The University of Mississippi Athletics
Ole Miss Adds Team Physician To Sports Medicine Staff
10/14/2009 | Athletics
Ole Miss Athletics recently welcomed a fresh face to its sports medicine staff in Dr. Henry (Hank) Sherman. Sherman joined the Ole Miss sports medicine staff in June as the team's physician and Director of Musculoskeletal Medicine.
Before accepting his current job at Ole Miss, Sherman served as a team physician for the Illinois State University football team in Normal, Ill. At Illinois State, he participated in and directed care of the student-athletes as well as provided sideline coverage of athletic events held at the school.
Hailing from Chatham, Ill., Sherman received his undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of Chicago and his medical degree from the University of Illinois.
Sherman, an orthopedic specialist, evaluates and treats orthopedic injuries of all Ole Miss athletes. He determines which injuries require surgery, and then directs those student-athletes that require surgery to the appropriate specialist. If Sherman decides an injury is a non-surgical issue, he talks with the athletic trainers and physical therapist and comes up with a rehabilitation plan.
"I'm here every single day for not just the football team, but for every Ole Miss athlete," Sherman said. "I do a lot of bouncing around and get calls from all the different athletic trainers. I am the first line of evaluation of every injury."
Sherman, a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine, has spent time working with both professional and collegiate athletes. He admits that he is right where he wants to be at Ole Miss - in collegiate athletics.
"It is a more interesting dynamic, given the time in their lives," Sherman said. (I enjoy) talking to them about what lies ahead in their lives rather than coming into somewhere that is very professional and looked at as a job."
There are some pretty significant differences between working at Illinois State and Ole Miss, but they are differences that Sherman sees as perks to his newest job.
"That's the attractive feature of this job - a higher level of college sports," Sherman said of getting to work in the Southeastern Conference. "This is what I wanted to do and some of it is different. Instead of working a football game with 15,000 people, now I am working games with between 65,000 and 100,000 people depending on where we are playing."
