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If you go to any Miami Palmetto High School sporting event, chances are you’ll see senior Kylee Swikehardt there. She’ll be one of the student athletic trainers, helping the athletes by wrapping their ankles or wrists.
She loves being a part of the sports medicine team.
“That is probably my favorite form of community service,” she says.
In the fall, she’s on the football field from 2:20 p.m. to 6:00 or 6:30 p.m. During the spring season, she’s at practices until 4:30 p.m. and then usually working a game afterward.
“I’m always there with them,” she says. “I never played a sport, but now I get to experience every sport.”
She likes football and baseball the best. One of the reasons she likes them so much is because she’s constantly busy at those games.
Swikehardt’s an officer on the sports medicine board. She works on recruiting new members, although the membership is limited to 15 students.
“It’s not a class but in order to join, you have to go through a 10-day period where the officers teach the material for a test,” she says.
She and her fellow officers are the ones who train the new members and then test them on single finger tape, buddy tape and wrist tape, plus the various stretches and other things they need to know.
“Those are the only ones just to join the club,” she says. “We also learn ankle tape, spat, hand tape, thumb tape, and so many more. You have to know what you are doing.”
The potential new members also go through an interview process.
“You can pass your test, but if you can’t pass the interview, you can’t join,” she says.
Recently, she spent a couple of weeks helping out at South Miami Spine and Joint. The office was short-staffed, and her mom suggested bringing in Kylee to help.
For a couple of weeks, Swikehardt worked as a receptionist and helped with the physical therapy patients. Best of all, because she already knew how to work the ultrasound machine and the e-stim machines. They didn’t have to spend time training her on that equipment.
Although being in sports medicine doesn’t leave her much time to be involved in other school activities, Swikehardt does try to be involved in drama. She volunteers as much as possible even though she can’t be in a drama production.
She’s taken the drama class since ninth grade and she’s a member of the Thespian National Honor Society. She credits the class for bringing her out of her shell. She says it makes it easier for her to approach people she’s never met.
This year, Swikehardt hopes to carve out some time to participate in a drama competition.
At this point, Swikehardt is still working on her college list. She knows she wants to do something in medicine but is still narrowing down what that will be and which colleges to apply to.
While Swikehardt says sports medicine dominates her time, there’s one volunteer job she loved equally. Before COVID she was a volunteer for the Dumond Conservancy at Monkey Jungle. She worked with the owl monkeys, doing enrichment, cleaning their cages and feeding them. She learned every fact she could about the monkeys and would talk to visitors about them.
“If and when they take volunteers again, I would go back,” she says.
She has also spent her time working with Habitat for Humanity and donating meals for the homeless at St. John Neumann Catholic Church since the beginning of high school.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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