On a World Stage
Dr. Heather Hammonds shares her inspiring journey supporting Team USA at the 2024 Paralympic Games
Heather Hammonds is tired. Reached in Paris where she was serving on the United States Paralympic Team medical staff, Dr. Hammonds was on a break between her responsibilities in the athlete’s village and the wheelchair rugby team, which had adopted her as its own team physician/good-luck charm on its run to the gold medal game.
“Murder Ball — wheelchair rugby — is our nickname for it,” she said with a laugh, “and is very exciting to watch and even more exciting live because you definitely get all the sounds and the energy. They’ve won when I’ve been there, so they’re like, ’You’re going to be there tonight, right?’ I hope that my luck continues for them.”
The Murder Ball team would go on to claim the silver medal, but Dr. Hammonds’ experience at the 2024 Paralympic Games was solid gold. Despite the grueling schedule across several time zones, the native Texan described the experience as nothing short of a dream come true.
“I have actually been to Paris before, in 2017, when I came here with the family,” she said. “It was actually part of the story because they had already had all the signs up for the Olympics and Paralympics in the airport that said ’2024 Paris.’ At the time, I remember thinking it would be awesome to get to go. And now, here I am.”
Three years ago, just as Hammonds was getting her Mountain Home clinic, Restore Sports Medicine, off the ground, she did a rotation at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, a training facility for U.S. Olympic and Paralympic elite athletes.
“Once you are a board-certified sports medicine specialist, you can apply for what we call a rotation,” she said. “You go up to Colorado Springs and spend a few weeks there working with the athletes, and you’re working with the athletic trainers, with the massage therapists, chiropractors, everyone. You’re one big team.”
The quality of her work as well as the networking got her name in the running for the USOPC medical team bound for Paris.
“Just like with the athletes, medical personnel have to work up and make a reputation for themselves,” she said. “Working domestic competitions, you make those connections until you’re invited to go internationally traveling with specific sports teams or the USOPC itself.”
A lifelong athlete, Hammonds was inspired to go into sports medicine by her runner father and after a tragedy involving a high school friend.
“My dad was running marathons in my early years, so I used to kind of jump in with him when I was anywhere from 4 or 5 years old, running a mile with him,” she said. “That dovetailed into my own running and playing soccer growing up.
“I also had a close friend who was in a bad car accident who I kind of followed along in the rehab process. That fed my passion for movement and keeping people in the game.”
After earning her undergraduate degree from Texas A&M, she graduated from the University of Texas Medical School in Houston, then completed a residency at St. Vincent’s Family Medicine Program in Jacksonville, Florida, and a fellowship at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She cut her professional teeth working the local sidelines.
“When I was in Texas, there were definitely lots of Friday night lights,” she said. “I worked lots of sidelines, including some of the smaller colleges there and when I was doing my fellowship at Baylor, and I worked with their athletes, too. I still work part time as needed with the University of Texas; I’ve traveled with their teams both domestically as well as some internationally. Did some basketball, swimming, baseball and softball, so a lot with UT.”
Hammonds’ multifaceted experience has come in handy with her USOPC assignment as she handled whatever walked through the door of the medical facility in the athlete’s village. Not to mention, she said, the expectation for the team to pitch in on any task that might crop up, medical or otherwise.
“Medically speaking, we’re running tests on the spot. Athletes can get MRIs here, they can get X-rays, we have ultrasound in clinic,” she said. “A number of us are trained in musculoskeletal ultrasound, and we can use that on the spot to assess someone’s injury and determine how to keep them in the game as long as possible. Then we have the services we were doing that were more preventative in nature.
“You know, as staff, we’re concierge medicine to a full extent, but whatever needs to be done we do it. It’s wearing a lot of different hats; I’ve delivered stuff up to athletes’ rooms; I’ve jumped in to help load and unload equipment. Whatever is needed, we do it.”
Asked for a highlight of her experience, Hammonds said the wheelchair rugby team’s march to the silver medal offered several memorable moments, including knocking out Great Britain, which beat Team USA for the gold last time out. However, nothing really compared to experiencing the event’s opening ceremonies.
“That was pretty surreal,” she said. “I had the honor of marching in the opening ceremony. Knowing a lot of the athletes’ stories, and what it took for them to be there and what they have overcome, to hear the crowd clapping and chanting ’USA!’ definitely brought tears to my eyes. There have been lots of golden moments that have been pretty priceless.”
