Barbara Morris | Enthusiastic Educator

Courtesy of Barbara Morris

Magnify

Fitness has played a significant role in Barbara Morris’s life since she was child. As a young girl, she stayed active on her family’s black angus farm outside Kansas City, Missouri. Once in high school, she found sports a comfortable home and headed to Arkansas State University on both softball and basketball scholarships. In her 30’s, she took part in competitive bodybuilding and even won an American Gladiators competition. But it has been her current work as assistant program director for the S.M.A.R.T. Institute at the University of South Florida’s medical school’s orthopedic program where she feels most rewarded.

“Community education, especially with youth, and trying to make the Tampa Bay area a safer sporting community are really big passions of mine,” she says. “I enjoy talking with people about important health issues such as obesity, diabetes and others, because those may be individual issues, but in the long run, they’re also national issues costing us money from an insurance standpoint as well.”

Barbara is a frequent speaker with community organizations, local sports leagues, school booster clubs and other groups. In one week, she might assist a teacher to instruct medical students about basic life support, then later meet up with utility linemen to discuss ways to prevent back and shoulder strain, and finally head out to meet volunteer coaches to discuss first aid and CPR training. So for Barbara her schedule is anything but boring, and she likes it that way.

“I may be in the classroom, I may be out in the community, I may be marketing our sports medicine doctors, I may be covering an event – it just depends on what’s going on that week, so the job is always morphing,” she says.

When she was transferred to the Tampa Bay area nine years ago from Little Rock, Arkansas to continue working for a national health care provider’s physical therapy clinic system, she could not have anticipated at that time what her future might hold. But she says, when USF received funding from the state a few years later to re-launch its orthopedic program and the university made a conscious decision to add a community outreach health education component to improve sports safety for the community, she couldn’t wait to become a part of this new innovative program.

“Our goal is to present information gathered through research to our staff and others in the Bay area to help people minimize injury related to physical activity, and try to educate not only the student athletes, but the parents and coaches as well,” Barbara says.

Through the S.M.A.R.T. Institute (S.M.A.R.T. stands for Sports Medicine and Athletic Related Trauma), Barbara and her colleagues may go out to groups and speak on any number of sports safety issues including proper conditioning, training in intensive heat, the prevalence of MRSA infection in youth sports and the repercussions,.and the steady rise in concussions as well as how to identify them. Barbara says that she also enjoys meeting with youth sports teams and leagues to educate about the growing need for sportsmanship in competitive sports.

“Many times we think about sportsmanship as ‘just be nice to each other and shake hands at the end of the game,’ but that’s not all it is anymore. In today’s world, the pendulum has swung a bit, and I think we’ve lost sight of teaching graceful winning and graceful losing,” she says. “We tell the coaches that it’s okay to get beat but we also talk to them about the way they handle children, that it is okay to correct, but in correction there should be some kind of positive reinforcement.” She also points out the growing trend of children experiencing injuries not normally seen in young athletes due to overuse, something she attributes to society’s increased pressure on children to pick their sport of choice early on without continuing a cross-training program to help prevent injury. In addition to presentations and talks, the Institute team makesavailable actual fitness programs, such as one designed to share techniques about proper warm-up to prevent injury. Most presentations and programs are offered to the community free of charge though when additional materials are required, a small fee may be requested and donations are always welcomed.

“To me, the question isn’t why would they call the S.M.A.R.T. Institute and ask for assistance or education on some of these topics; my question would be why not?  If it’s free and available, why not educate yourself?” Barbara says.

She shares her Seminole Heights home with her cat and French bulldog, and when she’s not out and about talking with the community and local athletes and their coaches, she can usually be found taking part in fitness activities, enjoying the great outdoors and motorcycle riding with friends or participating in bike charity events. She also will get involved frequently with local breast cancer awareness and fundraiser events in memory of her own mother who lost her own battle to breast cancer. She says free time is not something she has much of lately but she has a personal mission that preoccupies much of her time outside of the office, and it just so happens to fall inside the realm of her chosen field: getting the word out about commotio cordis. Commotio cordis occurs when a young teen (for example, someone 13 or 14) is struck near the heart by a blunt object at speeds of 40MPH (such as in baseball, softball, hockey, lacrosse or even some martial arts). The blunt force can actually throw the child’s heart into an abnormal rhythm, leading that child to most likely take anywhere from 3-6 steps and pass out and in many cases, die. Because of the child’s age, paramedics often do not look to heart trauma as the problem and most baseball parks do not have AEDs (automatic external defibrillators) nearby.

“My mission is to see if we can get money for some of these little league ball fields to put AEDs out there,” she says. “It’s a shame that children die from these kinds of things when it can be something as simple as community awareness and having the proper equipment available to save a life.”

Barbara and her S.M.A.R.T. Institute colleagues will have an information table at the upcoming grand re-opening event at the USF Recreation Center on campus in celebration of the building’s recent expansion. The event takes place Monday, August 22 from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. If you have any questions about the S.M.A.R.T. Institute, be sure to stop by to say hello or contact the Institute directly at 813-396-9625.