When you meet Tyler Tortora, a physical education major at Southern Connecticut State University, his calm confidence and passion for sports science stand out immediately. But like many students, there’s far more beneath the surface.
Growing up in Milford, Conn., Tyler seemed destined for football greatness. By his sophomore year of high school, he was drawing interest from powerhouse programs including Ohio State, Penn State, UConn, and several Ivy League schools. Coaches didn’t compare him to other high school or even college athletes. They saw professional-level potential.
Then everything changed.
At 15, Tyler was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a severe autoimmune disease that attacks the large intestine. What began as manageable symptoms quickly escalated into a life-threatening condition that did not respond to medication.
“I was beyond the point where I should have been hospitalized,” he recalls. “But I kept pushing through it because I wanted to play.”
Junior year brought a double blow: his health worsened, and COVID-19 canceled Connecticut’s football season. Still, Tyler found a way to compete, playing three games on a club team while undergoing aggressive medical treatment. Senior year was even more grueling: six surgeries in ten months, two near-death experiences, and more than 80 absences from school.
“I spent most of the year in operating rooms,” he says. Even so, Tyler earned his diploma that June.
Sadly, adversity was nothing new. He lost his mother to brain cancer at age 12, and a year later his father became legally blind in his right eye. Through it all, his family’s sports training business, High Intensity, became both refuge and classroom. It was there that Tyler discovered his deep interest in the science behind athletic performance. He was fascinated not just by how to train, but also by why training works.
After high school, he took time to heal and explore paths back to football: camps, post-graduate programs, and even a walk-on opportunity at Southern. The dream stayed alive, until another surgery ended his playing career for good.
“I realized my body couldn’t handle the hits anymore,” he says. “But I wasn’t done with the game.”
Finding a New Way Forward
By his first year at Southern, Tyler had already begun redirecting the discipline and self-awareness he developed as an athlete into coaching and research. Today, he serves as the head strength and conditioning coach for all sports at Notre Dame High School in Fairfield, Conn., while also coaching football — an unusual level of responsibility for someone still completing his undergraduate degree.
“He’s got the maturity of someone who has been out of college for four or five years, even though he’s traditionally aged,” says Professor Bill Lunn, Ph.D., Tyler’s research advisor and the program coordinator of exercise and sport science. “He’s pivoted from what used to be a promising athletic career, and now he’s leading an entire strength and conditioning program at a high school.”
That maturity is evident in the way Tyler approaches his academic work. At Southern’s Connecticut Health, Athletic, and Mental Performance (CHAMP) Center, he is leading a funded undergraduate research project supported by a $3,000 First-Year Research Experience (FYRE) award. His study examines how a football season affects high school athletes’ body composition, knee strength, and muscle performance using advanced tools such as bone density scans, force plates, and isokinetic dynamometers.
“He’s only halfway through his sophomore year, and he was part of a team of three that won that undergraduate research award, but he’s the one who stuck with it,” Lunn explains. “He’s been using CHAMP Center facilities to test the football team and look at performance and physiological analytics that can actually inform athletic trainers.”
What makes the project especially compelling is its focus. While injury rates in sports are commonly studied, Tyler’s research looks at risk of injury before it happens, an approach rarely applied to high school athletes.
“Assessing injury is common; assessing risk is not,” Lunn says. “We’re using isokinetic dynamometry of the knee joints to identify strength imbalances. It’s very individual-specific. You can forewarn athletes about potential risks and help design training regimens to support vulnerable areas.”
“The testing itself isn’t novel,” he adds. “Testing high school athletes for injury risk — that’s what makes it novel.”
Tyler and Lunn submitted an abstract based on data collected this fall and are awaiting a decision from the American College of Sports Medicine Conference, where the research may be presented next year. Tyler has also applied for and just recently received a second Undergraduate Research Grant to expand the study. He hopes to extend this work to baseball and softball athletes.
“He’s already gone through the research funding process and obtained approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB) in a responsible and ethical way,” Lunn notes. “He does so much on his own. You teach him something once and he gets it. He’s very resourceful and a quick learner.”
With plans to pursue a master’s degree in exercise science and potentially teach while coaching, Tyler is building a future that blends education, research, and applied performance training.
“I’ve always been drawn to the analytical side,” he says. “I can’t play anymore, but now I get to help others play smarter and safer. That’s just as rewarding.”
