Sports medicine during residency training

[medstudent33]

I am very interested in sports medicine and was wondering if there are any residency programs that will give you more experience in sports medicine vs others.

Thanks

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[DOctorJay]

lots of sports med experience available at Mayo if interested, can do game coverage early on in residency

 

[mjakec]

Tons of opportunities at the University of Colorado-I just finished my fellowship there and I covered 4 D1 teams- the sports medicine dept (Ortho, PM&R, Family Med, and Peds) were covering all CU and DU sports. The residents are always welcome to come and be as involved as they want.

I did my residency at the University of Washington and there are opportunities for marathon coverage, some D1 coverage (although harder to get access to as a resident), pre-participation physicals, high school football, and of course the Seahawks team physician is PM&R faculty (but you'll have to be more impressive than I was to cover anything Seahawks related).

 

[cbest]

Just finished residency at Rush and was very pleased with the sports/spine & sports opportunities.

Plenty of sports medicine clinic if you want with primary care sports med at Rush including college and high school coverage. Also can work closely with UIC PM&R sports med clinic as well as college coverage. Chicago always has lots of races and other athletic events to cover as well.

Personally, I feel very comfortable with the amount of sports medicine I plan on seeing in the future... hoping to have a spine & sports type practice.

 

[TXPMR]

Depends on what you mean by "sports medicine." Sports medicine can mean anything from taking care of general MSK issues in active patients to taking care of D1/elite athletes, covering games, training rooms, and large events. I find a lot of time med students don't appreciate that difference. If you're thinking more general MSK, most of the "top half" or so programs will give you decent exposure. If you're talking more covering games, training rooms, large events, etc. then it becomes a little more particular. Probably the biggest potential difference between programs is their affiliation with an institution that has NCAA sports. In general it's easier to get NCAA exposure if your residency program is affiliated with an NCAA school, especially at schools that have lots of lower profile sports (soccer, lacrosse, wrestling, gymnastics, etc.). For example, sports like women's soccer and field hockey often don't have any physician there full time and it's easy for a resident to cover the games with the trainer. Sports like football and men's basketball always have physicians (often multiple) so there's much less hands on experience but at least you can say you were there. And for large events, any program in a big city is going to have plenty mass events to cover throughout the year.