Kim Higginbotham has always loved sports. At an early age, she excelled at soccer and softball, receiving high school all-America honors in both and earning an athletic scholarship to Arizona State University to play softball.

Now, after spending a decade coaching high school softball, Higginbotham is combining her passion for sport with her passion for teaching as the athletic director at Bourgade Catholic High School.

“I thought I would miss the coaching,” Higginbotham said. “But really I went from having one team of kids to mentor to having 300 kids to mentor in that same capacity.”

Since arriving in 2016, she has made it her personal mission to get all Bourgade Catholic students involved in athletics, regardless of gender.

“Our goal was really to change the entire culture, to get kids to buy into what we were trying to do,” said head football coach Marcel Lopez, who came to Bourgade Catholic at the same time as Higginbotham.

Assistant football coach Sammy Alcantar said that Higginbotham’s emphasis on combining faith, athletics, and academics was an important step in growing the school’s athletic programs.

In her first year as athletic director, Higginbotham brought in ten new coaches to overhaul the school’s athletic department and bring a new attitude to Bourgade Catholic’s numerous sports teams.

“I wanted athletics to be important,” she said. “When I came in it was really kind of something that students just participated in rather than being competitive in.”

One of Higginbotham’s proudest achievements since she took over Bourgade Catholic’s athletic department is the establishment of a new girls’ soccer team that will begin play this winter.

Higginbotham said that the team was initially supposed to start operations next year, but the idea of having a girls soccer program generated so much buzz around campus that the plan had to be set in motion as soon as possible.

“We had open field on Monday and to my surprise 22 girls showed up for open field,” she said. “Which obviously forces our hand to start the team this year.”

Although none are in the plans for the immediate future, Higginbotham did not rule out the establishment of other girls teams at Bourgade Catholic.

“We periodically do surveys for our students at the beginning of each year to see what their interest lies in and then we pursue it,” she said.

Higginbotham said that opportunities like the new girls soccer team are essential for getting female students involved in athletics and dispelling the stereotypes that female athletes deal with on a regular basis.

“A lot of times in today’s society it’s basketball, football and baseball that get the limelight, the support and the recognition” she said. “We want to make sure that all of our student athletes here are treated the same and have the same access to facilities on campus.”

Higginbotham herself is no stranger to being treated differently because of her gender. As a female athletic director, she regularly deals with misunderstandings from her male colleagues.

“Discrimination isn’t the right term,” she said. “I would say it’s more a lack of knowledge. Sometimes it’s the misunderstanding that because I’m a female I don’t understand athletics, which is so far from the truth it’s laughable.”

Nonetheless, Higginbotham does not let those misunderstandings affect the way she does her job, and she continues to improve the situation for female athletes at Bourgade Catholic one step at a time.