Tag: Iowa State University

Posted on by

Iowa State grad completes athletic trainer internship at Super Bowl

Article reposted from Ames Tribune
Author: Grayson Schmidt

When Iowa State graduate Jordan Pierce first thought about becoming an athletic trainer as a high school junior in Indianola, he had no idea that one day that would lead him to the sidelines of arguably sports biggest stage, the Super Bowl.

“Growing up, I never imagined that these are legends in the sport that I’m now getting experience with,” Pierce said. “It really is an incredible opportunity, and incredible experience. It’s definitely something you never thought would happen, and then all of the sudden it’s Wednesday of Super Bowl week.”

Pierce, 25, is finishing a season-long athletic trainer internship with the New England Patriots, who take on the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LII tonight. And even though he will be working the sideline of one of the most watched events of the year, Pierce said the realization really hasn’t set in yet.

“We’ve been so busy getting everything ready, and working on the guys and setting stuff up that we didn’t really have a second to appreciate it the last couple of days,” Pierce said. “We’re so busy on game day that it has not been until late in the season that I’ve really appreciated the gravity of the opportunity that I’ve been given.”

According to Pierce, he became interested in athletic training in high school, when an injury had him sidelined, and he spent a lot of time with the school’s athletic trainer. After entering the program at ISU, Pierce was able to serve as an athletic trainer for the football, wrestling, track and swimming and diving teams, and also interned one summer for the Denver Broncos. He said that working with so many different sports, athletes and types of injuries gave him the exposure he needed to succeed once he graduated.

“The injuries that you’re going to see in football are going to be different than track and field, which are going to be different from wrestling, and different from swimming,” Pierce said. “Just getting to see different types of injuries, injuries to different body parts, and different demands of different sports was great clinically to help me develop my skills, but then working with different staff athletic trainers at Iowa State really helped me to develop who I wanted to be as an athletic trainer.”

According to ISU, Pierce is not the first Cyclone athletic trainer to have opportunities at the professional level, and he is not the first Cyclone alum to intern at the Super Bowl. The ISU turfgrass program has sent multiple students to intern with Toro and the Super Bowl grounds crew, most recently in 2016.

Upon graduating in 2015, Pierce took a two-year graduate assistant position with Louisiana State University, where worked with the track and field program for one year and the football program for another, until May 2017, when he took his position with the Patriots.

“I didn’t necessarily have a sport in mind, but it was more that I wanted to go to a place that had a great staff with good people and good opportunities,” Pierce said. “That’s what I was looking for, and that’s why I ended up at LSU.”

Prior to working in New England and Denver, Pierce said he was a fan of the Green Bay Packers. Growing up in central Iowa, Pierce said he had friends and family who are Minnesota Vikings and Kansas City Chiefs fans, so during this year’s NFL playoffs, he said there was a little trash-talking, but by now he said majority of them will be cheering for the Patriots.

“Throughout the season and early in the playoffs, there was certainly that (feeling of) ‘I hope you do well, but I want my team to win.’ Now getting to this point where I don’t really have any Philadelphia Eagles fans as friends, I think everyone’s kind of pulling for us,” Pierce said. “I think they’re rooting for me as much as the team I guess, but that was kind of a funny dynamic there for a few weeks in the playoffs.”

Pierce said he has enjoyed the ride thus far, and is grateful to the Patriots staff and players for welcoming him and providing him with such an experience. All he hopes is that the Patriots can get one more win before he goes to work for his new team. Going forward, Pierce said he has already accepted a position at Vanderbilt University, and will have a relatively short turnaround before he has to be in Nashville.

“It’s been a great experience. I’ve worked for a great staff here,” Pierce said. “The opportunities that I’ve had over the last five or six years now have been unbelievable. When I got to Iowa State, I thought that this was as big as it ever gets, and then to move on to so many different places and meet so many great people has been so totally incredible.”

Posted on by

Iowa State Grad Doing Well in the NHL

Joe Huff found himself at the 49th annual National Athletic Trainers Association convention in Baltimore, Md., in June of 1998. Just a month before, Huff had graduated from Iowa State with a bachelor’s degree in exercise and sports science.

On that June day, he scanned the job posting board at the convention and had to make a choice. He could apply for a job to be an athletic trainer in Georgia with the Macon Whoopee of the Central Hockey League, or head back to college for one more year and earn a master’s degree.

He applied for the job. He got it.

“I got my master’s in the school of hard knocks, traveling in bus leagues,” Huff said.

He started at one of the lower rungs of the hockey ladder, but just 15 years later, Huff climbed to the top as the head athletic trainer of the Anaheim Ducks of the NHL.

His first paid opportunity came in Macon, Ga., but his start in athletic training came at Iowa State. He began with the football and wrestling teams, but his passion jump-started when he joined Cyclone Hockey as an athletic trainer in 1996 before becoming the head trainer for Cyclone Hockey the next year.

“He was every bit a part of the team as anyone else on the team,” said former Cyclone Hockey defenseman Bob Dressel, who was on the team during Huff’s tenure. “We all practiced Monday through Thursday for two hours, we all traveled together and he was there every day with us from the first day of classes to the end of the season.”

Huff never suited up for the Cyclones, but he remembers many of the moments from the two seasons he was with the team. One of his fondest memories is Cyclone Hockey hosting the national championship tournament in 1998 at Hilton Coliseum. They finished third.

“It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun,” Huff said.

Huff’s statement still applies today as he works with professional hockey players within the Ducks’ organization. On many days, he puts in well over 12 hours, coming in at 7 a.m. and not leaving until after the game has finished.

The grind of his athletic training career has been taxing not only on himself but also on his family, which consists of his wife, who is from his same hometown of Marshalltown, Iowa, and two daughters, who are 13 and 10.

After Huff got his professional start in Macon, he moved back to his home state of Iowa to work as the head athletic trainer of the Des Moines Buccaneers. Huff moved his family back to Georgia six seasons later to work with the Augusta Lynx.

His move to the Lynx, Anaheim’s East Coast Hockey League affiliate, started his connection with the Ducks. He then moved to Anaheim’s American Hockey League Affiliate, the Iowa Chops.

Huff’s return to his home state didn’t last long, as the Ducks’ affiliation moved to Syracuse, N.Y., two years later. It moved again after another two years to Norfolk, Va., in 2012.

The head athletic trainer position opened with the Ducks in 2013. Since Huff had worked with all three levels of the organization, he was the ideal fit for Anaheim’s NHL team.

“I think when you graduate, you have the idea that [working in the NHL] would be great,” Huff said. “Working with professional hockey was what I thought would be really fun, but I don’t know if I ever consciously set that as the goal.”

Huff has averaged moving his family nearly every two years, living in seven different cities as an athletic trainer during the last 15 years. Nevertheless, Huff has found himself working in the NHL, but it hasn’t always been easy on him or his family.

“It’s a long and windy road,” Huff said. “It’s definitely not for the faint of heart and it takes an understanding, very supportive family.

“I am lucky in that aspect to say the least.”

Huff has been making sacrifices since he was a student living in Ames. Instead of being a part of the more glamourous sports such as football and basketball, he chose to be a part of Cyclone Hockey and that has helped him get to where he is today, doing something what most young athletic trainers only dream of: being the head athletic trainer of a professional sports team.

“[Cyclone Hockey] is not a varsity program. It’s not something where people go from there to the next level,” Dressel said. “And Joe did it.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE