Female trainer who made history in the NHL just graduated from FIU with a doctorate
When Aisha Visram told her parents, who migrated to Toronto from Tanzania in the 1980s, that she would be an athletic trainer, they didn’t get it.
“At first they said, ‘What? You want to watch sports? Why don’t you just watch them here?’” Visram recalled.
“As I started to get into it, they started to understand,” Visram added. “Now they just think it’s cool that I was able to make a living in sports and help people. They’re proud and excited.”
They’re happy not only because Visram, 37, made history in January when she became the first woman of color to work as an athletic trainer on a National Hockey League game day bench and the first woman to serve in that role in 20 years, but also because she graduated this week from Florida International University with a doctorate in athletic training.
Her parents watched hockey to first assimilate to the Canadian culture, using the volume of the announcers’ voices as a cue to cheer along with the rest of the audience. Her family’s heritage goes back to India.
On Tuesday morning, they watched their daughter get her doctoral degree at the Ocean Bank Convocation Center at Florida International University’s Modesto A. Maidique campus in west Miami-Dade.
FIU President Kenneth Jessell praised Visram and the approximately 5,900 FIU students who graduated during 10 commencement ceremonies, which began Sunday and will run through Thursday.
“Aisha’s accomplishments are truly remarkable and a testament to FIU’s commitment to helping students achieve greatness,” Jessell said. “Her story, and the stories of so many of our graduates this semester, embody our university’s culture of excellence and opportunity.”
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‘A testament to FIU’s commitment’
Toronto-born Visram first earned her bachelor’s in human kinetics from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and a master’s in kinesiology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She started to work, but the idea of a doctorate always lingered in her mind.
She worked at St. Lawrence University in New York for a few years, then the ECHL, a mid-level professional ice hockey league based in New Jersey, hired by the Adirondack Thunder.
In 2020, she relocated to Los Angeles, where she currently lives, to be the assistant athletic trainer and later the head athletic trainer for the Ontario Reign — the American Hockey League affiliate of the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings.
When the pandemic hit and she was furloughed from her job at the time, she chose to enroll virtually at FIU.
“Little did I know that a couple months later I wasn’t going to be furloughed anymore, so I ended up doing everything all at once,” she said. “And it became a very interesting process.”
She spent the last two years balancing her full-time, in-person responsibilities with her academic pursuit, fully online except for a few days in Miami during two summer residencies.
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“I’ll be honest, there were a couple of times when I was like, ‘Whoa! This is too much,’ and I wondered if I could delay. But really, it was the support of the professors in the program and the classmates that kept me going. At the beginning, I didn’t think I was going to get so close to a group of people I was going to barely see, but all of us got so close.”
Breaking glass ceilings
Richard Seeley, the general manager of the Ontario Reign and the person who hired Visram, said her gender had nothing to do with his decision.
“We pieced together her story by looking at her resume and checking her background references. She was more than qualified,” he said. “She seemed quite driven, and she had a good educational background.”
“She’s earned all of the things; it just happens that she’s a female of a different background, and that is awesome. It’s exciting to see her break barriers with her effort,” he added.
Those “earned things” most notably include a January watershed moment, in which she got called up to the NHL as a staffer for the Los Angeles Kings. She became the first woman of color to serve behind an NHL bench.
“That was a crazy experience,” said Visram, who’s used to staying behind the scenes.
Seeley said he admired Visram not only for her achievements, but for the challenges she has overcome.
“It’s probably not easy being a female in a male-dominated sport,” he said.
Throughout her career, Visram said she has been the only woman or one of a handful of women in the leagues, which has brought “a lot of frustration and disappointment.”
She wants to change that.
For her capstone project at FIU, Visram created a nonprofit called Equal Opportun-AT to cover expenses for women athletic trainers as they seek positions with sports teams. She hopes to award her first $5,000 next fall.
“Whether or not I should, I do feel responsible for those coming after me. I know my decisions don’t just affect me, they affect other people, so I try to make the right ones,” she said.
“But I think that things are definitely changing. I’ve definitely seen a shift in athletic training over the last few years. A lot more women are getting opportunities, and so, I think if we just keep going, we’ll get to where we want to be.”
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