Hughes, trainer at Rochester for 22 years, leaving for Ancilla

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

Christina Hughes will no longer be seen on the sidelines of Rochester High School sporting events as a certified athletic trainer.

She has taken a job at Ancilla College at Marian University, and her final day will be Aug. 8.

Hughes had worked for Woodlawn Hospital for the last 22 years. She has been a certified athletic trainer since 1996.

Though she will work at Ancilla, her new employer will be Lutheran Hospital out of Fort Wayne.

“Basically, I feel like I have accomplished as much as I can here in this role,” Hughes said. “I have built a comprehensive system of care for our athletes. I’ve developed all the parts of that that I had a goal to do, so it was time for a new challenge.”

Hughes not only experienced Rochester athletics as a trainer but also as a mother. All three of her children – daughters Catherine and Emily and son Blake – played sports at Rochester, and Emily and Blake won multiple sectional championships in basketball.

Emily currently plays volleyball at the University of St. Francis.

“So many positive memories, and so many positive things,” Hughes said. “The coaches have been great to work with, and obviously having my children go through as athletes, I have some really amazing memories. But the support from the hospital and the high school has just been great. They’ve allowed flexibility for me to be involved with my family. And the caliber of athletics is high, so I’ve been able to be a part of … some sectional championships, regional championships, semistates, state finals. All those things.”

Asked how her job changed, Hughes said there is a greater awareness of heat illness and sudden cardiac arrest.

She added that there are now 14 automated external defibrillators on Rochester High School grounds.

“I think a lot of our focus has shifted to emergency planning,” Hughes said. “There’s always been ankle sprains and shoulder injuries, but there’s increased awareness of emergency situations and the technology that allows us to address it on the field, so I think the emergency planning component has been huge, especially in the last 10 years.”

Hughes said she will miss the relationships she developed with the kids and the coaches. Also, her weekends during the fall became a lot less busy.

Her husband Ken is both a Rochester teacher and an assistant football coach and an assistant track coach.

“I’ll miss football,” Hughes said. “Ancilla does not have football, and so this will probably be the first time in probably 25 years that I am not on a sideline on a Friday night and especially not on a sideline with Ken. Ken and I have shared that for so long that I think that’s going to be difficult.”

Hughes will be one of two trainers at Ancilla.

“But I’m looking forward to having another athletic trainer to work with,” Hughes said. “Which means I can actually take some days off. I can actually have a little more flexibility in my schedule, and I won’t be dictated by when events are.”

"Hughes' daughter Catherine graduated with a Masters of Athletic Training degree from Manchester University in May after obtaining a bachelor's degree from Franklin College and will be seeking certification to become an athletic trainer herself."

“There’s a couple big things as an athletic trainer that I wish I would have known in the beginning,” Hughes said. “Number one is you can take your time to figure things out. I think most of us think we should know everything about every sport and every injury right away. And it just takes time. One of the comments that my boss at the hospital made was, ‘We won’t find somebody like you to fill this position.’

“And I said, ‘Well, I wasn’t like I am now when I was hired 22 years ago,” Hughes said. “You become that person over time, and it’s OK not to have that figured out in the first year that you start. So I think that and then the second part is communication. I’ve worked really hard on that to build a network of people from administrators to ground crew and maintenance and secretaries and teachers and coaches and parents and the community support I’ve had with fire department and EMS (Emergency Medical Services) and sheriff and our SRO (Student Resource Officer), all those community people make your job easier because when you have a situation, you already have an established relationship with those people, and that’s a huge part of the job, especially at the high school level: You have to develop that network so when things happen, you have that support you need to provide the best care for the athlete.”

Hughes said that she desired to have a career in big-time college or pro sports. In fact, she applied to NFL teams, but she said none took women in their internship programs.

High school sports, however, was best for her.

“As I became married and had children, you realize the work-life balance is really hard to do at higher levels,” Hughes said. “And so the high school made sense to raise a family. And I think there’s some unique things about high school sports because college sports are maybe a higher level, but you don't have the involvement with the families, you don’t have the friendships where kids have played together for 12 years. I think specifically about Blake’s group of those six or seven boys that played all the sports together (tennis, basketball, baseball), that bond is so unique, and you see that reflected on the court, and you don’t have that same type of thing in college athletics. So it may not be where I started out planning, but the experience has been amazing because high school sports are so unique.

“There’s just nothing like it.”