Thanks, Craig and Gee, good to see you guys, as always. So I've got to go fast. I've got five minutes. I could spend five days on this. So the title is How to Talk to Everybody, for the most part, that's involved in the care of professional athletes. And I think it's, you know, it's something you learn over time, and this is all my opinion of how to do it, but I think all of us have to find a way, you know, to do it effectively. School background. I trained at Curlin-Jobe. We covered everybody and their dog in L.A. back then, and I learned everything that's related to this talk, the picture there of Bob Curlin, and he always sort of beat into our head that you do the right thing for the athlete, you're actually doing the right thing for the team, and I believe that. So one of the most important things, I think, of this talk is going to be to know how to communicate. You have to know what your job is, and especially in professional sports, you know, and being a team physician is a huge commitment, and the time frame that is required to do this well is beyond anything you can actually imagine. When I added up the time for just a professional football team, it was over 90 days a year, and we all have full-time jobs that don't have an extra 90 days a year, so it really is a commitment, and I think to be successful, you have to have the three A's, but I probably should have put them all in caps. You know, you have to be affable. You have to be able to make friends. You have to be trustworthy to the players. You have to be imminently available all day, all night, all weekends. You know, we're sort of always on call, and then you have to be able to back up the things you say to the players with your ability to do it and your accuracy of doing it, and they sniff out all of these things, and at least from my perspective, they're all really important, so we have to be very thorough in diagnosis, imaging, treatment plans, recovery time projections, you know, all those things that we're not really taught about some, we're taught a lot about others, and so you can never have too much information as you go through this list of who we're talking to, and in this day and age, you've got to document it, document it, and document it again. So the athlete, I think that's the most important part, how you communicate with them. You've got to speak the language of the sport, and the language for football is different than the language for basketball or the language for women's gymnastics or those kind of things or soccer, and if you don't speak their language, you're not believable, I think, to the athlete that you understand what they're going to, and the relationship with the players is incredible. It's a lifelong relationship if you handle this right, sort of exhibited by the two pictures below, and sometimes speaking that language means you've got to learn a little Chinese, and that was probably one of the tougher ones, you know, so the communication with the athlete happens at multiple different times, so on the field, back in the locker room, after all the tests are done, after treatment, during recovery, and then at the time returned to play, those, the communication is very different. On the field, and this is a picture of one of our defensive backs at the Texans that had a terrible spinal injury and spinal cord injury in Dallas with Drew Dossett was actually on the field with us that we had to board him, he was completely paralyzed on the field, big soft spot in the back of his neck, he blew up his poster elements, and Harry looked up to me and he goes, am I going to be okay, what are you going to do, and I said, Harry, just chill, let, you know, let me do what I got to do here, what I know to do here, we're going to take the best care of you we can, and we're going to pray everything ends up okay, straight to the OR, Drew operated on him that night, full return of everything within three or four days, and now a football coach at Prairie View A&M, and to this day if I see him in the grocery store or see him anywhere else, you always get a big hug, you know, and so we have to be honest with them at all times, we have to walk them through the realities of what it are, the big injuries, we not only need to tell them what's up, but we need to write it down and send them letters to make sure that we're on the same page with them and we know what they're, you know, they know what we're talking about, and we know what they're hearing is probably the best way to say it, but again, when you do this, these are lifelong relationships, you know, the athletic trainer discussion is different, and these guys are on your team or should be from the very beginning, and we all have to be on the same page with the diagnosis, with the communication, and with how we communicate it to the athlete, the head coach, that's a different one, there's usually no in-game communication, there's a little post-game, here's what we think's going on, the next morning, depending on your team, the head coach may want to know or it may just be the GM, and there's usually a weekly update so they can plan, but again, brutal honesty, predictions that don't assume miraculous recoveries is probably the way to say it, it is the way you communicate with both the head coach and the GM. One of these head coaches, I'll love for the rest of my life, and one of these, I'd be arrested if I saw him right now, and I probably wouldn't have to tell you which one that would be, and so when you look at talking to the GM, again, it's very different, the guy you see the picture of is an analytical guy that only wants math, some of the other ones, you know, want to know the exact stuff, so you have to know your GM, you have to know how he wants to approach it, and you have to communicate with him in a way of what he wants because they're all, this is probably the most variable part of the sports team communicating with from my standpoint, and then, you know, the agent, I think, and I'm about a minute over, the relationships are everything, but you gain the trust of the agent by prioritizing the health of the player, and that's actually the right thing to do. One thing that's important is there are no in-game discussions at all, and the agents will try to get you in-game to find out what's up, and the last bit of advice is I like to talk to the agent for the first time after I have all information with the player in the room, and I think that goes a long way, so I'll sign off there, this is just re-emphasizing that the communication done right, it's a lifelong relationship, this was my wedding a couple years ago with the NFL player in Cushing, with Jeff Bagwell from baseball, and owner of a baseball team, and a GM of a football team that are all my friends for the rest of my life, even though I don't work for those teams right now, so anyway, thank you.

communicate

professional athletes

trustworthy

lifelong relationships

player health