Q&A with Jaime Potter

Jaime Potter is in her second year as UC Irvine’s Assistant Athletic Director/Director of Sports Medicine. She came to UCI from Cal State Fullerton where she spent nine years, including two in the director role where she guided the Titans through the pandemic. Jaime also served as CSF’s Senior Woman Administrator, Title IX liaison and as a part-time lecturer in kinesiology. She started her athletic training career in her home state of Ohio. She earned her undergraduate degree in athletic training and master’s in exercise sciences at the University of Akron. 

In conjunction with National Athletic Training Month, we recently sat down with Jaime for a Q&A talking about her career path and the important work of athletic trainers.

How did you get into the athletic training profession?
My story is a little different than most. I started college as a civil engineer major. Math came easy to me so everyone said if you want to make money and you’re good at math then be an engineer. So I got into a CAD program, but it just didn’t click for me at the time. One of my roommates who played soccer told me to look at athletic training because I loved sports and anatomy was fun for me back in the day. I didn’t have an athletic trainer at my high school, so it was something I didn’t really know about, but I took a little deep dive into it and realized it was something I might like. That was my freshman year in college so over the summer I took the classes I needed to to get into the program my sophomore year and I fell in love with it. Most people get into this profession because they were an athlete at some point and got an injury. I didn’t even know about athletic training but it just all of a sudden clicked for me. 

What were the first steps in your professional career?
After undergrad, I stayed at the University of Akron as a graduate assistant. It was nice because I got to stay for another two years to get more experience. Then, I went into sales for a little bit. An opportunity came and I needed a job right out of grad school, so I started in medical sales at a small clinic in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. I was in that space for about a year-and-a-half when one of my DonJoy reps, who does the knee bracing and ankle bracing, asked me to come work for them. I spent about a year working for DonJoy and it was nice because I worked out of my house and made my own schedule, but I didn’t interact with sports the way I wanted to. I still saw some big institutions where I would put a lot of offensive linemen in knee braces and get the post-ACL stuff, but I missed athletic training. 

When I was trying to get back into athletic training, I had a friend who was a women’s basketball coach that had left the University of Akron and was at the University of Dayton. They were hiring an athletic trainer specifically for women’s basketball, so she reached out to me and I applied. It was a situation where I had already been offered a D2 position, but I really wanted to work with Division I women’s basketball, so I turned it down, hoping I would get the Dayton job. I got lucky and got it so then I spent five years at the University of Dayton working with women’s basketball and women’s rowing. At that point in my career, my focus was really women’s basketball. We were good back then; our first year we went to the WNIT and my next four we went to NCAAs. Two out of those four years we made it to the NCAA Second Round, so it was just really a great experience. 

What brought you out to California?
I had the opportunity to apply for a position at Cal State Fullerton, which was on the opposite side of the country. The leader for women in athletic training, Julie Max, was the Director of Sports Medicine at Cal State Fullerton at the time. She was our first female president of the National Athletic Trainers Association and had really paved the way for females in athletic training. Again, I got really lucky. I had the opportunity to spend the morning with Julie before my interview and we just hit it off. To this day, she is someone I talk with often; we actually just went to dinner the other night. She became a huge figure in my life. At Fullerton, my transition went from focusing on women’s basketball at Dayton to now really trying to give back and trying to set our future young professionals up for success in athletic training. It really shifted to the focus of where I wanted to be in the profession. I started taking on more things like mental health and how we can better support student-athletes. I also picked up teaching in our undergraduate program and then our master’s program. I was part of the CPC which is our national-level committee that puts together our conference. I was really trying to learn how to grow our profession and how to be better. I think athletic training sometimes is hard where we change so often that you can get really good at staying stagnant and just getting by, but I wanted to be able to push our limits, to see how we can change and how we can stay on the upward trend. Cal State Fullerton had done a really good job of producing good athletic trainers, so I wanted to do that. Then the pandemic hit. Julie Max had been at Cal State Fullerton for 41 years, her entire career, and when the pandemic hit, she retired. So it was kind of like, hey, Jamie, can you figure out how to get us out of it and move into the Interim Director of Sports Medicine? So again, I just got lucky. If I would have taken the Director of Sports Medicine at Cal State Fullerton at any other time, I think my trajectory would have been different. Given the opportunity to help us get through a pandemic is something Julie had never done, so it helped separate me a little bit instead of me having to fill a huge pair of shoes. Then, as we got out of the pandemic and were dealing with all the things that came with the NCAA and transformation committee, it was really hard to be able to do what I wanted at Fullerton with the resources I had. 

Can you talk a little about your transition to UC Irvine?
When an opportunity came up here at UCI, I jumped on it. Our space is big, we are fully staffed at 10 athletic trainers and I’m able to do a better job of focusing on the overall well-being of our student-athletes and athletic training staff. We are integrating return to play objective measurements. Now we have BFR (Blood flow restriction) training, we have force plates, we have a sensor motion detection app we can use; all this stuff that makes us better has given me the ability to start to prevent injuries instead of reacting to injuries on the back end. When I was at Fullerton, I traveled with women’s basketball and was also the SWA, Director of Sports Medicine and our Title IX liaison, so I couldn’t do all the things I wanted to do. Here, I have men’s and women’s golf, so it gives me the availability to do the admin side, to create better policies, to create that balance of health and wellness for our student-athletes and provide a work-life balance for the athletic training staff. Again, I have just been really lucky. I was in the right spot at the right time in multiple places to get to where I am.

