McGee Knows Highs and Lows of Being an Athletic Trainer
Sean McGee was going through his normal pregame prep as St. Thomas More’s athletic trainer: taping, filling the water, and setting up his team’s football sideline for a Sept. 15, 2018 game at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford.
This day, no different than any other, would rapidly turn into a tragic memory.
“I heard screaming behind me,” McGee says. “I didn’t know what was going on. I jumped over, ran to the stands, saw [a parent] on the ground laying there, and realized that he was under cardiac arrest.”
The man was a St. Thomas More player’s father who was in his mid-40s. Bystanders called 911, but before first responders came to the scene, McGee performed CPR by himself for 10 minutes – which might as well have been an eternity.
“That 10-15 minutes feels like an hour,” McGee says. “When you’re doing compressions on someone and you’re by yourself and you’re kind of leading everything, especially at a young age, and especially when you know the guy that’s down, it beats you up a little bit.”
McGee graduated from Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire with a degree in athletic training. While in college, McGee wanted to “try something new,” so he studied abroad in Perth, Australia – “as far as you can get from Connecticut.”
“In Australia, I worked for a semi-professional Australian rules football club, the Bullcreek Leeming Bombers,” says McGee. “It’s a mix of rugby and soccer. I covered a couple professional women’s matches as well.”
But McGee’s interest in athletic training started much closer to home: Lyman Memorial High School in Lebanon.
“I had a really bad injury in high school,” McGee says. “I was on and off of crutches for a year and a half, had experimental surgery done to my hip, and fixed it. I was told a bunch of things that I probably wouldn’t ever be able to do again, but here I am lifting a bunch of weight, running ultra marathons, all sorts of stuff.”
McGee didn’t want anyone else to feel alone during times of tough recovery.
“I didn’t want anyone to deal with all the mental issues you have when you go through a tough injury like that where it kind of alters and changes your life,” says McGee. “It’s hard, especially when sports is part of your life. It’s hard to let go. I guess I kind of stayed with it and then decided to help people out because I went through a rough time.”
McGee’s first job was at St. Thomas More School in Oakdale as the athletic trainer and athletic director. McGee worked with many elite athletes at the prep school – but he didn’t feel totally fulfilled.
“I think we were pushing out anywhere from 30 to 40 Division I athletes a year out of the school,” says McGee. “I loved every second of it. It was great. But for people that don’t know how it works in a private school, it’s great as a young adult coming into the field, but eventually you become overworked and underpaid. That’s why I left that.”
Despite the tragedy in the stands, the St. Thomas More-Choate football game kicked off and McGee tried to refocus. Shortly after, a doctor on the sideline told McGee that despite their efforts, the man died before reaching the hospital.
But it wasn’t until the second half that the player found out his dad was gone.
“Seeing the athlete tear up and freak out, it was like the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” McGee says. “I basically held and hugged the athlete and just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ but at that point I felt hopeless. There was nothing I could do.”
Six years later, it remains the only time someone has died despite McGee’s efforts.
“Still to this day, I still think about this,” says McGee, who turned 25 on the same day of the incident. “I have done CPR a couple times on people; everyone I’ve done it on has survived, besides this father. I’ve had other life-or-death situations with people on the field, but they ended up being fine, and I did everything in my hands that I could or was trained to do.”
None of those positive outcomes prevented the second-guessing that tormented McGee in the aftermath of the man’s cardiac arrest.
“It really scarred me,” says McGee. “It beat me up big-time because you know the person you’re working on. It was a constant three or four weeks where afterwards it settled in: You’re like, could I have saved this person? Would this person still be alive today? I just had to swallow it up at the time and finish out the game.”
While working as St. Thomas More’s trainer, McGee began providing freelance coverage of Berkshire League events in 2018 through a working relationship with Shepaug trainer Chris Schneider.
McGee’s skills stood out to Declan Curtin, then Nonnewaug’s athletic director.
“I had noticed him in terms of his professionalism,” Curtin recalls, “reaching out to me at the beginning, telling me who he was, [asking], ‘What do we need?’ and saying, ‘I’m here to help.’”
By the following year, Curtin had seen enough. He wanted to hire McGee as the Chiefs’ first full-time athletic trainer.
“I basically reached out to Chris Schenider and said, ‘Hey, I’d like to have this guy. He seems pretty consistent, he seems dedicated. He’s caring. His communication is the best I’ve ever seen in the business,’” Curtin remembers. “We said, ‘Let’s employ you full-time ourselves as a district because you obviously have proven yourself. You are really good at what you do, and we want you here all the time.’”
