Athletic Training Program Vision, Mission, and Core Principles

Vision and Mission

The vision of the Athletic Training Master’s Degree Program at Northern Arizona University is to be an innovative national leader in Athletic Training education, ensuring graduates positively affect healthcare as independent, autonomous, and competent clinicians.

The mission of the Athletic Training graduate program is to provide a learning-centered graduate experience that effectively links didactic and clinical education in the prevention, evaluation, treatment, and rehabilitation of athletic-related injuries. The program faculty promote professional and ethical conduct, prepare students to be successful on the national Board of Certification (BOC) examination, and strive to produce competent and confident Athletic Trainers prepared for a career in athletic training serving the communities around us.

Program Purpose and Core Principles

The purpose of the Athletic Training graduate program is to prepare students to work with physically active individuals in a variety of settings to provide professional injury prevention and care services. To succeed in this, we emphasize both classroom (didactic) and clinical education every semester in our program. This provides our students with not only the necessary knowledge and skills to become Athletic Trainers, but also the practice to master their skills prior to becoming nationally certified. Our program is tailored toward students who want to be involved in both healthcare and sports, working with athletes of every caliber to prevent injuries and to provide a continuum of care to return them to activity after injury.

To achieve our mission, we recruit students from both Arizona and across the country. We hold high expectations of our faculty, clinical preceptors, and students alike, fostered by a rigorous academic program and varied clinical experiences with expert clinician-educators. The first year in our program is in-person, while the second year is online to allow students to be placed in a clinical education setting of their choice at any of the affiliated sites we have established around the country.

The core principles of the program include: integrity, fairness/equity, altruism, dedication to lifelong learning, continual quality improvement, respect, persistence, and professional engagement. These principles guide our curricular development and delivery, along with our program assessment processes. From the content of our courses to our clinical assessments and mentoring, we strive to embody each of these core principles.