While sports medicine, physical therapists, and doctors collaborate and together play a vital role in caring for the athletes throughout their journey, there are some key differences.

Sports medicine doctors, where most of us are orthopedic surgeons, there are non-operative sports doctors, but here in our context, most of us orthopedic surgeons, a lot of times people enter the pathway through the doctor, we'll see them in the clinic, and we'll do a quick evaluation, identify on a broader level what is the problem now, and then try and get a hand on what maybe the underlying factors are.

We give our prescription or referral to the patient with some general guidelines, and then that's when they come in for their evaluation with therapy.

And I'm always happy when I have an athlete come in that says, like, listen, I'm getting ready to ramp up my activity level.

I just want to, something's been nagging.

Can you check in on it? That lets me identify movement restrictions or weaknesses, and I can send them over to TAC.

I get one look at the patient.

The depth of knowledge is critical, Dr. Zichilli added, for his patients in the journey back to their sport following an injury.