Day in the Life of a Sports Medicine Nurse Practitioner
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“I love seeing people return to activity … When somebody thrives and they succeed through rehab of any sort, that is my absolute favorite part.”
Karen Myrick, DNP, Program Manager for the Institute for Orthopedic Education, Massachusetts General Hospital
More than eight million students competed in high school sports during the 2023-24 school year, an all-time record. At the collegiate level, over 554,000 student-athletes participated in NCAA championship sports in 2024-25, also a record high. And beyond the organized tiers of competition, nearly 242 million Americans, close to 80 percent of the population age six and older, participated in at least one sport or fitness activity in 2023.
From Olympic hopefuls to weekend runners logging miles on a Saturday morning, the United States is a nation of athletes. And every one of them, at some point, needs care.
“We’re always trying to get athletes to function at their highest level, or help them return after an unfortunate injury,” says Dr. Karen Myrick, a nurse practitioner specializing in orthopedics and sports medicine. “It is a very niche position, and it is a lot of fun. It is just a really nice life to be a sports medicine nurse practitioner.”
Dr. Myrick would know. One of the foremost experts in the field, she is the program manager for the Institute for Orthopedic Education within the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the architect of the only post-master’s certificate program in the country that combines orthopedics and sports medicine for both NPs and PAs. She is also a third-degree black belt who teaches martial arts, a runner, and a triathlete, so she understands athleticism not just as a clinician but as a participant.
Read on to learn what the day-to-day life of a sports medicine NP actually looks like, how the role fits within a larger care team, what skills the job demands, and why, for the right NP, it may be one of the most rewarding specialties in practice today.
Please note that “orthopedic” and “orthopaedic” are the same; they are the American and traditional British spellings, respectively.
Meet the Expert: Karen Myrick, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC, ONP-C, FAANP, FAAN
Dr. Karen Myrick is the program manager for the Institute for Orthopedic Education within the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. She came to Mass General from Connecticut, where she was a distinguished professor of nursing known for her expertise in orthopedics and sports medicine.
Dr. Myrick created the only post-master’s certificate program in the country that pairs orthopedics and sports medicine for both nurse practitioners and physician assistants, which she runs out of Mass General Brigham. She holds tenure at two universities, has taught in a doctor of physical therapy program, and takes on medical school capstone students. She also serves as director of nursing education and practice for Springer Publishing, where she has authored and edited several textbooks.
In addition to her academic and administrative roles, Dr. Myrick maintains an active clinical practice as an NP in an orthopedic urgent care setting. Her research focuses on athletes and sports medicine, spanning clinical health assessment, biomechanics, sports performance, and injury prevention. She is perhaps best known in clinical circles for developing the THIRD test, a physical examination technique for diagnosing hip labral tears that has since been published, studied, incorporated into textbooks, and adopted in other countries.
What Do Sports Medicine NPs Do?
A sports medicine professional’s mission is simple: keep athletes healthy and get them back to doing what they love. In practice, that means the role of a sports medicine NP is far broader than treating injuries after they happen.
“You work alongside the team physician helping an athlete to be the best that they can be, whether that is recovering from an injury or performance enhancement,” says Dr. Myrick. “Really, we are just trying to get athletes to function at their highest level, or return after an unfortunate injury.”
It is also, by nearly any measure, one of the most specialized corners of NP practice. There is currently only one post-master’s certificate program in the country for nurse practitioners and physician assistants that combines orthopedics and sports medicine, and Dr. Myrick runs it.
“We always combine the two: orthopedics and sports medicine,” she explains. “There’s only one program in the entire country that has a post-master’s certificate that includes sports medicine, and that’s the one I run out of Mass General Brigham. There’s an orthopedic NP program out of Duke, but ours is for nurse practitioners and PAs and includes sports medicine as well as ortho.”
The scope of the patient population is wider than many NPs might expect. Dr. Myrick points out that “athlete” in sports medicine is a broad term, covering everyone from elite competitors to recreational fitness enthusiasts. A D1 college player, a 40-year-old training for their first marathon, a middle schooler on a travel soccer team, and a weekend cyclist all fall within the specialty’s reach.
Where Sports Medicine NPs Work
One of the most appealing aspects of sports medicine is the variety of settings it encompasses. Unlike many NP specialties anchored to a single clinical environment, sports medicine NPs can find themselves almost anywhere athletes are.
