AVON — Kiah Ferrell was working at Ascension St. Vincent Hospital late last year when a person arrived with a gunshot wound through the pelvis. The patient was losing quite a bit of blood, she recalled, and one of her responsibilities as a trauma physician assistant is to run the Level One Rapid Infuser, a massive transfusion machine that quickly delivers large volumes of warmed blood.
Ferrell accompanied the patient into the operating room around 1 a.m.
Four hours and six coolers of blood later, she left the OR.
“I sent a text to my parents and I’m like, ‘My life is crazy,'” Ferrell said from her Avon home a couple of weeks later. “I just spent four hours giving this person six coolers of blood. Now I’m gonna take a nap then coach a basketball game tonight.”
At her busiest during the fall, Ferrell will work a 12-hour overnight shift, stop home for a brief nap, then head to an offseason workout at either Plainfield, where she’s an assistant basketball coach, or Avon, where she’s in her second season as head softball coach.
Sometimes, it’s both.
The 2016 Plainfield graduate is “a unicorn,” Quakers girls basketball coach Curt Benge says, a description he first ascribed to her as a mature-beyond-her-years, three-sport high school athlete.
The “chronically busy” Ferrell has grown accustomed to her non-stop lifestyle, deftly balancing her responsibilities as a coach of two sports at two schools with her full-time job as a PA working overnights in the trauma unit.
She wears a variety of hats and fulfills a variety of duties as an assistant coach at Plainfield ranging from team therapist to occasionally assisting the team’s athletic trainer, junior guard Hannah Menser says. “It’s funny, Kiah will do one thing and we’re like, ‘Add it to the list,'” she laughs, adding Ferrell will occasionally scrimmage with the girls — in a pair of Menser’s old basketball shoes.
Avon senior softball players Lilly Heath and Regan Cooper are often left bewildered when Ferrell works a couple nights in a row, then shows up to practice with a new poster she designed or strategy to discuss with the team.
How could you have possibly had time to do this? They’ll ask. She’ll casually reply that she had some downtime at work and decided to knock it out.
Ferrell is “literally Superwoman,” Heath says.
“I always brag about all these things Kiah does but she’s never exhausted,” the senior outfielder continues. “She doesn’t take out her anger on us. She doesn’t get an attitude because she stayed up all night. She’s always the same Kiah … and she pours her heart into everything she does.”
Type A ‘unicorn’
Ferrell and Benge are sitting behind the scorer’s table enjoying the tranquility ahead of Plainfield’s final offseason workout before fall break. Conversation covers a variety of topics, including Ferrell’s work schedule — she’s working nine of the next 12 nights — and the lack of rain, a welcome development as Avon softball will conclude its fall workouts with a scrimmage later that afternoon.
“Kiah’s a unicorn,” Benge repeats with a grin.
Ferrell loathes downtime and sitting around; her mind wanders to what she could be doing instead, even if there’s a movie or television involved.
It is very Type A and “probably to a small extent not healthy,” Ferrell said, but she’s always been this way. She and her brother played multiple sports in high school, with the elder Kiah a 12-time varsity letterwinner (volleyball, basketball and softball) and an active member of Plainfield’s National Honor Society and Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
She wanted to be there for everything, Benge said, recalling a Notre Dame team camp she missed as a high schooler due to a softball showcase. She hated every second of not being there and was texting her coaches and teammates for updates throughout.
“Most kids would just go to softball and not even think twice about basketball,” Benge said. “But that’s not Kiah.”
The school bell sounds and Quaker basketball players begin trickling into the gym, most heading directly to the scorer’s table to catch up with Benge and Ferrell as they get ready.
The players sometimes think of Ferrell as another one of their high school friends, senior guard Berkeley Williams said. “She has this energy and a lot of people gravitate towards her because of it.”
Plainfield was shorthanded most of the offseason with multiple players missing extended time due to injuries. Among those on the mend is sophomore Emma Righter, who asks Ferrell if she can scrape her injured ankle, wherein a round-edged tool is run back and forth over an area to increase blood flow and break up scar tissue to promote healing.
As Ferrell tends to Righter on the bench, Benge explains how his former player has always been the “emotional barometer” for this program, a trusted figure among players and coaches.
He recounted a game early in Ferrell’s playing career when she and four other freshmen were on the floor late in regulation against a significantly more experienced opponent. The other team “wasn’t very nice about it,” Benge said, and he was understandably displeased.
But Ferrell was unfazed.
“She had that voice very early on to come to me and say, ‘Coach, it ain’t a big deal. Let’s move on,'” Benge said. “She takes care of all the details. It’s not just one big moment or one big thing (that stands out). It’s a collection of all the little things that make her very, very valuable.”
‘Blessing from God’
A couple weeks into her orientation at St. Vincent Hospital, Ferrell had a patient who arrived with half their arm in a cooler after running it through a table saw. A few days later, she dealt with her first fatality.
“It was upfront and personal pretty quickly,” Ferrell said, but she quickly came to love the “high acuity,” the intensity, of working in trauma. “I don’t think there’s ever a world where I’m not involved with something that makes me feel alive.”
Ferrell’s interest in medicine was influenced by her high school athletic trainer and a desire to care for people.
Her chosen path as a PA was guided by her academic advisor at Southeastern University, where she played softball for two seasons before transferring to IU South Bend.
