Lindsey YEager

Lindsey Yeager, a physical therapist who graduated from RHS in 2010, has had a clear, set path she’s been striving toward since high school. “I became an athletic trainer first, which was a great stepping stone for gaining my Doctorate in Physical Therapy, which was kind of always the plan.” Lindsey wasted no time in high school getting on the right path to reach her goals. While at RHS, she would often spend time with the athletic trainers during as many sporting events as she could. She spent countless hours in the training room to educate and familiarize herself in the sports medicine field. She continued this practice all the way to Temple University where she discovered that her greatest interest was working with fellow students, taking them through the recovery process and onto the path of healing. “It was awesome to help student athletes return from injury and to see what I would be doing during my undergraduate rotations.” She eventually moved onto her graduate degree in 2019, moving more than 1,200 miles from her family, navigating Florida on her own. But even after earning her Doctorate, she never gave up on her natural instincts to learn. To this day she’s continued to get sources of inspiration from other physical therapists online, keeping up to date with new exercises and physical therapy programs to give her patients the most modern techniques so they, too, can be on a path toward wholeness.

Where were these natural instincts of Lindsey’s honed? Reading High School, of course! As an editor for the Arxalma–the RHS yearbook–a member of National Honor Society, and vice president of Student Council, she saw her leadership skills begin to thrive. “Yearbook taught me how to work really hard to create and edit a product to sell to a large population. In Student Council, I was vice president, and that helped me build my leadership skills. And NHS helped me continue to focus on how important my studies would be in the future for college and post-graduate studies.” While attending classes and participating in clubs, she was leaping her way through the gymnastics world, too. As a gymnast, she often found herself injured, so she had to rely on the medical team for aid. These experiences, coupled with her natural interest in helping others, cultivated her passion to enter the sports medicine field. But what gave her the biggest push to be involved in medicine was the influence of her Anatomy teacher, Ms. Gochnauer. “Ms. Gochnauer gave me a jumpstart on learning anatomy, and even specific skills with dissection, [because later] I would have animal and cadaver dissections in both undergrad and grad school.” 

In addition to the mentorship provided to her via her teachers at RHS, what also influenced her professional career as a physical therapist was the melting pot of cultures here in the city of Reading. With the diversity of students continually interacting on a daily basis, Lindsey was educated at an early age to accept people of all backgrounds. She also learned that she needed to understand her patients’ emotional connection with their bodies, which is just as important as the physical connections within their bodies. “You can never truly know what someone is going through by external looks only–you have to talk to them, listen, be patient, and kind in order to build a strong relationship of any sort.” Therefore, noticing these subtle differences and helping her patients merge both the physical and emotional senses in the body, and seeing how that has benefited her patients' lives, that is what most fulfills her. “A good day at work as a physical therapist is when multiple patients share how much their pain or bodily function has changed to improve their quality of life.”

Just like everyone else, since graduating high school and settling into a professional career, Lindsey is still figuring out how to “adult.” She eventually plans to get married, have kids, and work her way up to establishing her own practice someday. This path she’s on, which opened up to her at RHS, still stretches onward and has taken her to places she never thought she’d go. Lindsey continues to harness her Red Knight spirit by donating her time to fundraisers, participating in parades and charity events, and growing spiritually in her church. Despite the miles she’s traveled down that path–and the many, many more she will be traveling–this physical therapist's Red Knight spirit has never left; it only continues to grow stronger.