Sports Fellowship Program: Clinical Service

Orthopaedic Faculty
Our faculty expertise covers all musculoskeletal sports medicine areas with subspecialty interests. Our entire faculty is involved in providing orthopaedic sports medicine care to our university teams, local and surrounding area schools and colleges, minor league and professional team affiliations. In addition they are involved in the orthopaedic residency-training program, national and international teaching and continuing education. Research is a significant component of our program and the faculty is involved from basic bench research activity to numerous clinical trials and projects.

 Our faculty includes the following orthopaedic sports medicine specialists:

John Albright:                     knee, shoulder and elbow reconstruction

Ned Amendola:                    foot, ankle and knee reconstruction,

Joseph Buckwalter:             tumor surgery and sports medicine

James Nepola:                      trauma and shoulder reconstruction

Brian Wolf:                          shoulder, elbow and knee reconstruction

Patient population
Fellows are exposed to a range of injuries on the UI fields of play, in the athletic training rooms, and in the hospital based sports medicine center

As important as the quality of the faculty is the patient population one is exposed to.  We see a large population of competitive interscholastic and intercollegiate athletes referred for care of their musculoskeletal problems by their athletic trainer, their coaches, parents or primary care physicians.  There is also a large volume of recreational level athletes ranging from those injured while participating in club and intramural activities to the businessmen playing in a pick-up game.  Mixed in and among this population is a group of maximally challenging athletes referred because of the complexity of their problems and the tertiary center level expertise of our faculty. 

Consistent with a well known major departmental strength is the fact that we offer the sports medicine fellow exposure beyond that of merely learning the up-to-date surgical techniques.  As in the operating theater, you will discover a multitude of diagnostic and management strategies that set our faculty apart in their field.  This exposure will allow you to become comfortable in selecting patients for surgery as well as providing superb non-operative as well as post operative management working closely with the sports therapy and athletic training staff.