The objective, at least as it appeared on an index card, seemed simple enough.
Open up, Tyler Wilps had written.
Wilps, at the time a standout wrestler at Pitt, was a part of a volunteer trip to Haiti with fellow athletes at the school. It was the second time in as many years that he made the trek and while he did many of the same things his counterparts did — enjoying their work and the time they spent with children at local orphanages — it felt as though some part of his soul, open and empathetic as it was, wasn’t being penetrated, as was the case the year prior. For whatever reason, he wasn’t accomplishing what he set out to.
As the group convened at the end of the trip and each member was asked to evaluate how well they fared in reaching their goal, the two-time all-American wrestler was moved to tears.
“I didn’t do this at all,” Wilps recalled saying. “I completely failed.”
There was no way for him to know it at the time, but that experience put him on a path in which he’s working to fulfill that insatiable drive to help others.
Nearly three years after launching the Trek Coalition — a nonprofit organization aiming to, as its mission states, “provide comprehensive care that reaches the needs of underdeveloped countries through people and technology” — the 27-year-old Wilps is taking steps to extend the group’s work and broaden its reach. After finishing his third year of medical school at Temple University, the Pitt and Chartiers Valley graduate is taking a year off from classes to, among other objectives, devote more time to Trek. The organization is upping its fundraising efforts, beginning with its inaugural gala Saturday at the Metropolitan Club in Market Square.
“Going into my first year [of medical school], I was kind of thinking ‘I want to do something a little different. I don’t want to just go down this traditional medical school path,’ ” Wilps said. “Once you’re in there, there’s so much to do that you just get through it. Being a doctor is great, but it can be a 9-to-5 thing. I didn’t want to be doing that. I wanted to be putting my time toward something I felt was going to make an impact.”
Athletically, Wilps made his name over a decorated career at Pitt in which he compiled an 87-31 record, was the school’s first-ever ACC champion and was, as he still remembers, within 10 seconds of winning the NCAA championship at 174 pounds in 2015.
After taking a year off after graduation, he entered medical school, but even as he immersed himself in his rigorous schedule, he longed for more. Early in 2017, those desires took the form of Trek, which he started with his good friend Kyle Flick, a Pitt graduate who is the organization’s vice president.
Through the coalition, Wilps organized a trip in July 2017 to the Chimborazo Province in Ecuador, an isolated, mountainous region where many live in poverty. While there, Wilps and a group of medical professionals examined individuals, logged their information and provided treatments when necessary. Since that initial trek, Wilps has been back to Ecuador four other times, along with traveling to other countries in South America such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Peru.
“I think it really touches him, the need that is out there,” said Lisa Wilps, Tyler’s mother. “I think he has a very healthy respect for knowing that the problems are huge and that what he is offering is just a part of that. Balanced with the excitement over what they’re able to accomplish is that there’s so much more that needs to happen to really help these people.”
Even after those visits, Wilps longed for solutions their earlier work hadn’t fully addressed. They would see hundreds of patients over the course of a trip and would write down their medical information, only for it to be filed away and never seen again, meaning that if they saw the same person in the same community on a different visit, they’d have no background or potential follow-up questions.
To fix that problem, Wilps and Flick worked to develop a prototype for a digital health record system, which could upload information and be accessed even in remote locations. By having those details digitally archived, one could collect information on local populations to understand the problems afflicting them and help deliver them the proper resources, a tool that would potentially be helpful to governments, as well as groups such as the World Health Organization. In five years, Wilps thinks it’s possible 30 organizations could be using the system.
“There’s a huge information gap,” Wilps said. “Moving into the future, that’s only going to get much bigger. That’s kind of what we’re trying to attack.”
It stands now as the next big step in Trek’s work, one that will require both time and money. About seven months ago, Trek officially became a 501(c)(3). In his time away from school, Wilps is back in Pittsburgh doing research at Pitt and working daily on Trek but will also spend four months in Ghana working with Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei and the Foundation of Orthopedics and Complex Spine, an organization that provides affordable orthopedic care to those who would not otherwise have access to it.
At least part of the work with Trek now focuses on fundraising and securing grants, primarily to help make the digital health record system a reality, but also to potentially make it a full-time venture for Wilps and Flick. They’re hoping events like Saturday’s gala can help Trek grow and make their goals and vision for it possible.
“It’s really hard to start something like this,” Flick said. “It’s not a business. It’s a social enterprise. There are differences. You’re more resource-constrained. It’s just harder than you would think. If you really want to grow it and scale it and build it, you have to do it full-time. If you can’t do it full-time, it’s not going to grow the way you want it to.”
Tickets for the function can be purchased on the coalition’s website, trekcoalition.org, where users can also find more information about the organization, its mission and its efforts.
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG
First Published: September 19, 2019, 4:10 p.m.
