Missouri State

IVAN MILTON
Athletic Trainer, 1976-2009
Director, Athletic Training Services
Inducted February 4, 2006

Ivan Milton was the longest-tenured athletic trainer Missouri State has had for Bear teams and athletes and his many accomplishments in his nearly three-decade career on the Springfield campus are noteworthy as his time saw the establishment and expansion of a number of training facilities and services. In his first year at Missouri State, he opened and supplied the training room in newly-built Hammons Student Center, and four years later opened another training room when Forsythe Athletics Center was completed. When the lower level of Forsythe was renovated in 2003, he supervised the expansion that made the new and greatly-enlarged Forsythe facility among the best in the Midwest. Milton established the athletics training curriculum at Missouri State to give hundreds of young student trainers an opportunity to learn the profession in a practical setting while gaining academic credit. Milton was a driving force behind a bill which was passed in the Missouri General Assembly and signed into law in 1983 which requires all athletics teams competing within the state to have the availability of a licensed and certified athletic trainer. He was instrumental in the establishment of a Southwest Missouri Regional Sports Medicine Clinic at the university for the treatment and rehabilitation of athletics injuries, and that program has grown tremendously over the past 20 years. He has worked with southwest Missouri physicians in a number of different medical disciplines to establish a consulting physicians program so that some 30 doctors are available to Missouri State athletes in many specialties. A native of Boise, Idaho, and a 1974 graduate of Idaho State University, Milton was inducted into the Missouri Athletic Trainers Association Hall of Fame in 1992.