The power of U-M networking in becoming a globe-trotting massage therapist
The first trip Christopher Yee (MVS ‘04, MS ‘09) took with a sports team was because of a U-M connection.
It was 2006. The movement science alum had only had his massage therapist license for a year. But, as a former U-M track athlete who had been an intern at U-M Strength & Conditioning and a physical therapy aide at MedSport Physical Therapy right out of college, he’d already been able to parlay his relationships into partnerships with collegiate teams at his alma mater.
One early morning, he was in the U-M weight room helping the baseball and softball teams with their workouts and their stretching. Carol Hutchins, who’d go on to become the coach with the most ever wins in NCAA softball, was working out, too. Yee had never met her and wanted to introduce himself. But she was already a legend, and he was intimidated.
He worked up the courage to approach her, egged on by U-M Softball’s athletic trainer.
“I was surprised that she took to me at all,” Yee says.
In fact, Hutchins ended up asking Yee to come with the team to a major tournament in Tennessee.
“So I’m fresh out of massage school, and I’m with the Michigan national championship-winning softball team on a private plane,” Yee recalls. “Not bad.”
It would be Yee’s first of many trips to high-level college and professional sport events as a massage therapist. Through relationships he built working with NCAA teams and fellow U-M alums, he’d go on to support USA Track & Field and USA Swimming at world championships, the Pan American Games, and the Olympics — all after enrolling in massage school on a whim.
“I didn’t ever picture being able to do those things,” he says. “I truly believe Michigan helped make that happen.”
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Yee grew up, as he says, in a “medical family”; his mother was a nurse, his father was a respiratory therapist, and his sister is a physician.
“It wasn’t exactly dinner table discussion — I wasn’t as certain about what I wanted to do — but I presumed it would be some type of health care,” Yee says.
While attending Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, Yee played several sports and met a couple U-M athletic training students in the process. One asked him if he’d ever heard of kinesiology, the study of human movement.
“I was happy to discover there was an academic discipline that supported my athletic background,” Yee says.
As both a movement science student and a walk-on track athlete at U-M, it was interesting for him to see the knowledge he was gaining in class — the macro and micro understanding of exercise physiology — playing out on the track.
“To feel it in real time at an extreme was meaningful,” he says. “And practical, if you will.”
But, by graduation, Yee hadn’t figured out what he wanted to do for work. He’d thought he might become interested in research, so he’d helped out in the lab of movement science professor Jeff Horowitz. Although Yee appreciated the experience, he eventually figured out that research wasn’t for him. He thought that maybe he’d become a physical therapist, so he got a job at MedSport Physical Therapy at Domino Farms to see if that would foster his interest.
He got an internship at U-M Strength and Conditioning, which furthered his passion for collegiate sports but didn’t feel like quite the right path. He coached football and track and field at his old high school, which he enjoyed but didn’t want to do full-time. Finally, he enrolled in a one-year massage program, which he thought could be a less traditional way to continue working with athletes.
“I did those four things, and that allowed me to stay in sports,” he says. “Any of them could have been a career.”
When fellow Kines alum Earl Wenk (MVS ‘91) asked Yee to join his massage therapy practice, Arbor Wellness, Yee threw himself into the work and quit everything else. He gave himself three years to build up business.
“After three years, I was too busy to come up with another three- or five-year plan,” Yee says. “And so here I am, almost 19 years later, as a massage therapist, a business owner, and an entrepreneur.”
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Yee jokes, but he does like being a massage therapist. In his almost two decades in the discipline, he’s learned that he likes being a “control freak” about his business. (He has an office on Packard Street under the moniker, CW Therapy, which he opened with former Arbor Wellness colleague Wendy Woerner in 2016). He likes the hands-on aspect of the job and working with all different types of people to solve the puzzle of their particular problem, as his father always described health care services.
“Whether it’s the client I saw this morning in my office or a high school or professional athlete in a very high-stakes sports event where this is their world, they’re entrusting me with five to 30 to 60 minutes of their time to help them get to a certain physical and/or mental space,” he says. “And so, to be given the autonomy to help them with that and to utilize what I think I know about the body as a massage therapist with the techniques I’ve learned from other types of sports medicine, that’s pretty cool.”
Most of all, he likes the autonomy that allows him to see clients in his office but also serve as staff at a large number of high-stakes sports events.
“The first 26 weeks of last year, I had 22 work trips,” Yee says. “I would go straight from the office where I was working on a client to get on a plane for an athletic event.”
He still works with collegiate teams, but the network of body workers whom he’s met at the college meets has also connected him with professional entities, namely USA Track and Field (USATF) and USA Swimming.
These governing bodies amass extensive staffs for their significant meets; for the track and field 2022 World Athletics Championships, which Yee worked, there were five athletic trainers, a physical therapist, two massage therapists, two physicians, two chiropractors, a sport nutritionist, and two sports psychologists. And it’s “all hands on deck,” Yee says.
“Everybody is willing to do anything for the team,” Yee says. “Sometimes, I’m folding towels or hauling equipment or setting up ice baths. Sometimes, I’m doing nine to 10 hours of massage here at the hotel, or sometimes we’re working at the competition venue for five hours.”
Although he isn’t paid to help out at these events, there are lots of perks: working alongside other talented health care providers, getting to represent his country (in his own way) at major sporting events, branded clothing and swag, and, of course, frequent flyer miles.
“My clients will joke with me a lot that I’m a Delta junkie,” Yee says, “which I 100% am.”
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Yee’s proudest professional moment involves a U-M connection.
It was during the 2016 U.S. Olympic Trials for track and field. Yee was there supporting several athletes, in particular Jeff Porter, a former U-M star hurdler who had been a freshman on the track team when Yee was a senior.
Porter’s race was the last event of the day. Yee was sitting on his massage table in a large medical tent, watching the race with Porter’s sister. In a surprise upset, Porter placed third and qualified for the Olympics for the second time.
“It’s a challenging, highly emotional environment,” Yee says of the Olympic trials. “Most people come there and fail, and there’s just sprinklings of success.”
There was still work to be done. Yee and Porter had outlined Porter’s treatment plan, so Yee knew exactly what he needed to do. Porter’s sister took a picture of the two of them, late at night in an empty tent with little fanfare.
“We didn’t really need to say much,” Yee says. “I was proud of him and happy that I was able to do what I was doing. And I think I did it well for him.”