This summer, UTSA Athletics will be profiling its numerous areas to provide an inside look into how each unit serves Roadrunners’ student-athletes.
In this edition, we sat down with Rhodie Moss, Associate Athletics Director for Sports Medicine, to discuss the Sports Medicine unit.
Said Moss: “This particular profession – athletic training – it’s the only profession in the allied health professions that we get to see our patient through the full cycle of health. We see them when they’re healthy and performing, we see them at the time of injury, we see them when they see the doctor, we’ll scrub in sometimes and we’ll watch surgeries, we’re post-op, we rehab them through the rehab phase and we get them all the way back healthy to when they’re playing again.”
Q: How does your department service UTSA student-athletes?
Rhodie Moss: “The No. 1 thing that we provide here is that we try to bolster the student-athlete experience. It’s our job to provide the best possible healthcare for the student-athletes. Whatever is in the best interest of the health and safety of the student-athlete is our top priority. We utilize our resources and our partnerships, for example with UT Health, to be able to do that. We try to make it as convenient as possible. They have a place where they can come here and it’s a one-stop shop. We offer the full sphere of everything from general medicine to dental to ortho – anything they need, they come to us first. We may not be the ones who always treat you directly, but we get you with the people who will. The biggest thing we do is we try to gain trust with the student-athlete so they feel comfortable coming in here telling us, ‘Hey, I have this going on,’ before it becomes an issue and prevents them from playing.”
Q: What makes UTSA a leader in your field?
Rhodie Moss: “The structure that we have right now, there are not many places that do it the way that we do it. We have what is called a hybrid medical model. Part of my staff is funded through our partnership with UT Health, which is a major healthcare provider, and then the other part is provided directly by UTSA. You would never know the difference between the athletic trainers who are funded by each source because we all just work here. Through that partnership, we have an in-house doctor and we have our own medical facility at Kyle Seale Parkway that just opened this year. Beyond what we can offer from a resource standpoint, the biggest thing I pride myself on is our staff. We have a staff of 15 full-time athletic trainers, which is a large staff. It affords us the ability to be able to have an athletic trainer concentrate on one sport. They’re dedicated to that sport year-round. They have one roster, one team, one coach that they work with and collaborate with, so they can get to know those athletes very well. In the offseason, they have the ability to decompress around the schedule. When the athletes are gone, they don’t have to be around as much, so it gives them some life balance and I think a lot of places lack the ability to do that just because of numbers. I also think just the style that we work with our student-athletes. For instance, international student-athletes. American healthcare and athletic training is totally new to them, but our athletic trainers earn their trust. When we’re treating student-athletes, we’re not just putting them on a table and walking away and not telling them what we’re doing. We’re trying to educate them through this process and say ‘this is the reason we are doing this and this is the benefit it is for your body.’ We teach student-athletes how to take care of themselves. That way, that knowledge goes beyond when they’re in college because some of them are going to go pro, some of them are going to go overseas and they’re going to need to know that. Some are going to be parents someday and they’re going to know how to rehab a knee because they injured a knee and know how to go through a process. They enter a journey with their athletic trainers.”
Q: Why did you choose to come to UTSA?
Rhodie Moss: “The choice for me to come back, I thought it was going to be a difficult one, but then after going through the process, it was a very easy one for me. UTSA was my first full-time employment. I started in 2007 and I stayed until 2017. I got to a point where I felt like I needed to go elsewhere and see a different structure and see what other mentors had to offer. When I did that, it was great. It enlightened me and opened my eyes up to a bunch of things. I worked as an associate athletic trainer and, after doing four years as an associate, I got the opportunity to be a head football athletic trainer at SMU. I saw how they did it in the Pac-12 at the University of Arizona and then I went to the American Athletic Conference at SMU. I thought I was going to be there for a very long time; I was very happy there. My predecessor here was the one that reached out to me and said, ‘I’m taking an opportunity to be close to home, would you be interested here? I’ll put your name in the hat. I’d highly recommend you and people know you here.’ I wasn’t sure it was the job I really wanted to do being the director. I was always a football person; I was always working with athletes on the sidelines. I talked to my wife and her eyes lit up. My wife was born and raised in San Antonio and our family lives here. I love this university. I felt like I played a role in the foundation of where we are today because when I started here, we didn’t have football and we started football. I had already invested so much in it and I’ve always been a fan of UTSA. This was the one job at the one place that I would have left what I was doing for. It’s been the best decision I ever could have made. Bringing that family environment of San Antonio to the training room, it’s involved in everything that we do between my small family of athletic trainer and our family of athletes, that’s the beauty about the RACE. We all see each other, we’re all interacting, we cross the same paths. It does have a great collaborative, family feel.”
