathewson, MSS, ATC, CSCS. "Professional athletes know who they are and what they want to do. But here at Ponderosa, our student-athletes are still developing, and I’ve seen the effect I can have. I’d rather be here, where I can do more important work and make more of a difference in people’s lives."
After working with Mathewson for a decade, Athletic Director and Head Wrestling Coach Tim Ottman has seen the kind of difference Mathewson can make. "Chris has had a huge impact on our program, and we’re lucky to have him here," Ottman says. "He’s organized, dependable, and thorough—he’s great in all areas. But more than anything else, he’s a true professional. His relationships with our student-athletes and his ability to get them back competing have been crucial to our success."
In the past year, Ponderosa’s athletic successes have included state championships in football and wrestling, and Mathewson has played important parts in both. "Whenever you need him, Chris is always there to help," says Patrick McHenry, CSCS, Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Ponderosa. "If it’s a night game, Chris will be there, standing on the sidelines and always being upbeat. If it’s a Saturday morning, he’ll be here before I’ve even opened the weight room, and our athletes will be taped and ready to go. If it’s summertime and one of our athletes is injured, Chris will be here, working on the rehab."
Taking the job at Ponderosa didn’t initially change Mathewson’s dream of working in pro football. He earned a Master of Sports Science, Medicine, degree from the United States Sports Academy, and during school vacations, he kept working as an assistant athletic trainer with the Broncos. He was also the Head Athletic Trainer at the Steadman Hawkins Denver Clinic, which provides sports medicine and orthopedic surgery to the area’s elite athletes. But as he grew more used to working with teenagers, Ponderosa started feeling more like home.
"The students have all these plans, just like I did, and they don’t understand yet that life may take them somewhere else," says Mathewson. "They’re impressed by the fact that I’ve worked in the NFL, and that probably makes it a little more likely that they’ll listen to me. But I explain that the rehabs I do with the pros are the same ones I do here at Ponderosa. The pros do quad sets and straight leg raises, the same as us. They get ice and stim, just like we do. I tell our students that sports medicine is sports medicine, no matter what level you’re at."
The students at Ponderosa are glad he chose the high school level. "Chris has a very positive impact on his students’ lives," says senior Hillary Cotner, a soccer player and athletic training student aide. "He demands respect for all of his student athletic trainers, and makes sure that everyone in the athletic training room treats each other well. You can really tell he enjoys his job and likes to be around kids. All the kids around the school know him and really like him. He’s more than an athletic trainer, he’s like a father figure to tons of kids."
Working with him after her second ACL injury, Cotner learned the same lessons that Mathewson tries to teach all his students, balancing patience, toughness, and encouragement. Every day Cotner came into the athletic training room, she found a checklist of exercises to complete, and steady, strong support.
"Between working as a student aide and going through two rehabs, I’ve spent many hours in the training room," says Cotner. "He taught me to stay positive throughout my rehab, which can get really frustrating when it feels like you’re not getting better. He’s taught me a lot about being tough, and he’s always been really encouraging."
Describing himself as the type of person to "give them the tools to fix it themselves," Mathewson sees his job as providing "a shoulder to cry on and a kick in the pants."
"Some athletic trainers think they need to be working hands-on with their rehabs every day," he says. "I’m more likely to tell my athletes, ‘It’s your knee. I can teach you the exercises, but you’ve got to do them yourself.’ I’m not a big cheerleader standing over them, saying, ‘Okay, let’s do another set.’ I give them their chart, tell them what to do, and move along."
Over his years of working at Ponderosa, the biggest change that Mathewson has seen is in the decreased number of physical therapy appointments his athletes get before beginning their rehab with him. Now, with health insurance typically paying for only two or three physical therapy visits, Mathewson begins his treatments almost immediately after surgery.
In his 10 years at Ponderosa, the hardest rehab that Mathewson has worked on was his first. "A junior who was a big part of our football program had torn his ACL," says Mathewson. "When we first saw him, I knew we could get him back into shape, but actually doing it was kind of tough. I’d seen plenty of ACL rehabs at college and at the clinic, but I wasn’t making the decisions. So I learned about the true flow of how a rehab works.
"He came in every single day for the next four and a half months and worked like nobody I’d ever seen before. He never missed a session," says Mathewson. "When his senior year came, he scored our opening touchdown, ran back to the sidelines and handed me the ball, saying, ‘That was for you.’ That was the toughest rehab, but it was also the best."
Mathewson’s work at Steadman Hawkins has given him the opportunity to work closely with doctors. Plus, for Ponderosa patients at the clinic, Mathewson is a reassuring presence. "Because Chris knows the doctors, he’ll go to the surgery and find out right then and there exactly what happened," says McHenry. "He gets to see our students every step of the way, from right after surgery to the end of rehab."
"Chris is very highly regarded as an athletic trainer at the clinic," says Meredith King, ATC, who works as an Athletic Trainer at Steadman Hawkins and the Assistant Athletic Trainer at Ponderosa High School. "The doctors think the world of him. Whenever they see one of our athletes, they’ll call Chris over to ask, ‘What do you think?’ He works with top-notch people at the clinic, and I think that adds to his skills as an athletic trainer at Ponderosa."
Every June, Steadman Hawkins physicians and physicians assistants come to Ponderosa, conducting physical examinations of the school’s student-athletes. They donate their fees back to the school to pay for King’s salary as assistant athletic trainer.
Mathewson’s reach extends beyond the Ponderosa community. The president of the Colorado Athletic Trainers’ Association (CATA), he has coordinated corporate sponsorships for the CATA and made presentations on sports medicine both to the community and his colleagues at CATA. He has also edited the Web site of the Rocky Mountain Athletic Trainers’ Association.
After years of building up his resumé, Mathewson is now spending more time at home, taking care of his daughters—three-year-old Taylor and five-month-old Bailey—before going to Ponderosa at 2 p.m. He works only one day a week at Steadman Hawkins, where he’s now in charge of accounts payable and inventory control.
"Until my first daughter was born, the thing I cared most about was my resumé and what I was doing professionally," says Mathewson. "When Taylor came along, I decided I needed to change the way I was looking at life. Being a dad has really put my priorities right: I want to continue working at Ponderosa and I want to be the best dad I can."
As he learned before, dreams can change. "For years, working in the NFL was the only job I wanted," says Mathewson. "But these athletes here at Ponderosa are working really hard, and they deserve a lot of support.
"I like working with high school students," continues Mathewson. "I like their approach to life, I like their energy. On game days, I can feel the excitement in the locker room and remember what it was like to be in the same position. Years from now, when they’re my age and my father’s age, they’ll still remember being in these games. And I get to be a part of that."