Krysta Porter had a relatively light work night for herself Wednesday with just a three-school wrestling competition to oversee.
“The best part of my job is getting to be here for the games and matches,” said Porter, the new athletic administrator for grades 6-12 at Mount View Middle/High School in Thorndike.
Porter isn’t long removed from being a student-athlete at Mount View herself, competing in field hockey and softball for the Mustangs until her graduation in 2016.
Less than six years later, the 23-year-old Porter is back at her alma mater in a job she has aspired to since those playing days.
“I’ve been thinking about this since I was in high school,” said the Unity resident of the job she acceepted on an interim basis in mid-December after Tom Lynch retired as the school’s assistant principal and athletic administrator.
The position will be re-evaluated after the current school year, Porter said.
Porter is believed to be the youngest high school athletic administrator in the state, according to the Maine Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, but for her it’s the next logical step in a career path she enhanced by her course work at Thomas College, where she graduated in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in sport management and a minor in coaching.
Those courses included public relations, athletic administration, coaching and facility management, all of which Porter said have been valuable in the transition to her job at Mount View.
“A lot of what I’m doing now was covered,” said Porter, who also played four years of field hockey and two years of softball at Thomas and went on to earn her master’s in business administration from the Waterville school in 2020.
Porter had been working for the American Lung Association in Augusta as a development coordinator since graduating from college, with those responsibilities including planning and logistics for the organization’s annual Trek Across Maine bicycling event.
She also has been the junior varsity softball coach at Mount View for the last two years.
“That was what I was kind of envisioning for myself for the next few years,” said Porter of coaching. “I didn’t think I was going to be an athletic director this early in my career.”
Porter said facility and team management have been two of her major responsibilities during her first month as Mount View’s athletic administrator.
“Paperwork for the athletes, making sure everybody knows where they need to be and when they need to be there, and making sure we have buses available to take them there, those types of things,” she said.
Porter also has had to keep up to date about issues related to COVID-19.
“Anything involving COVID is kind of new,” she said. “We didn’t go over that in school.”
Porter is grateful for the assistance she has received from others around the school in learning while on the job.
“It’s been pretty much what I expected,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of help from our principal [Zackary Freeman] and we have a full-time athletic trainer [Casey Holmes] that has been here forever and knows everything. I’ve had a lot of help from him in just finding my way and what I need to be doing each day.”
Porter also attended her first Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference athletic administrators’ meeting earlier this month and was buoyed by the support from her new colleagues.
“Everybody has offered me help if I need it, they told me to let them know if I have any questions,” Porter said.