Is there anything besides the resources that drew you to your current position at UC Irvine?
Having Paula (Smith) as the Director of Athletics, and Erica (Monteabaro) in that second position was a big pull for me. To have two females in those positions is very rare in this space. I’d known them both from the past working within the Big West, so I had an idea of who they were and what they’ve done. So the two of them were a really big draw for me.

Have you faced any challenges being a woman in a male-dominated profession?
There was a time I worked baseball a long time ago in my career, and times where I’ve helped with men’s basketball, when things are dealt with a little differently if you’re not a part of the boys’ club. During the pandemic, I probably saw it the most. I feel like it was two-fold. I was new in an interim director role where people saw me differently. Also, being a female that came in a little stronger in the middle of a pandemic to lay down rules they actually had to abide by was a little bit harder. Unfortunately, they heard it a little better if it came through our Athletic Director who was a male, or my assistant director of sports medicine who was a male. But again, I think I got lucky. Jim (Donovan) at Fullerton was great to me. He was a good mentor and great leader. He accepted the things I wanted to do, and allowed me to do what I could within our resources. He listened to me, but I think he also understood some of our coaches needed to hear it from a different perspective to actually get the point across. 

What are some parts of the job the public doesn’t see or know about?
I would say emergency medicine. I think people are starting to see that now with everything that has happened in football. Athletic trainers are literally the ones on the sidelines saving lives in emergency situations. Right before I left Fullerton, I was working a women’s soccer game and got a phone call about a student-athlete that had fallen in a different facility on campus and it was a C spine injury. So as women’s soccer was warming up, I ran from one field to the other to hold C spine until EMTs got there to transport. I think those are things people don’t understand that we do. Those moments are hopefully very rare in the longevity of our profession but if we aren’t prepared for it then things go extremely terrible. How we need to move, and move quickly, in those emergency pieces, I think is something the public doesn’t have a large grasp on. 

The other thing is California is the only state where athletic training isn’t licensed as a medical profession. I think that is another big piece, understanding that we, in all states but ours, are licensed medical professionals.

What does a typical day look like for you?
One of the best parts about being an athletic trainer is that every day is different. There are days that you’re more rehab programming oriented or days that you’re more admin oriented. You could be getting a team ready for practice, attending practice, treating student-athletes after practice or going through rehab with student-athletes. But I would say the biggest piece of our day, across the board, is communication because athletic trainers are that hub. We’re talking to orthopedic surgeons, physical therapists, strength & conditioning, coaches, student-athletes and mental health professionals. We are the person getting our student-athletes into all those buckets and making sure that we are creating that health and wellness piece for them. Our day changes, but you’re going to have the same components. 

What is your favorite part of the job?
That I get to work with student-athletes. Also in the world of athletic training, our biggest concern is always burnout. So in the way we have things set up, with me having only men’s and women’s golf, I can give people days off and ingrain myself with different sports. I have the availability to get in front of our student-athletes across the board. I’m not with them 24/7 but I at least get to see them and share a piece of their experience here. That is one thing I really like about my position; I’m not so hyper-focused on one thing that I can get to know our student-athletes and know what’s going on with each sport. In their four or five years, they become adults, they grow as people, and we get to help and share a piece of that with them. Seeing a student-athlete come in as a freshman and then seeing them leave as a fourth or fifth year, is just one of the most amazing things you could possibly see. The things they have to overcome - the obstacles, the people, the experiences they have - you don’t get that anywhere else. If I were to have chosen physical therapy, they see people 2-3 times a week for a certain amount of time insurance tells you that you can attend. My staff sees their student-athletes 5-6 days a week for 10-11 months out of the year, and 12 months out of the year for basketball. You don’t get that type of hands-on, integrated treatment anywhere else.

What advice would you give to students or young professionals interested in a career in athletic training?
This setting of athletic training is just so different, and it comes with its headaches and heartaches. You work a lot, and you don’t get paid a lot, so you have to really love what you do. That is what I tell young professionals all the time. If this is the setting you want to work in, you have to understand there are holidays you will not spend with family. There are times you would rather be at a friend’s wedding than working a water polo tournament. You have to understand this is going to come with decisions you’ll have to make, and if it’s not for you then that’s ok. There are so many different variations for athletic trainers, but to do this setting at the collegiate level, you have to really love what you do. You also have to understand that there are going to be ebbs and flows of you loving it and hating it. There are days when I get in my car to leave work and I’m angry, upset, frustrated. But by the time I get home, if I’m not back to the mindset of how I can adjust what I did today to make tomorrow better, then I’m not in the right place. If you can get there then we can ebb and flow. We’re going to have good days and we’re going to have bad days. That was a bad day, let’s make tomorrow a good day. 

Is there anyone who mentored you when you were first starting out in the profession?
I was really lucky at the University of Akron. I had a female as the Director of Sports Medicine, but she was a little different than Julie (Max). She was closer to retirement when I was there so I didn’t get to see her a lot. But, while she was phasing herself out, she hired Bill Droddy. He was one of those people who kind of took me under his wing. I worked women’s soccer with him then he moved to football. He was the head athletic trainer for football at the University of Akron for a really long time then transitioned into men’s basketball when he became the Director of Sports Medicine. He was someone in each phase of my career I called for advice. We don’t see each other that often but he’s always been someone who has guided me. He actually just got out of the collegiate setting, but Bill was definitely one of my mentors as I moved through this profession.