SHRS alumna Christie-Lee Coad
With the 2024 Paris Olympics (July 26 - Aug. 11) and Paralympics (Aug. 28 - Sept. 8) taking place this summer, SHRS is showcasing some of its faculty and alumni who are supporting the athletes and programs!
Christie-Lee Coad, cohead athletic trainer for USA Track and Field, attended Pitt for graduate school from 2008-10, getting her master's degree in sports medicine. She also was a graduate assistant for athletic training, working with swimming and diving.
She worked with USA Track and Field at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were postponed a year because of COVID-19 and held without spectators. “There was an added layer of stress,” because of the pandemic, she said. “Hopefully [it will be] very different this time around in Paris.”
Growing up in the Pittsburgh suburbs, she ran track at Thomas Jefferson High School, which was what pointed her toward her career.
“I actually got sent by my high school athletic trainer to a workshop at Pitt that went over what athletic training was. It was a big sports medicine learning event that they put on for people who are interested in sports medicine.”
With moves that took her through Michigan, Oklahoma, Texas and New Jersey, she initially volunteered with USA Track and Field until she landed a full-time role in 2019.
“They train everywhere, and we compete, literally, all over the world,” Coad said. When we spoke with her in mid-July, she said, “We have groups in Monaco right now and then they go to London and we all meet in Paris, so kind of all over the place, but we see the same athletes a lot throughout the year.”
She and her husband, who also works in professional sports, have a 14-month-old baby, who will not be joining her for the month-long work trip to the Olympics.
What will you do at the Olympics?
“I share the head medical role with one of my former mentors, actually, who got me into USA Track and Field in 2013. So, it’s kind of a cool experience. We’ve been coheads quite a few times now.”
First on her schedule will be working with the relay athletes. “We'll go over early because most of them compete in open events also. But it's not like a relay team in college where they all live and train together. They're competing against each other all year, and now they're going to compete for a gold medal in relay together.”
What do you like about the job?
“Probably my favorite part about working with USA Track and Field is we're pretty multidisciplinary, so we'll have athletic trainers, physical therapists, physicians, chiropractors, sports dietitians, sports psychologists, kind of the whole gamut. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee has all that and a ton more resources as well.”
She said she expected to be doing a lot of maintenance treatment. “We'll do a lot of activation work and things like that to get them ready for their race. A lot of them have pretty specific routines they do.”
How did your experience at Pitt prepare you for this role?
“Some of my best mentors that I still talk to, to this day, are from Pitt. I remember [longtime athletic trainer] Tony Salesi asked me, ‘What's your ultimate goal?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I really want to do the Olympics, but I know that's kind of far-fetched.’ And he was just like, ‘No, it's not, you can do that.’ And so it was the first time that I was like, ‘Oh, okay, maybe I can do that.’
“People who are my mentors are sending younger athletic trainers now to me, and it's kind of a funny moment where you're like, ‘I looked up to you my whole life and now you're sending younger people back to me.’ I love that about Pitt. I think it truly is a family. I mean, half my family went there.”
What are you most looking forward to at the Olympics?
“To see an athlete that you help come back with a gold medal is pretty awesome. And you're only a very, very tiny part of what went into the Olympic Games being successful, but just knowing that you had a part of that is a pretty exciting feeling.”
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Continue reading:
SHRS' Team Behind Team USA: Ed Strapp
SHRS' Team Behind Team USA: Ashley Koto
SHRS' Team Behind Team USA: Rory Cooper
This article was originally published in Pitt Health Sciences News.