NFL, HBCUs to increase diversity in sports medicine

Four medical schools at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, including Morehouse School of Medicine, are partnering with the NFL, the NFL Physicians Society, and the Professional Football Athletic Trainer Society for a program aimed at increasing diversity in the field of sports medicine within the league’s 32 teams.

Eight teams, including the Atlanta Falcons, will take part in the initiative, which will provide medical students a clinical rotation with NFL teams’ medical staff during the 2022 season.

NFL’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Allen Sills stated, “What excites me about this program is not just the benefit for the NFL, but the benefit for medicine as a whole. What we’re trying to help address here is not just an NFL problem, it’s really something that’s widespread across medicine and that’s a lack of diversity.”

Medical students from Morehouse School of Medicine, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, Howard University College of Medicine and Meharry Medical College will be selected by their schools to complete one-month clinical rotations with NFL teams. 

The program will start with 16 students. Two students will be assigned to each team – the Falcons, Cincinnati Bengals, Los Angeles Chargers, Los Angeles Rams, New York Giants, San Francisco 49ers, Tennessee Titans, and Washington Commanders. The NFL plans for the program to include all 32 NFL team medical staff in the future. 

The NFL also hopes the program will highlight that there are many more careers that are a part of sports medicine. “We recognize that it’s orthopedic surgery, but it’s also primary care, sports medicine,” Sills said. “Then when you look beyond physicians, you’ve got athletic trainers, and you’ve got strength-and-conditioning coaches, performance specialists and sports scientists and nutritionists, the behavioral health clinicians, literally, sports-medicine departments.”

In 2023, the program plans to expand to recruit students from additional academic institutions and medical disciplines and place those students with medical staffs at more NFL clubs. “The NFL can be proactively part of the solution,” Sills said.