The Kinesiology Merit Fellowships are given to students from educational, cultural, or geographic backgrounds that are underrepresented in kinesiology in the United States or at the University of Michigan. These students have demonstrated a commitment to diversity in the academic, professional, or civic realm through their work experience, volunteer engagement, or leadership of student or community organizations.

Read on to learn more about Zabith Wilson, one of this year’s graduate fellows.

Q: What brought you to U-M?
A: I’m from Michigan. I grew up a U-M fan my entire life. But when I started applying for grad schools, my heart was set on going somewhere warm. I wanted out of the winter.

Being family-oriented, my family was like, ‘Can you just apply to some Michigan schools? Just one, to appease us?’

So I applied to U-M. It was the first school I heard back from. And when you search the athletic training program in the rankings, it’s one of the best in the country. It was very hard to say no.

It was a choice I don’t regret, even though I didn’t get out of the cold. I love it here and am really enjoying my time here.

Q: What made you want to be an athletic trainer?
A: My family has always been a sports family. My dad was a professional athlete. My mom's an avid sports fan. My older sister and younger brother and I were all competitive in sports. On weekends, we were always at tournaments or away games. So that’s how our family time was spent, at sporting events. When I'm at home, more likely than not, there's some sporting event on TV, and we're all in the living room watching. So I knew I wanted to stick around sports when it came to profession.

And then unfortunately (but fortunately, I would say now), when I played sports, I was very injury prone, so I was always in the athletic training room dealing with my own injuries. And the ATs that I worked with helped me greatly. I wanted to go into medicine at one point, but then I realized that athletic training was the best of both worlds.

Q: Where did you go for undergrad?
A: Albion, it’s a small school in Michigan.

Q: Were you interested in a larger program that would expose you to higher-level sports for grad school or was that not necessarily a requirement for you?
A: It was. I really wanted to build the best network I could, and I knew that I needed a bigger program to do that.

And then during my interview process after I applied to schools, how Michigan formatted their program sounded the best compared to everyone else because it’s very individualized. In other programs, everyone has the same clinical rotations. You’re six weeks here, six weeks there. You have to do some clinic stuff, which is not something I wanted to do. Here, all of us in the program will have very different clinical rotations. We’ll have a different immersion. It’s very specific to our future goals.

Q: What are your future goals as an athletic trainer?
A: I want to work with high-level athletes. At first, I thought I would work in MLS and soccer because that's a sport I grew up playing and played in college. This summer, I’m hoping to do my immersion with an MLS team in Minnesota. But now I'm in between professional soccer and college football, because my clinical rotation was with the football team last semester, and there's no real atmosphere like college football.

Q: How did you end up getting matched with your clinical rotation? Do you put in requests? 
A: I definitely got a little lucky because football was very highly sought after as a rotation.

But the way it works is Adam Lepley, our clinical coordinator, sends out a survey before every semester. We have to pick our top three choices for sports teams and give a little explanation of why and talk about our future goals.

And then Adam sits down and thoroughly goes through the surveys and tries to find the right fit for everyone and what’s going to help us eventually get to our end goals — what’s going to help us strengthen our strengths and also better our weaknesses. Like, I said the individualization of it.

With football, I said I wanted to be thrown into the deep end as soon as possible, and I figured that the more exposure I could get while in grad school, the better, and the more I’ll learn. So that was my philosophy with being on the football team.

I learned more about how much goes on behind the scenes and how committed you have to be. There's so much more than just treating the athlete. It involves very long days. And I got to see behind all the planning, the ordering of supplies, the figuring out trips, the bowl game prep, all of that. And then I also got to see so many injury evals, injury treatment. Because we’re treating 140 guys on the team. There’s always something that’s nagging them. So I learned a ton.
 

Q: There was a pretty high-profile injury to offensive lineman and Kines alum Zak Zinter later in the season. Were you involved in treating him at the time?
A: For the most part, with the high-profile injuries, we as athletic training students aren’t involved right when they happen. That’s up to the certified athletic trainers. With the rehab process, we’re part of that and can help out.

