CU Around: Sports Medicine

High Performance 

Jeff Stieb’s youngest patient so far is a 7-yearold skier, his oldest a man of about 90 who still climbs 14ers. 

It’s been nearly a century since there was a hospital on the CU-Boulder campus, but the university is again providing community medicine, with a focus on athletes. 

“We’ve had everyone from Frisbee golf players to stunt men to elite marathon runners,” said Stieb, director of physical therapy at the CU Sports Medicine and Performance Center, which opened last August in Folsom Field’s new Champions Center. 

A joint operation of Boulder Community Health, the CU Anschutz School of Medicine and CU Athletics, the 25,000-square-foot center is open to the public and aims to become an international destination for elite athletes, while also serving active people of all ages and abilities, said executive director Eric Medved. 

The center offers physical therapy, orthopedics, sports nutrition, pain management, performance assessment, physiological and metabolic testing and other services. 

Medical director Dr. Jason Glowney recalled an early success, a once-avid cyclist sidelined by artery scarring and related ailments. Today she’s back on her bike. 

“We saved her limb,” he said. “And we saved her lifestyle.”

In Brief:

1. Opened August 2015
2. Open to the public
3. Biomechanist to help with custom bike fittings
4. Current pool for improving swim strokes
5. Plasma-rich platelet injections
6. Concussion care
7. On-site MRI machine and other imaging services

Photo by Cliff Grassmick/Daily Camera