As the assistant strength and conditioning coach for LSU Gymnastics and Beach Volleyball, Katie Guillory spends her days helping student-athletes do one thing:
Perform and recover.
From practices. From injuries. From the physical stress that comes with pushing the limits of performance week after week.
Her job is to understand how the body responds to trauma. When to apply load, when to pull back and how to rebuild strength safely over time.
In July 2025, that knowledge became deeply personal.
The Day Everything Changed
On the Fourth of July, Katie joined friends for a familiar Louisiana summer ritual, jet skiing on Blind River.
After hitting the wake of a passing boat in a narrow canal, her foot became entangled in the jet ski rope mid-air.
“I didn’t feel anything,” she recalls. “No pain affiliated with it at all.”
Back on the water, she tried to get on the jet ski and couldn’t. That’s when she realized her left leg had been completely severed.
Friends fashioned tourniquets from a tow rope handle and belt before wildlife and fisheries officers arrived. She was airlifted to Baton Rouge and rushed into emergency surgery at FMOL Health | Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, where surgeons worked for almost six hours to try to save her leg.
When she woke up the next morning, she learned amputation was the only option.
From Coach to Patient
Katie had spent her career helping athletes understand recovery. Now, she was the one in the hospital bed asking the questions.
“I told them, I need you to know I’m a border collie,” she says. “I’m going to do what you tell me to do and push the needle.”
For her own mental health, she needed goals.
Her first? Walk a full lap using a walker.
Her next? Learn to efficiently operate a wheelchair.
Each milestone became something to work toward as she spent a week in the ICU followed by intensive rehabilitation with her care team, working up to four hours a day relearning how to move safely again.
She credits vascular surgeon Michael Conners, MD, and nurses and therapists across multiple shifts with helping her navigate both the physical and emotional realities of limb loss, setting expectations for what recovery could safely look like for someone young, active and determined to return to coaching.
“My care team was phenomenal,” she says. “They were honest with me. Not telling me what I wanted to hear but what I needed to hear.”
Healing Is More Than Physical
Just months before the accident, Katie was in the best shape she had been in roughly a decade, finally training consistently without knee pain after seven knee surgeries and a hip surgery over the course of her athletic career and beyond.
Now, she was adjusting to an entirely new set of biomechanics.
“I was well aware of a comeback story and what it takes to return your body to what you need it to be,” she says. “But some days, it was extremely frustrating.”
She learned acceptance is part of recovery too.
“There’s nothing I can do about it, and the more I prolong the acceptance of that, the longer I’ll be frustrated.”
With guidance from her care team at the Lake and continued outpatient rehabilitation after discharge, Katie began relearning everyday tasks, from standing and walking to safely increasing load on her body again.
Back in the Gym
Unofficially, Katie returned to work the Monday after being discharged from inpatient rehab.
Just two hours a day at first, simply to be present during team training sessions.
“To be in a place that gave something back to me,” she says.
Gradually, those hours increased until she worked up to a full 40-hour week before the start of the fall semester in August, learning how much recovery each day would require from her body.
A Team Effort
On February 27, Katie will be recognized as an FMOL Health | Our Lady of the Lake Geaux Hero during an LSU Gymnastics meet vs. Alabama, an honor she says reflects far more than her own effort.
“It means that I had a great care team around me,” she says. “I could not have done this without every single one of those people.”
As she continues her recovery, Katie is setting new goals for herself, from helping LSU Gymnastics and Beach Volleyball compete for championships this season to exploring what a return to elite competition could look like in the future. Her sights are set on the 2028 Paralympics.
“If you want to do anything great,” she says, “you’ll never do it alone.”