Curtin hired McGee full-time, effective Jan. 1, 2020, and he’s patrolled the Chiefs’ sidelines ever since.
“I’m very thankful that Mr. Curtin found a way to get me hired here at Nonnewaug,” McGee says, “because this is just an awesome place, and I couldn’t see myself at a better place, and I hope to stay here for a very long time.”
Over his past five years at Nonnewaug, McGee’s relationships with athletes have become a highlight of his career.
“What’s awesome about [athletic training] is like, yeah, you’re sort of an educator, but you’re also a coach, and you’re also someone that a lot of student-athletes look up to,” McGee says. “Being around sports all day is fantastic, and talking to the student-athletes, helping out student-athletes who want to reach their goal, watching them smile, watching them jump on the field – it’s an amazing feeling.”
But as McGee knows better than anyone, sports are also filled with low moments. McGee tries to deal with setbacks and tragedies by maintaining his own positivity and also instilling it in the athletes he helps.
“It’s really satisfying being able to help someone reach their goal,” McGee says. “We had a basketball player a few years ago in and out of surgery, left and right, I really tried to keep her positive, really push her to get out of the negativity and help her heal quicker. But I’ve been still helping with her all the way up to this day, and I was able to help her out to get her back into pursuing college basketball, and she’s doing fantastic up there.”
That player was Samantha Conti, a 2023 Nonnewaug graduate who competed in soccer, basketball, and tennis. Throughout her high school career, she struggled with several injuries, first tearing her ACL and lateral meniscus on Dec. 26, 2021. After rehabbing and returning to play soccer, she broke her patella in November 2022.
The knee injuries cost Conti most of her junior basketball season and all of her senior basketball season at Nonnewaug. Throughout Conti’s rehab McGee helped keep her positive.
“For both my injuries, Sean was extremely helpful in helping me recover both physically and mentally,” says Conti, now a sophomore guard on the Curry College women’s basketball team. “For an athlete, serious injuries are often devastating and frustrating. He played an enormous role in helping me maintain a positive attitude while healing from these injuries. During the recovery process for both my surgeries, he also spent a lot of time coming up with workout plans to ensure I stayed in shape while still recovering from those surgeries.”
Like Conti, any athlete going through an injury affects McGee in some way. But McGee believes positivity is essential to an athlete’s recovery.
“It kind of breaks my heart a little bit because it’s hard and they have to go through a long process,” McGee says. “It can take up to a year, depending on the injury. The best thing I try to do is make sure that they’re OK and staying positive. Positivity goes a very long way just making them happy, comfortable, and positive.”
Every athlete deals with lows, especially when they’re stuck in the trainer’s room. McGee says part of his job is to adapt to each athlete’s mindset, which might change on a daily basis.
“Some days they are going to feel fantastic and you have to be there for them, pump them up, get them ready to go, and just go with that positivity and be that type of person or an environment to get them positive,” McGee says. “Other times, they’re going to have bad days, and at that point you have to be one of those people [saying], ‘Hey, you’re going to be fine. You stay positive; keep pushing forward.’”
Helping an athlete return to the field is McGee’s favorite part of the job, but the wins aren’t bad, either. When Nonnewaug won the 2023 Class M state baseball championship in a 10-8 thriller over Wolcott, McGee rushed the field in celebration.
“Watching them win the state championship and watching all their eyes light up and everyone just being happy and excited, that was one of the all-time highs I think I’ve ever had as an athletic trainer still to this day,” McGee said. “It gives me goosebumps thinking about that stuff.”
That unforgettable moment was one that McGee only experienced because he continued his career after the tragedy five years prior. Many of his colleagues don’t recover the same way.
“A lot of people who had incidents like this in the sports [medicine] world at a young age usually leave the profession,” says McGee, who admits he considered doing the same before seeking counseling. “I chose to keep pushing even though I had anxiety for a while. It took some time to get over it, but made me a stronger person today overall.”
It’s turned into a lesson that McGee uses for himself and other athletes, whom he encourages to not harbor any regrets.
“Tragedies happen to everyone,” McGee says. “Some are dealt worse hands than others. It is up to you how to handle it. You can either take it negatively and sulk, or you can learn from it to become a stronger person and better the people around you. Life is too short.”
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