By Dave Persons
Next stop: Greece, for athletic trainer and 2009 Parchment High School grad Colin Diment.
Diment, currently a resident of San Diego, plans to move to Athens in October where he will continue to work with American track and field triple jumper Tori Franklin. Franklin recently became the first American to medal in the triple jump at the World Athletics Championships, taking home a bronze.
While in Greece, Diment, 31, plans to also work with members of the Greek national team and conduct online appointments dealing with injury rehabilitation and sports performance.
Diment’s career, which has included working with U.S. Olympians and professional athletes, stems from his interests early in life, with a few fortunate circumstances and bold moves along the way.
“I always had a desire in the back of my mind to work in sports medicine, but I didn’t really see a path for me,” he says.
That was true when he began attending the University of Michigan after graduating from Parchment.
“Within my first semester, I learned about athletic training. … I looked into it a little more and liked what I learned about it, so I transferred into it halfway through my freshman year of college.”
As part of his studies, he got to work with the U-M track & field, tennis, rowing, and best of all, the football team, on the sidelines, in the locker room and on the road.
“I grew up a huge fan of Michigan football,” he says, so it was like living the dream.
“It’s kind of been the same ever since, to be honest,” he says.
After receiving his kinesiology degree from U-M, Diment went to Mississippi State University, where he worked as a certified athletic trainer with the track & field and cross country teams.
“In exchange for that, they paid for my master’s degree in exercise physiology,” he says.
Once he had a master’s degree, he applied — on a whim, he says — for a job as full-time medical provider for USA Track and Field at the Olympic training center in Chula Vista, Calif.
“They called me back and within three weeks I was packing up and moving to San Diego,” he says.
From 2016 through 2019, Diment worked with the country’s most talented track and field athletes, accompanying them to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and World Athletics Championships in the United Kingdom and Qatar.
In all, he traveled to 22 countries and 40 states providing performance therapy to 75-80 athletes.
After four years, Diment, again on a whim, he says, applied for a job with the National Basketball Association’s Los Angeles Lakes, and again he was hired. For the next year-and-a-half to two years he was one of five athletic trainers on the Lakers’ staff.
“That was including the year they won the NBA championship, so I got a ring out of that,” he says.
For the last year or so, Diment has been at Kinetik Performance in San Diego working with professional athletes as well as the general public, helping clients recover from sports injuries, improve at the sports in which they participate and undergo rehabilitation, as well as other “sports medicine-type things.”
He also has served as a consultant for USA Track and Field, including at this summer’s World Athletics Championships at Eugene, Ore., where Franklin won her bronze medal.
Diment says his work is very rewarding. “I’m helping people get out of pain and build a better connection to their body,” he says. “Just being able to have an impact on people’s lives and connect with them in that way is pretty great.”
Diment plans to spend the next two to three years in Greece before moving on to the next phase of his life.
Ultimately, he says, he would like to establish a holistic healing center, possibly in Costa Rica, with physical therapy, acupuncture, nutrition assistance and mental-health training all under one roof. People would come for “healing vacations, basically.”
Why Costa Rica?
“That’s a beautiful country; the energy of the country is healing in itself,” he says.
At Parchment High School, where he played varsity basketball, golf and tennis, Diment says “the three people who stand out the most are Mrs. (Carol) Bouabdellaoui, Mr. (Tom) Novak and Mr. (Wayne) Hinton,” because of the way they related to him and the energy they displayed.
They “cared about me, they wanted me to succeed and they were good role models on how to treat people,” he says.
Diment says he would love to connect with acquaintances in the Parchment community and can be found on Instagram @colindiment.