“You may be in the clinic one day, in the OR one day, and then at the hockey rink the next day because they have a game,” says Dr. Myrick. “You can really be a little bit of everywhere. An elite gymnastics team, you might be part of the team and travel, or as part of a practice that covers the team.”
High school and college programs, professional teams, urgent care clinics, and private orthopedic practices all employ sports medicine NPs. Dr. Myrick currently practices in an orthopedic urgent care setting, a role she finds particularly well-suited to the breadth of the specialty.
“Where we are located, there’s not great access to an emergency department immediately, and we have many sports teams around, everything from college level to high school to middle school, and even our weekend warriors,” she says. “There’s a lot of running paths and bike trails, so we get a wide variety of everything in the urgent care. I love that job right now because it’s perfect for me.”
A Typical Day For Sports NP
The work day for sports medicine NPs starts first thing in the morning. “Everybody in orthopedics and sports medicine wakes up early. You have to,” she says. “When I run the certificate program, we meet at either 6 am or 7 am, and that’s just class time.”
From there, the day takes shape around whatever the schedule demands, and in sports medicine, that can change fast.
“Pretty typically, a nurse practitioner in sports medicine is at work early to star the triage of emails and texts. First thing is to make sure you’re not missing anything acute that needs to be dealt with right then and there that you missed while you were trying to rest,” says Dr. Myrick. “Is it a practice day? Do you need to be on the sideline? Is it a clinic day where you’re actually seeing patients coming in pre-op or post-op, maybe with a new injury? You’re dealing with whatever the flavor of the day is.”
However, this is a dynamic job, and without warning, the day can pivot entirely.
“Your time gets snatched away when there is an acute injury, especially with a higher-level athlete who needs care immediately,” she explains. ” You will need to triage them to advanced imaging, an immediate X-ray, a CT scan or an MRI. Hopefully, the nurse practitioner can handle what’s going on, but if it’s at that higher level, like compartment syndrome or something that needs surgery, you’re going to pull in your orthopedic surgeon and see the athlete together. In an ideal scenario, you’re seeing that acute injury, getting them triaged to their athletic trainer, and working on progression back to play. Return to play is a big deal for us.”
The Team Approach
Sports medicine is never a solo effort. Caring for an athlete requires a coordinated team of providers, each playing a distinct role.
“It’s really a collaborative effort to take care of an athlete and a team,” says Dr. Myrick. “The nurse practitioner, if you’re in a state with independent practice, might be working independently, but always collaborating with the entire team of providers and the team of athletes.”
At the center of that day-to-day collaboration is the athletic trainer. “The athletic trainer is really with the team almost 24/7, whenever they’re out on their field or their court,” she explains. “They’re the first ones out on the field with any injuries, and they’re reporting to the provider, whether that’s an advanced practice provider or a physician. The athletic trainer has standing orders in place from the NP or physician for their team so they can provide care.”
Physical therapists, strength and conditioning coaches, sports psychiatrists, and nutritionists can all factor into an athlete’s care plan as well. According to Dr. Myrick, the nurse practitioner’s role within that team is to organize and oversee, making sure each piece of the puzzle connects. “No one in healthcare really does it alone,” she says. “And sports medicine NPs, maybe more than most, really never can.”
Working With Athletes
The patient population in sports medicine is as varied as the settings. Dr. Myrick is clear that the term “athlete” casts a wide net. “We say athlete broadly,” she says. “This can be your typical weekend warrior, a 40-year-old training for a marathon, a 16-year-old at the peak of their high school career wanting to get recruited D1, or elite gymnasts. It is a very wide variety.”
What sets this patient population apart from a general practice is motivation. These are people who want to get better, and fast. “These are active people who really want to stay active. Sometimes in the general population, we’re trying to push people to get active,” says Dr. Myrick.
Elite athletes are more work: “They come with specific needs, like nutritional needs. We’re always looking for REDS, relative energy deficiency syndrome. And there’s a lot of pressure they put on themselves. There are sports psychiatrists we occasionally have to collaborate with, ff they’re trying to get over a mental block or dealing with a lot of pressure,” she adds. “So you’re dealing with psychology, nutrition, and the musculoskeletal piece as well. It’s very holistic.”
