"Treating athletes is different," says Pruitt. "Everything from the size of our hearts to what we expect out of ourselves is different." Yet as late as the mid-1980s, Monte Sutak, director of athletics for the Boulder Valley School District, recalls that "It was our coaches who were doing all the taping and rehab work for our high school athletes. We were concerned about expertise; our coaches aren't trained to diagnose anything."
Mark Manger
Andy Pruitt in his Boulder sports-medicine center.
Related Content
More About
In 1996, after leaving CU and working for eleven years in a Denver medical clinic as a physician assistant, Pruitt had the sudden realization that something important was missing from his life. After a while, it came to him. "I needed my fix of stinking locker rooms and smelly buses filled with athletes," he remembers thinking.
He wasn't a fetishist. But for a guy who'd been around jocks most of his waking hours -- as well as having lived the life -- the relatively clean and easy schedule of a city-side sports-medicine clinic was too much like being a gardener who had let himself turn into a seed-catalogue salesman.
At the clinic, Pruitt says, "We saw only the stale stuff -- sports injuries that hadn't gotten better after treatment at some suburban clinic." Sprain, strain and torn-ligament-wise, there was no longer any dirt in his life. His mission became clearer still.
After two years of planning, he convinced Boulder Community Hospital to let him build his dream facility -- an all-in-one clinic for anyone who moved his or her body for health or pleasure, from Lance Armstrong to fat little ladies. It would include connection to all kinds of medical doctors, physical therapists and trainers, as well as a biomechanics lab (runners' uneven gaits often result in injury) and performance assessment. Anything to help those willing to get off their butts.
"The key clearly was Andy," says BCH vice president Jim Peters of the clinic's founder/ director. "He was well known in the biking community, among the area's elite athletes. He had an amazing reputation. Basically, without Andy, we wouldn't have done it." Instead, the hospital spent a couple million dollars, investing in Pruitt's vision by basically giving him everything he wanted.
This past January, Andy Pruitt's mission, the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, celebrated its five-year anniversary. In its first year of business, 2,100 patients stopped by. Last year the number was 28,500. They come from all fifty states and from seventeen countries.
The way Pruitt envisioned it, a good sports clinic wouldn't stop at passively receiving injured patients; it would also bring athletic care to the muddy fields and sweaty buses he missed so much.
"It's amazing what he does for us," says Boulder Valley's Sutak, who today places the value of the six athletic trainers Pruitt donates to the district and makes available for every high school athlete at more than $300,000 a year. "Our students probably receive better care than those at most colleges. And these aren't people studying to become trainers he sends. They work with world-class athletes when they're not here."
Still, says clinic administrator Karen Martin, the real genius of the place is that medical care that once was available only to Olympians is also there for anyone who takes the time to climb a mountain, kayak a river or walk the quiet early-morning halls of a deserted mall. "We see a seventy-year-old woman who is not an athlete, but she's active. She just wanted to come to a place where people get better."
