When it comes to athletic training in North Carolina, there might not be a more recognizable figure from the past quarter century than Randy Pridgen.
He started his career as a student athletic trainer at Atlantic Christian College (now Barton) as a freshman in 1979. In 1988, he was hired as Barton’s first certified athletic trainer. By 1998, after years of handling the athletic training needs of a dozen athletic teams by utilizing student athletic trainers, a Pridgen-led team began the process of establishing accreditation for a certified program at the school. In 2003, nearly 25 years after Pridgen first set foot on the Barton campus, the school’s program became accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education (CAATE), allowing it to offer a major to its students.
That was a proud day for Pridgen and his colleagues. Friday, October 26, 2012, will be another proud day for Pridgen, as his years of taking care of athletes — and teaching students athletic training — will be rewarded with a spot in the Barton College Athletic Hall of Fame.
A native of Wilson County who grew up in Black Creek, Pridgen will be enshrined alongside two other Wilsonians, 2002 graduates Stacey Radford Miller and Shemkia Reid.
“This is a great honor,” said Pridgen, who is currently the athletic trainer and a teacher at East Wake High School. “I am very honored and humbled by the recognition, and I am also very proud to go in with the other two inductees since I was the athletic trainer for both of them. I think this recognition is also great for our profession because you rarely see athletic trainers getting recognized by institutions in this way.”
Pridgen, the son of Ronald and Glenda Pridgen, has compiled quite a resume in athletic training over the past 33 years. A member of the state, Mid-Atlantic, and National Athletic Training Associations, he has played a pivotal role in the development of student athletic trainers for most of his professional life. He served as a staff member at the NCCA Student Trainer Camp from 1978-94, was co-director of the N.C. Sports Medicine Symposium for Students from 1995-97 and has directed the state symposium since 1997. He was the chair of the Carolinas-Virginia Athletics Conference Athletic Trainers Committee from 1997-2003 and served as the athletic trainer for the Wilson Tobs summer collegiate all-star team from 1997-2001. In 1999, he was selected as the N.C. Athletic Trainers Association College/University Athletic Trainer of the Year.
The 6-foot-5 gentle giant has seen a ton of games and knows a lot of names. Aside from being a knowledgeable, caring athletic trainer, he has been a friend to many, a travel agent for numerous coaches, a van driver for teams, and a chauffeur for countless young men and women who needed to get to a doctor’s appointment or the hospital. In a word, he was reliable.
There was the night when a Coker men’s basketball player suffered a neck injury during a game in the Dog House. Pridgen accompanied the young man to the emergency room. After the game, the Coker bus pulled up to Wilson Medical Center. When Pridgen learned that the Cobras had final exams the next day, he told their coaches to take the rest of the team home. At midnight, when the player was discharged, he drove him two and a half hours to Hartsville and didn’t get back home until 5 a.m.
It was classic Randy Pridgen: always going above and beyond the call of duty.
“I did a lot of things during my career that were not in my job description,” he recalled, “but that has been true my whole career.”
Pridgen attended Lee Woodard School in Black Creek from grades 4-11 and went to Beddingfield his senior year in 1978-79. He was a manager, scorekeeper, and bus driver during his high-school years. While at Beddingfield, he won the Stantonsburg Kiwanis Award for his overall contributions to the school.
During his senior year, Atlantic Christian men’s basketball coach Bill Robinette sent a letter to Beddingfield looking for a manager/athletic trainer for his basketball team. Beddingfield boys coach Al Warrick brought Pridgen the letter and “encouraged me to seek out this opportunity.”
“I didn’t even know what athletic training was at the time, but Coach Robinette told me he wanted me to come to AC and be his student manager. He then paid for me to go to the athletic training camp in Greensboro, which ironically, is now the camp I am the director of each summer. My job was to learn how to tape ankles. That’s how it all got started.”
In another bit of irony, Al Proctor, an athletic trainer at N.C. State back in the 70s and 80s, was then the director of the state clinic. He came to AC in the winter to referee a basketball game and asked Pridgen, who was on the bench, to work his clinic. He did. Pridgen took his initial first-aid class under Tom Parham at AC. This past year, both Proctor and Parham were inducted into the N.C. Sports Hall of Fame.
“We learned how to tape ankles in Parham’s class,” Pridgen recalled. “We all had to shave our legs from the calves down so the tape wouldn’t stick to our hairs. Pre-wrap was too expensive to buy on a small budget!”
He credits then men’s soccer coach Mike Smith for being a strong mentor since Smith was a physical therapist. Drs. Tyson Jennette and Tom Rand, who acted as team physicians, were also a big help in his early years.
“That first four years as a student athletic trainer was a huge learning experience for me,” Pridgen said. “I was basically self-taught. I learned a lot just by reading books.”
It was on a 10-hour car ride to a 1982 postseason soccer match in Alabama with AC Athletic Director Bruce Curtis that Pridgen was encouraged to spread his wings and take his talents away from Wilson. That winter of his senior year, he met Mary Broos, athletic trainer at Guilford, during a basketball game, and she asked Pridgen if he would work as a grad assistant with her. His responsibilities would include men’s basketball with head coach Jack Jensen, football and lacrosse.
“A boy from Black Creek didn’t even know what a lacrosse stick was at that time,” he said, noting that Broos became a lifelong mentor and friend.