Ferrell planned to use her extra year of eligibility after the COVID pandemic wiped out her senior season but a month before the semester, she was moved off the waitlist and admitted into Butler’s prestigious PA program.
Though she loved softball, “the stars were aligning” for her professionally and after some tough conversations, Ferrell made the difficult decision to hang up her cleats.
“At that point, I had no clue I would be getting back involved with sports,” she said. “I tell our girls all the time, not many people are gonna make a career out of their sport. You will have to be a functioning member of society and get a real job.”
Ferrell’s current occupation as a PA working overnights in trauma came together by chance.
She had entered the coaching ranks as an assistant with the Plainfield softball and girls basketball teams after completing her first year of PA school, and, upon graduation, hoped to find a job in orthopedics — something that would keep her involved with sports medicine and, ideally, allow her to continue coaching.
But as the weeks of job hunting turned into months, Ferrell, who was working as a substitute teacher at her alma mater, began getting “pretty upset.”
And then her mom, the school treasurer at the time, was told by a friend at the bank about an opening at St. Vincent.
Kiah didn’t know much about trauma and was unsure about working part-time overnights, but the idea of a high-pace, intense work environment was appealing. So she applied.
“They took a chance on me as a new grad and I’m forever grateful,” Ferrell said.
“I think (this job) is a blessing from God because I don’t think I could have done anything else and still coach,” she later added. “It’s a little unorthodox — I’ll go from practice to work instead of vice versa like a normal person — but it works out.”
Coaching is ‘part of her DNA’
The night before Avon’s 2024 rain-interrupted semistate semifinal vs. New Palestine was scheduled to resume, then-first-year coach Kiah Ferrell asked each of her players to send a picture of themselves playing softball growing up. Those photos, along with a coach-selected mental health quote, were hung in the Orioles dugout with “Play For Her” written in bubble letters across three notecards at the top.
It was a reminder for the girls to enjoy the moment, said Ferrell, who renewed the tradition for last year’s state tournament, which culminated with an unprecedented fifth consecutive sectional title and near-upset of eventual state runner-up Center Grove in regionals.
Ferrell is Avon’s “biggest hype woman,” Heath said, adding there are times when she’s coaching third base that she’s cheering even louder than the dugout.
“And she encourages me to be loud, which I know is difficult to understand because I’m a very loud person in general,” the Northern Illinois signee laughed. “But she’ll give me a look and I’ll be like, ‘I got you coach,’ and get things going.”
Cooper, an Eastern Illinois signee, added: “Kiah’s increased my confidence by like 100 times. She always believes in me and that’s really helped me reach my full potential. If I’m struggling, she reminds me what kind of player I am, the work I’ve put in … (and encourages) me to have swagger. That really puts me into a good mindset.”
Ferrell’s interest in coaching was inspired by positive experiences throughout her high school and college careers. She cherished her coaches’ life lessons and “felt the urge to give back to the game,” to be a role model for the next generation.
And she has a knack for it, Benge said.
Ferrell is great with the players and they trust her, he continued. “Coaching is not a job. It’s a lifestyle choice. And she embraces that lifestyle. … It’s definitely part of her DNA.”
‘She’s genuinely amazing’
Early in Ferrell’s coaching career she was scheduled for back-to-back overnight shifts with an early-afternoon basketball road game in between. There wasn’t enough time to go home after work, so — against her better judgment — she went straight to Plainfield High, showered and slept in the coaches’ office until everyone arrived for morning scout.
It was a subpar hour-long nap, she recalled, but at least she made it to the game. And she was able to catch a few more hours of sleep back home before returning to the hospital.
“I try not to do that to myself too often,” smiled Ferrell, who will head straight from basketball practice to work in a few hours. “(But) you’re only in your 20s and 30s for a little while, so you might as well live life to the fullest.”
“Everything she does, I can’t imagine ever doing anything like that,” Williams laughed. “The energy Kiah brings — she pushes all her worries, all her things aside. It’s always all about us and the unselfishness she has goes back to her love for the game and love for us girls.”
Benge admits there was concern how Ferrell would balance working overnights while coaching two different sports, but “she juggles it brilliantly.”
For her part, it helps that Ferrell controls her schedules for work and softball, allowing her to minimize overlap.
As for those rare occasions when she has basketball and softball in the same day, she’s mastered the art of changing in the car, a technique that requires maximizing stop-light productivity — and keeping your eyes on the road, of course.
“Kiah knows we’ll always work with her with anything, but she very rarely asks,” Benge said. “If we have a morning practice after she worked an all-night shift, her fatigue will show a little, but it’s not much. I mean, you almost have to be looking for it. She always comes with energy and joy.”
As Avon’s year-end softball scrimmage concludes, Ferrell organizes the players for a few fun team photos at home plate, then gathers them in the outfield for a quick team meeting, running through the plan for winter workouts and reminding them of an upcoming Trunk-or-Treat event.
In less than 24 hours, she’ll be at Ascension St. Vincent for the first of back-to-back overnight shifts, with the start of basketball season just around the corner.
“Whenever I get a chance to brag about Kiah, I do because she’s genuinely amazing,” Cooper said. “I’m so lucky to have someone like her as a role model in the athletic world and I’m so grateful to have her as a head coach.”
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Blood, sweat and cheers: Kiah Ferrell’s life as trauma physician assistant, high school coach
Reporting by Brian Haenchen, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
