Tiff Haub

Master of Science in Health Administration
Class of 2024

Tiff Haub ’24 grew up as an equestrian rider with a love of taking care of horses. These days she’s still taking care of horses but has added keeping jockeys healthy to her responsibilities as well.

Now the director of Norton Sports Health thanks to a connection she made through a UofL class assignment, Haub ensures horse riders and jockeys have access to wide-ranging health care in a partnership with Churchill Downs.

“We’re making sure jockeys and riders have comprehensive care to support them on the track and off the track,” Haub said. “We have a performance dietitian, social worker, access to sports psychology, sports fellowship trained physicians, all the things they need for comprehensive care.”

Haub was working as an athletic trainer at UofL when she decided to take advantage of the university’s employee tuition remission benefit and earn her online master of science in health administration through the School of Public Health and Information Sciences.

In her first class of the program, Haub was assigned to choose someone to interview who was in a position she would want to be in after she earned her degree. Haub selected the then-director of Norton Sports Health, who reached out to her a few months after their interview to let her know about an open position and invited her to apply.

She took the job. A year later, Haub became the manager of Norton Sports Health. A year and a half later, she became the director of Norton Sports Health, the role she currently serves.

“I don’t believe I would have made that connection or been asked to interview for that first position if I didn’t have that class assignment in my first semester,” Haub said.

Her time in the classroom didn’t just spark Haub’s career change. She was able to compound her class assignments with her work, leading to a more engaged and impactful experience as a student and success in her career.

“A lot of the class projects were my real-life projects for work, like putting on (a) symposium or a project with the jockeys or the wellness fairs at Churchill Downs,” Haub said. “We have a performance center that I help oversee and I was able to use a lot of these work projects for my school assignments and leverage my professors as experts to help support me. I think sometimes people think, ‘Oh, I just need to go to school and get a degree.’ But I was actually using what I was learning at night or early mornings in my classes in my regular job and vice versa, so they really were compatible. It made my school assignments feel more meaningful.”

Inspired to translate that meaningful work to help jockeys and riders in a direct way, Haub and her team created changes to state law to further protect jockeys.

After being onsite at Churchill Downs for a few months, Haub saw the demand not only for the emergency management care jockeys need if something happens on the track, but also the sports care and rehabilitation necessary to help jockeys return to riding. Haub and her team worked to update the state law to require an athletic trainer’s presence at races to help jockeys stay healthy and succeed on the track. The law passed unanimously in January.

“We worked to create a baseline of what is appropriate care and really started from scratch to create policies and slowly begin building trust with the jockeys,” she said. “Most of them are very underserved and we had to be present often and show them that we’re here to help you stay on the horse and continue riding to protect your livelihood.”

Another thing that helped build that trust and elevate jockey health care was creating a second state law that ensured every jockey must have a baseline concussion test and physical each year.

“Every other sport that we’ve worked with outside of jockeys and horse riding, you have to have an annual sports physical,” Haub said, “but the jockeys never had to have that.”

The elevated jockey care her team created isn’t limited to Kentucky but can help jockeys and riders at tracks around the world.

“If Churchill Downs is doing this and we are providing and setting the gold standard of care here, we are creating a blueprint that can be implemented across the nation and globe,” she said. “We aren’t providing the minimum level of care, we are going beyond that, which is what we believe should be the standard.”

Creating a positive impact that can race across the world is what drives Haub to continue raising the stakes, and she credits that drive to UofL.

“Increasing access and elevating care for jockeys is the most rewarding part of what I get to do and I feel really empowered in my role because of my program at UofL,” Haub said. “This work gives me purpose, and to advocate for jockeys at Churchill Downs and support something so big as (the Kentucky) Derby, is something I don’t take lightly. I know I’m privileged to be in this position, so I’m very intentional and passionate about the work we’re doing to create these positive impacts.”