05 May 2025 A wiser Kiser
By Donna Lampkin Stephens
Tori Kiser knows the mental health toll that injuries can take on athletes, and she is using that experience for her Community Service Initiative as she prepares for the Miss Arkansas pageant as Miss UCA.
Kiser, 21, a junior biology major with a concentration in pre-med, will compete in her second Miss Arkansas pageant in June after qualifying as Miss Dardanelle in 2024. This time, though, she’s changed her Community Service Initiative to better reflect her experiences. Thus was born “Mindful Recovery: Supporting Athletes’ Mental Health.”
“I felt like there was a real need for someone to speak up for the mental health of student-athletes, and by having the experiences I have had with my mental health after sustaining a serious injury, I felt like I was being called to be a voice for that,” she said.
Kiser was a senior on the Cabot High dance team when she suffered a serious concussion after a fall. During a weekend competition, she was supposed to bend backward, hit her shoulders and slide to the ground, but instead of shoulders, she hit her head on the floor.
“I guess I didn’t tuck my head when I was going down,” she said.
She finished the weekend competition, but by Monday she was at the emergency room with a headache that wouldn’t go away, nausea and something even scarier. “I was in class trying to write notes, and my hands went limp,” she said. “I was losing motor skills — the ability to write and walk properly.”
She spent about a week in the hospital and was under concussion protocol for a couple more. She said she still has some memory issues.
Another injury came after she joined the dance team at UCA as a freshman. She was working on trying to be ambidextrous with her aerial cartwheel. “I tried to do my aerial on the right side, landed on my straight leg, and it buckled and went sideways,” she said. “I tore my ACL, and that took me out for the entire season, a couple of days out from the first football game. I had surgery, and since then I’ve had the repair surgery, and I’ve also had my knee drained twice and another surgery to clean out the scar tissue.
“After that, I really started to understand the impact on your mental health just from having a physical injury. When we were all in our recovery process, I started seeing that with other athletes.”
She said the experiences made her realize how tethered athletes’ identities are to their sports. “I’ve been a dancer since I was 2 or 3, and I didn’t know a world without dance,” she said. “I definitely had never had a snap moment where I was able to walk and move around, and the next minute my leg is immobilized and I can’t do normal functions throughout the day, like walking. There’s a pretty decent identity crisis. You’re no longer that athlete, and you can’t do what you love to do.”
She said the injuries also took a toll on other aspects of her life.
“I felt like I was keeping myself away from friends and family, isolating myself, and I had a lot of anxiety and depression,” she said.
The initiative started as her Honors College capstone project on the importance of mental health, as well as athletes being able to recognize the issue and know about available resources. Another facet of it is educating coaches and athletic trainers to recognize signs of the problem and for them to be familiar with helpful resources they can recommend.
As Miss Dardanelle last year, Kiser used “Inclusion is Key: Advocating for Special Olympics” as her CSI. That had been her platform since her early pageant days. She was a Special Olympics U.S. ambassador from 2021-23.
“I feel like I’m more connected to this platform because it happened to me physically,” she said. “And I am able to have people in the realms that I want to make a change in, having that connection with athletic trainers and other athletes. That passion for my university and the work I’ve done will show through.”
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