By Ryan Clark
CHS Communications Director

As a young soccer player growing up in Tokyo, Kenta Mizumoto had several injuries — and he was inspired by the athletic trainers who helped nurse him back to health.

He decided he wanted to be an athletic trainer, too. After going to college in Japan, he learned that one of his professors had studied at UK, so Mizumoto started to research the program at Kentucky. Ultimately, he decided it was a good fit.

Tonight, he will celebrate with his classmates as they graduate from UK’s Athletic Training program.

And he also got some more good news: He signed the paperwork for his first job — a paid internship with Major League Soccer’s Sporting Kansas City. Everything has happened so quick, he said.

“These two years went by really fast,” he said. “But it all definitely lived up to my expectations. I had really great experiences. I learned a lot from all my clinical experiences.”

Those included working with UK’s men’s and women’s soccer teams, swimming and diving, and the football team. He also interned with the Seattle Sounders of the MLS, Lafayette High School, Georgetown College and the Lexington Fire Department.

To cap it all off: He learned this week that he'd passed his board certification.

“It feels so good to know that I’ll officially be an athletic trainer when I walk across that stage,” he said.

Anna Holt, a Lexington native, will also be graduating, and she also already has a job lined up — Head Athletic Trainer in Madisonville, Ky., through Baptist Health Deaconess at Hopkins County Central High School.

Holt, who also came through the pre-AT track in Human Health Sciences, worked with UK’s baseball team, as well as with Henry Clay High School, Transylvania University, Laffayette High School, UK’s swim and dive teams, Gymnastics and Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School.

“I believe I will be very emotional when it comes to graduating,” she said. “I have been waiting for this day for a really, really long time and I’m overwhelmed with happiness to be done with all the stress that revolves around school. But on the other hand, I’m scared to enter the real world and I can even say that I’m sad that I’ll no longer be a student because being a student has been my whole life. Nearly 17 years of hard work and classes come down to this one moment.”

Trey Roe III could think of one word to describe how he’s feeling about coming toward the end of his college career.

“I’m feeling very awesome,” he said this week.

The Hurricane, W. Va., native, will be using his degree to head back to his home state and work as an injury prevention specialist at a Toyota plant.

“I didn’t even know it was something we could do until I got into the Athletic Training program and learned about the industrial setting,” Roe said. “But I fell in love with it.”

He was able to intern at the Georgetown, Ky., Toyota plant to cement his interest in the job.

Now, he’ll be graduating.

“The biggest thing I’m taking away is how helpful everybody was — on campus, my professors — everybody in the program wanted to do everything they could to help us out," he said. "They wanted us to succeed. It made me realize I could do anything and everything I wanted to do.”