The Dr. Bill deShazo Sports Medicine Center celebrated its grand opening Saturday on the Quad prior to the A-Day spring football game.
The Sports Medicine Center, located in the Family Medicine Suite of the University Medical Center, is open to the public as well as to UA athletes. The center is currently accepting patients.
"We want to let people know that our services are for everybody, not just University athletes and students," said Thomas Struthwolf, the director of marketing for the Medical College. "The Medical Center is for the community, and it's important for people to know that."
The center will be open Friday afternoons and will later include Tuesday afternoons, allowing patients suffering from sports related injuries to receive treatment from the same physicians who tend to UA athletes, Dr. James Robinson and Dr. Craig Buettner.
Robinson and Buettner are both graduates of the Tuscaloosa Family Medicine Residency, which is administered by the UA School of Medicine.
The center is named in honor of Dr. Bill deShazo, who provided medical care at the Student Health Center and served as the first full-time family practice residency director at the UA College of Community Health Sciences, where he was also chair of the department of family medicine.
"Dr. D," as he was also called, was the team physician for the UA Athletics Department from 1972 to 1985, serving as a personal physician to head coach Paul "Bear" Bryant as well as a team physician for the football, basketball and baseball teams. DeShazo retired from the University in 1989. He died in 2006.
"Dr. deShazo was well-known and respected throughout the community," Struthwolf said. "He worked with all of the athletes."
The center is a key component of the new Sports Medicine Fellowship Program that the UA School of Medicine is creating in partnership with athletic department.
Struthwolf said there is no timeline for the program, but it is coming. He also said the program will benefit the community and its participants.
"We want to move toward creating a fellowship that will allow students to major in sports medicine," Struthwolf said. "Instead of losing students to programs across the state, we can do something here."
The Sports Medicine Fellowship Program will have two full-time faculty members. Fellows will be required to devote 10 to 15 hours per week to the athletics department, as well as provide weekly participation at a UA event. The Sports Medicine Program fellows and faculty members will work closely with UA coaches, athletic trainers and athletes.
Kristin Kelley, a sophomore majoring in geography, said she is looking forward to visiting the center and receiving care for her basketball related injuries.
"I'm as accident prone as they come. I've strained just about every muscle in my body, and I've tore a ligament or two," Kelley said. "It will be more convenient than traveling to Birmingham for care and more dependable than [Druid City Hospital]. It's just good to have options."
Troy Watson, a freshman majoring in biology, said he thinks the Sports Medicine Fellowship Program sounds promising and he would be interested in participating.
"I tore my [anterior cruciate ligament] while playing football in high school, and that's really when I began thinking about pursuing a career in sports medicine," Watson said. "I am still not sure whether I want to focus on injury prevention or rehabilitation. It's a vast and rewarding field."
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