Q: What are the most rewarding aspects of your role?
Rhodie Moss: “Doing impactful work every single day. It’s hard to get up every day and do things when you feel like you’re just a cog in the wheel. The reason I chose college athletics to begin with is because I love the population that I’m working with. They’re young adults, they’re not kids any more and they’re transitioning to adulthood. They can make their own decisions but, at the same time, I am still able to have an impactful role. I feel like they are being molded. They’re not a complete product and they’re still very impressionable at that age. I love doing that. I love giving little tidbits here and there. I love being part of that stage in their life. Having an adult figure that they can trust and rely on; I feel like that’s an important part of what we do every day. Any time an athlete gets injured, whether that’s a minor injury or a major injury, you enter a journey with your athletic trainer, whether it’s a small journey or a long one. It could take nine months to 18 months. You see them every day, you check their progress every day. This particular profession – athletic training – it’s the only profession in the allied health professions that we get to see our patient through the full cycle of health. We see them when they’re healthy and performing, we see them at the time of injury, we see them when they see the doctor, we’ll scrub in sometimes and we’ll watch surgeries, we’re post-op, we rehab them through the rehab phase and we get them all the way back healthy to when they’re playing again. There’s no other health professional who gets to see that. It’s very rewarding, all that work you do and to see somebody out there who is living up to their potential who is doing what they came here to do and what they love to do. As challenging as this job is, it is rewarding and I feel like it’s impactful.”
Q: What advice do you have for students or student-athletes who might be interested in entering into the athletic training profession?
Rhodie Moss: “When you simplify what it takes to be really great at a craft or a skill, if you have the ability to get along with people, if you have the ability to learn and you have the ability to work well with others, then I feel like it translates to just about anything you could do. We just get to do a lot of that in our area. In terms of my field, I try to recruit student athletic trainers all the time, because if you learn the basics – just like student-athletes – you learn time management, they have to work hard, they have to have passion for what they do and get along within a team environment – all of that translates to any career. If you apply those things then you are going to be able to excel in anything that you do. When you’re picking your career, you just want to focus on those foundational values. At the end of the day, whatever is going on, you can always fall back on the foundational pieces and they’ll translate to a lot of different applications.”
Q: What kind of educational and experience background would someone need to become an athletic trainer?
Rhodie Moss: “Those standards have changed over the years. When I first came through, I went through an undergraduate accredited program. The first year you spent taking prerequisites, you had to do volunteer hours and observational hours, and then you applied and interviewed and they took a select amount. Then you spent the next three years accumulating 1,800 hours – 600 hours a year – and then you would sit for the national exam and could get certified. There’s no longer that path. The path that we do now, you have to go to a master’s program. What we offer here with our student athletic trainers, they come and they major in kinesiology with an emphasis in athletic training and then they spend three years getting all this experience. Then, they have to go on to an entry master’s level program and they have to do a two-year program to where they can get certified. If you end up going to that, it means you really want to do it. You’ve had a chance to figure it out and decide what you want to do. We all have to have a baseline of a bachelor’s and master’s degree. We have to be nationally certified through the National Athletic Trainer’s Association, our governing body, and then in the State of Texas, you have to be licensed in your state. There’s a bunch of different certifications that you can get beyond that – Strength and Conditioning Certification, Dry Needling Certification – there’s a whole bunch of skills that you can learn and apply different initials by your name if you want to do that. Everyone is, at base, an ATC and an LAT – Certified Athletic Trainer and Licensed Athletic Trainer.”
Q: What is something that people may not know about athletic training?
Rhodie Moss: “I think when you try to explain it, a lot of people don’t know what an actual athletic trainer is. People automatically assume that it’s strength and conditioning. I have to tell people, if you’re watching a football game and you see somebody get hurt, the people who run out on the field and take care of them, that’s what I do. And they say, ‘Oh, that seems like a really cool job.’ And it is, it’s a really great job. Everyone sees that. Everyone sees the product on the field and the athletes playing. But what nobody does see is all the work that it took to get to that point throughout the week, whether it’s showing up early and having early-morning treatments before practice, getting them primed and ready to go for practice, rehabbing them, keeping them at a maintenance level to where whatever aches and pains they have, you’re keeping it at bay so they can perform efficiently in practice and gain skills in their sport. There’s a lot that goes into it every single day. People don’t see that. That’s something that you have to be involved on the inside to see all the logistics and everything that goes into it – the amount of man hours and the thought that goes into it as well. It’s a great profession, but when it comes down to athletic training, it’s worth looking into it to see everything that goes into it beyond just water bottles and handing out towels.”