Necessary Skills for Sports NPs
Sports medicine NPs need a specific set of skills beyond those required in a standard clinical setting. At the top of Dr. Myrick’s list is the ability to triage quickly and accurately. “Your triage skills need to be fine-tuned. You need to be able to see what is truly urgent versus what can wait,” she says. “You also have to have a lot of patience, because this might be a day you’re just watching a practice, hanging out at the sidelines. You need good observation skills, you’re watching for mechanisms of injury, and you’re also looking at things so you can prevent injuries.”
That observational piece extends into injury prevention, which is as much a part of the job as acute care. “Baseball is a good sport to talk about. They stand still for a period of time, and then they do that fast, ballistic motion, and they tear hamstrings. So how can you keep them warm while they’re in the outfield?” she says.
“You’re looking for ways to come up with a research question you can implement and get the answer to, or you’re thinking about how to communicate with the rest of the interprofessional team to prevent injury,” she says. “You really have to be a team player, interactive, with good acute diagnostic skills, solid differential diagnosis management, and the ability to triage right away.”
The Rewards of the Role
Despite the early hours and high-intensity parts of this job, it can be very rewarding. For Dr. Myrick, the rewards of sports medicine come down to one thing. “I love seeing people return to activity. It doesn’t matter if it is just jogging, if it is Division I sports, maybe they’re a contender for an Olympic position,” she says. “When somebody thrives, and they succeed through rehab of any sort, that is my absolute favorite part.”
She describes the moment of walking from the academic side of her work into the clinic as one that never gets old. “Sometimes when you’re walking into the clinic from the academic area where you’ve been working on charts or reading a research paper, and you step foot into the clinic, I always feel like there’s that opportunity on that threshold to change lives,” she says.
For every sports NP, there is a particular part of the job they love the most. “I love dislocations. Anything dislocated, it doesn’t matter if it’s a finger, a shoulder, a hip,” she says. “I enjoy the process of physically being able to put that back in place, or a fracture that needs reduction. I love getting bones back into alignment and then seeing that patient calm and happy again and on the road to recovery. As a nurse practitioner, being able to do that, that is all me. There’s some power there in being able to help people like that.”
The Future of Sports Medicine NPs
The demand for sports medicine NPs is growing, and Dr. Myrick sees the specialty poised for significant expansion. “Nurse practitioners and PAs have really found a role as the advanced practice provider. This is due in part to the physician shortage, but also because you can extend that coverage,” she says. “The focus of the nurse practitioner being a little more holistic means we get all those pieces, and we’re very good at organizing the care that an athlete needs. I do see the role growing.”
That growth is happening against a backdrop of limited formal training options. With only one post-master’s certificate program in the country combining orthopedics and sports medicine, the pipeline of formally trained sports medicine NPs remains narrow. “We’re always looking to build our program,” she says. “Currently, we only have about eight to 15 in a cohort, which is nice, but we always would like to grow that a little bit too.”
Advice for Aspiring Sports Medicine NPs
For NPs considering sports medicine, Dr. Myrick’s first piece of advice is to find purpose with the work. “Find some kind of alignment with your own likes and desires,” she says. “I’m a third-degree black belt, I do martial arts, and I teach it, I run, and I do triathlons. I like to stay healthy and active, so I get drawn to people in that same area.”
Continued education and staying current in a fast-moving field is equally important. “If you are a nurse practitioner in a primary care type of practice, specializing is a great idea. Definitely go back for a certificate, get as much education as you can, read the research journals, stay really up to date, because things change quickly in sports medicine,” she says. “Shadow somebody, because then you really know what the day-to-day is like, you can make an informed decision and then press forward.”
For those still on the fence, she is direct. “It is a nice life to be a sports medicine nurse practitioner. I couldn’t do diabetes all day. It’s just not for me. So I think it’s a really great role, and I would love to see more people in it.”
Kimmy Gustafson
WriterAmong her many diverse writing endeavors, Kimmy Gustafson has also lent her expertise to NPSchools.com since 2020, providing insightful and engaging content about the significant role of education in shaping our future generations of nurse practitioners. Many of her pieces include interviewing experts on timely topics such as healthcare workplace violence and moral distress.
Kimmy has been a freelance writer for more than a decade, writing hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics such as startups, nonprofits, healthcare, kiteboarding, the outdoors, and higher education. She is passionate about seeing the world and has traveled to over 27 countries. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. When not working, she can be found outdoors, parenting, kiteboarding, or cooking.