Stephanie Wilkerson loved going to Charlotte Sting games.

Growing up in southeast Charlotte, some of Wilkerson’s core memories included driving down Tyvola Road with her father to see the Sting — an original WNBA franchise that played in Charlotte from 1997-2007 — at the old Charlotte Coliseum.

Whether it was cheering on local teams, supporting her siblings or her own athletic ventures, Wilkerson, now in her seventh year as athletic director at Olympic High, has been around sports since a young age.

“I did really enjoy it, but did I think that this would be my profession, in sports? No, not really,” Wilkerson told The Charlotte Observer in a phone interview. “As I started getting older, by high school or college age, I did know that I wanted to do something in athletics, in that realm somehow, and it would change from time to time. And eventually, I got to where I am now with being an athletic director.”

Wilkerson, a UNC Greensboro graduate, played basketball at Providence High and is a proud product of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools since kindergarten.

She was recognized as the statewide Athletic Director of the Year by the North Carolina Athletic Directors Association last year, along with earning The Charlotte Observer’s athletic director of the year honor.

“Growing up in Charlotte and coming through the schools, I just wanted to give back to the place that made me who I am,” Wilkerson said. “I lived in Greensboro for 10 years, and I always eventually knew that I wanted to come back and really just give back to the city that gave me so much.”

Wilkerson, who also ran track before focusing on basketball full-time at Providence, had aspirations of becoming an athletic trainer in the NFL when she was a high school student. She’d enjoyed a sports medicine class she took at Providence, so much so that she decided to major in sports medicine at UNC Greensboro.

She recalls a meeting early in her college career where her advisor discussed future opportunities in the sports medical field. Her advisor explained to her that many athletic training jobs are in high schools, so to get a foot in the door, she should get a teaching degree and then study sports medicine later on.

Wilkerson changed her major from sports medicine to teacher education, with a concentration in physical education, and her focus shifted. She found she was enjoying these classes much more — and in the career she’s had, she still finds herself thinking about material from those sports medicine courses when dealing with athletes’ injuries.

“Being an athletic director is like running a little mini business,” Wilkerson said. “I take stuff from all kinds of places — even with sports medicine, pieces I learned in those classes.”

Wilkerson’s first teaching job came in 2007 at Parkland High in Winston-Salem, where the athletic director was her sister’s best friend’s father. He wanted an assistant, and it ended up serving as Wilkerson’s first step into high school athletics.

After taking a break from work to start a family, Wilkerson moved back to Charlotte in 2013. Chris Satterfield, now Butler High’s athletic director, held that position at West Charlotte at the time and connected with Wilkerson, who became his assistant.

“Obviously, times are different — this generation is different than mine — but some of those things, being a student-athlete in high school in Charlotte, I just know some things that they deal with,” Wilkerson said. “And that helps me, in my job, better serve them.”

Wilkerson has represented her hometown and state on a national level — she’s involved with the National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association.

There are classes that all athletic directors nationwide take, ranging from leadership to field maintenance, and Wilkerson teaches two of them. She’s also on several committees that help ADs gain different certifications.

“The high schools that we have here in Charlotte, they are very high-performing and I think they match up well against other places,” Wilkerson said. “I just want people to see that. I feel like the athletics that we have in Charlotte and what we produce, I think is some of the best in the country. I would just really love for more people to see that.

“To be an athletic director in Charlotte is not an easy task. And a lot of people say that, if you can be an AD in Charlotte, you can be an AD anywhere else because the job is just really extensive.”

Before Wilkerson forged an athletic career of her own, she remembers sitting alongside her brother in the car while being driven to his basketball and baseball tournaments and practices.

She felt like she was constantly on a baseball field, and once she was old enough to play sports, she wanted to follow her older brother. She started playing softball.

Softball wasn’t the only sport that Wilkerson played in her early days as an athlete. But it was the first. Basketball became her main sport when she was 8 years old, and she joined the Union County-based AAU Carolina Fire program and played with them through high school.

She was around sports at a young age, and now she’s developed a national reputation for administering them.