Sports medicine innovations are helping weekend warriors stay in the game

Frank Petrigliano, MD, and Denis Evseenko, MD, PhD, have been collaborating on medical innovations to help heal and even regenerate damaged joints. (Photo by Ricardo Carrasco III)

Call them recreational athletes. Couch-to-5K joggers. Weekend warriors. Whichever name you use, they’re the ones who wait all week to hit the soccer field, basketball court or running trail on Saturday morning. They’re up at 5 a.m. for a long run before work or playing softball until the lights switch off at night. They might not have fancy endorsements or lucrative contracts like the professionals, but they bring just as much heart to their sport.

Juggling work and family while still leaving it all on the field every week can take its toll on the body, though. The sporadic activity that defines these intermittent athletes makes them prone to injury. “Weekend warriors represent a large number of the patients that we see,” said Frank Petrigliano, MD, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and chief of the USC Epstein Family Center for Sports Medicine.