Northside Independent School District is launching a sports medicine magnet program at Stinson Middle School.
The magnet is starting with an inaugural sixth grade class of about 100 students on Aug. 10 and is designed to give students an early look at sports medicine jobs such as physical therapists and athletic trainers.
Hosting the magnet at Stinson was intentional, said Jeannette Rainey, the school’s magnet coordinator. The schools is less than a mile away from the Northside Sports Gym, the Dub Farris Athletic Complex and the NISD Natatorium.
“The hope is the kids get the confidence to enter the health care care world,” Rainey said.
Soon-to-be middle schoolers already accepted into the magnet gathered on Thursday in the Northside Sports Gym on the far Northwest side of town, meeting their future classmates and hearing from local sports medicine professionals.
Speakers included Matthew Coston, a primary care sports medicine fellow with Sports Medicine Associates of San Antonio, and Danielle C. Aguilar, a sports performance therapist with Reaction Rehab & Sports Performance.
Future Stinson Skyhawks bombarded Coston and Aguilar with questions, but were especially curious about which professional athletes they’ve worked with. To several students’ disappointment, neither have worked with current Spurs players.
But students also wanted to know more about sports medicine jobs, what they looked like, what it took to get into the field and why they were drawn to it.
“This is one of the career fields in medicine where you can work with people who are really motivated to return to their passion,” said Coston, who started out as a military medic, went through medical school, finished a residency and is in the last three weeks of a fellowship program. He often works on the sidelines of sports games, focusing on non-invasive musculoskeletal system procedures.
Aguilar told students she was in the industry for a similar reason.
“We help you get back to what you love doing,’” she said. “Our motto is ‘build better athletes.’”
Aguilar is a former college basketball player, which is how she got interested in sports medicine. During Thursday’s icebreaker, she asked students to stand and squat to explain the importance of training and using correct form to prevent injury.
As part of the new magnet program, Stinson is getting a new physical therapy room that’s currently under construction.
On top of required math, social studies and physical education classes, magnet students also have to follow a course catalog tailored for sports medicine.
Sixth graders will take a science course that explores grade-level concepts through the lens of exercise science; a language arts course where students will read and write stories that focus on “resilience and perseverance, where people and characters grow through movement and challenge”; and a “career investigations” course tying in lab- and project-based learning.
In eighth grade, Rainey said Stinson magnet students will get the chance to earn a CPR certification. There’s also opportunities for students to get some high school credits early.
Stinson’s first magnet program comes as school districts are looking for more innovative programs to attract and retain students. NISD is currently undergoing an “optimization” process to see which areas they should invest in more or consolidate for the same reason.
The district has several magnet programs, industry-specific tracks where students can get hands-on learning and exposure to careers as early as middle school, sometimes elementary school. Primarily in high schools, magnet programs usually come with opportunities to earn industry-based certifications and college credit.
NISD already has a very popular health magnet program at Health Careers High School, getting over 500 school-choice applications for the upcoming school year, but educators are pushing for career and college exposure sooner and sooner in a student’s K-12 journey.
Magnets are also open-enrollment, meaning any student can apply even if they don’t live in a school’s attendance area or even inside the district’s boundaries.
More than a draw for families, the Stinson sports medicine magnet also aligns with growing industry demands for professionals in the field, Rainey said.
Hospital systems are currently expanding in San Antonio, increasing demand for health care workers across all specialties. Texas is also the largest employer of athletic trainers in the country, and the second largest for physical therapists, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
According to the Texas Workforce Commission, the field of sports medicine physicians is expected to increase by about 13.73% across the state in the next few years.
Alexis Green, 11, may not know all about the sports medicine industry yet, but she knows that she’d like to work on the sidelines of big games like Coston and Aguilar.
A soccer player and aspiring volleyball player, Green is one of Stinson’s first magnet students. She’s nervous about starting middle school, but she’s also excited to learn more sports science.
Her inspiration comes from watching Spurs games, paying close attention when athletic trainers rush the court when a player is injured.
“I thought that was really cool,” Green said.
The deadline to apply to Stinson is July 1, and the deadline to accept an offer is July 10.