His salary was $2,500 for eight months. Broos set him up to live with a Guilford history professor in a single room that he rented for $80 per month.
He got many of his meals while traveling with the teams. During that time, Broos also encouraged him to get his master’s degree at North Carolina A&T, which he did. The tuition was $54 per semester for two classes, and Pridgen received $50 per semester in minority money for being a Caucasian at a primarily African-American university, “so I paid four dollars per semester to get my master’s degree. That was money well-spent!”
He was required to put in 1,800 hours of supervised athletic training work to become certified. Broos had him covering high school football games on Friday nights, and he would return late, get up early, and drive Guilford’s injured players to football games on Saturdays on just a few hours of sleep.
During the week, Broos taught elementary school, so Pridgen would have to get the players ready for practice until she arrived. “She was a great, great mentor,” Pridgen said. “She made sure I was doing things correctly, and that took me to a different level.”
Broos also encouraged Pridgen to get involved in professional organizations and personally tutored him for the Athletic Training Exam, which he passed on the first try in 1988 when the pass rate was only 33 percent. “She was so crucial in my development,” Pridgen added.
His first job as an ATC was at Enloe High School in Raleigh. He taught classes for six out of eight periods per day for his first two years. He and a group of other ATCs in the county went to a school board meeting and eventually had legislation passed that said they should teach no more than four classes per day since they had to work such long hours after school. They also talked the board into approving stipends for each sports season.
Pridgen was hired by AC President Jim Hemby in 1988, and he was thrilled to return to his alma mater as its athletic trainer. It was a position he would hold for 22 years. He can still recite the names of many students who helped him over the years before the school began hiring other certified athletic trainers in 2000. He also keeps up with most of his former colleagues either by telephone or Facebook.
He currently has more than 1,100 Facebook friends, and he estimates that some 40 percent of them have Barton ties. He is affectionately called “The Godfather” by some of his closest friends because he knows SO many people from his years in the trenches as an athletic trainer and his years working and directing the state’s clinic for aspiring student athletic trainers.
In 1998, after a decade of handling the needs of Barton athletic teams with 10-15 students per year, Pridgen sent a letter to Barton Director of Admissions Anthony Britt telling him that sports medicine students could no longer be recruited to Barton if they didn’t have the opportunity to be certified. That prompted Barton to hire Carla Stoddard as an Athletic Training Education Program Director to develop an Accredited Athletic Training Program. Pridgen and Stoddard designed a new athletic training room, and it was completed in 2000. Pridgen, then teaching some 14-15 semester hours per year, gave up much of his teaching duties to Stoddard.
“We revamped the curriculum and came up with a plan to hire a staff to be accredited to cover all our athletic teams,” he said. “Our goal was to have five ATCs on our staff, and we got there. We had to because all students have to be supervised in order to get their hours, which meant our entire coaching staff had to change the way it was used to doing things.”When the program got fully accredited in 2003, Pridgen said it was a very proud moment.
“I give Carla so much credit. I just got the ball rolling, and she took control from there,” he added, giving props to P.E. Chair Claudia Duncan, Athletics Director Gary Hall, and Vice President Vernon Lindquist for their support and expertise as well.
It’s hard to synopsize all the highlights of a long career with the Bulldogs, but he lists “the success of his students upon graduation” as No. 1. “That’s the reason I am such a Facebook fan, because it allows me to keep up with so many people associated with Barton that I would never see again, from former athletes and coaches to my athletic training students. I want to be a part of the milestones in their lives and careers. I am just very proud of the work my former students have done, will do, and are doing.”
No. 2 on his list would be “the camaraderie with my colleagues over the years at Barton. A lot of us were around for a long time, and those are relationships I will always cherish,” he added. “We have had some really good people come in there, and I was privileged to work alongside them. And, there’s no way I could have done what I did at Barton without the support and help of our local doctors, especially those at Wilson Orthopaedics.”
Finally, he said that it was “a great opportunity to be a part of so many teams over the years. I got to be a part of every team and got to know so many players. Each team had its unique personality, so to watch the players mature and the dynamics of the teams change was so interesting. If you go back to the National Championship team in men’s basketball in 2007, on day one, I would have told you we had no chance to win a national title. We didn’t have the size or ability, but the two things Coach Ron Lievense’s team had that nobody considered were heart and chemistry.”
He was overjoyed when the women’s soccer team, led by Radford Miller, captured the CVAC Championship at Belmont Abbey in 2001.
“I was there for the inception of women’s soccer, so it was phenomenal to watch where the program had gone.”
He remembers countless bag lunches on road trips with men’s soccer coach Gary Hall – and the postgame trips to Wendy’s. He was with longtime baseball coach Todd Wilkinson when the Bulldogs were dominating in the 90s, and recalls doing the athletic training for the Regionals in Kinston out of a U-Haul trailer.
The run of Wendee Saintsing’s “Six Pack” of senior women’s basketball players to the regionals was a thrill for him in the late 80s, and he enjoyed watching the golf team blossom under the direction of close friend John Hackney.
“Wow! I was a part of so much athletic history at Barton,” Pridgen said. “I may not have been the best athletic trainer out there, but I was a good athletic trainer. The big thing for me was that I always tried to do the right thing and help people.”
Now, he can take his well-earned spot on the wall in the Barton College Hall of Fame.