Q: What is it like for you as someone who grew up as an athlete, who has been through a lot of injuries yourself coming into a situation like that, where there’s a pretty grisly injury that may require an intense rehab process? Are you able to bring any of your own experience to bear in helping these athletes rehab? 
A: I think the one thing that people sometimes don’t really see is how human all athletes are. And at the end of the day, they have to deal with the mental side of the injury more than people realize.

That’s where I felt like I could help. My personal experience helps me understand. No athlete wants to miss games. That’s the one thing that athletes hate the most, that affects them mentally the most. So I can use my own experience to help them deal with that and let them know that it’s OK to have to mentally heal as well as physically heal when you’re hurt.

Q: What has been the biggest challenge in coming to Michigan as an athletic training student?
A: The time commitment. Once we got down to the nitty-gritty of the football season, I would go to the Schem [Schembechler Hall, which houses the football facilities], learn before class, help with the morning treatments, go to class, come back after to help with practice and post-practice treatments.

And then, once we got into conference championships, bowl games…we spent a week in LA, so we had to take everything we used here in Ann Arbor, fly that or drive that on the semis to LA, and then business as usual there for a week. We flew home right after the game. Like we left from the stadium to the airport. We were home for two days before we flew right back out to Texas. So it was a huge time commitment.

Q: What was your reaction to the fact that the team won and you got to be a part of that?
A: Deserved. Being in the building every day, you realize how much work those players and the coaches and staff put in every day to get to this point. We all knew from day one what our goal was. It was Houston or bust. We were good enough. People on the outside doubted it. There’s all the accusations and people tried to bring us down, but at the end of the day, we got what we deserved.

Q: Did you feel valued as a part of this team?
A: A hundred percent. The kids on the football team had the nicest manners. Like I keep saying, they’re actual people. They say ‘please’ and ‘thank you, ‘I appreciate you.’ They lean on us when they don’t know things, and they like when we explain things to them. They’re listening. They understand how dedicated we are and how much work we put in, and they appreciate that.

And the same thing for the U-M track athletes I’m working with now. They treat me as if I’m certified and have been practicing for 10 years. They don’t question if I tell them to do something. They’re gonna do it. They know they’re trying to get healthy. They’re trying to get better. And that’s what I’m here for.

Q: Now that you’ve been at U-M for a bit, what do you think it is about the program that will get you where you want to go, in addition to your deep experience on these rotations?
A: Like I’ve always said, networking is the game of life. And the better you network, the farther you'll get ahead in life. You see the block M everywhere. I went to a conference in Florida that was a professional soccer medical conference, and multiple people came up to me saying, ‘Oh, I graduated from Michigan. I was in the program.’ So you get that networking based off of just going here, which is huge.

And the professors here are world renowned. As researchers, they’re big names. The National Athletic Training Association puts out announcements on different injuries and how to treat them, what you can and can’t do as an AT. There was one recently where the first name on it was a doctor and researcher here. It was like, ‘Whoa, he’s going to be a professor in one of my classes, and the world looks to him for his knowledge on concussions.’ So being at such a big university in terms of how worldwide it’s known is huge.

Q: In terms of being a Kinesiology Merit Fellow, how did you hear about the program and how has it helped you?
A: I heard about it through the Bridge program. That group was really refreshing and needed. ‘Cause in the AT program, there’s 20 of us in my cohort. We’re in the same classes together; we’re with each other every day all day in the fall. And other than that, I went from class to my clinical rotation. I didn’t have time to make friends outside the program.

So the Bridge program gave me new friends outside of AT that I can not be an athletic trainer around. It’s such a diverse group. There’s so many different personalities. And when I’m in the Kines building, it’s nice to be able to say hi and catch up. That was the biggest benefit of both the KMF fellowship and the Bridge program.

Q: How does your experience in the Bridge program compare to your experience in the athletic training program? 
A: In the Bridge program, we’re all a little bit different. There is one girl that’s also in the AT program with me. But then there's some movement science. There's some doctoral students. There’s some in sport management. So we all have different backgrounds, and you can get new perspectives and new ideas. And then with the AT program, all of us are in love with athletic training. So it’s cool to share that passion with other people.