For many Steelers fans, a player’s injury at training camp in August was cause for concern. For Warren Austin, a third-year medical student and 2019 Pitt graduate, each injury also represented a learning opportunity.

Austin, who grew up in Carrick, spent August in a clinical rotation with the team as the first local participant in the NFL’s Diversity in Sports Medicine Pipeline Initiative, developed to encourage medical students from diverse backgrounds to consider careers in sports medicine. The league cited a 2021 report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that Black students accounted for 7.3% of the total med school population in the United States, well below the 13.4% Black population overall.

After learning of the program through the Office of Diversity Programs at Pitt Med, Austin consulted his mentor, MaCalus V. Hogan, the David Silver Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and chair of that department, who is also a foot and ankle consultant to the Steelers.

“Everyone deserves exposure to opportunity, particularly those who are working hard and excelling and have a goal in life. And Warren Austin fits those criteria,” says Hogan, an MD, who noted that the program strengthens the partnership the Steelers already have with Pitt’s School of Medicine.

Austin started in Latrobe at the Steelers’ camp with the athletic training staff at Saint Vincent College and then moved into the clinic at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex with sports physicians.

Austin, who attended Pittsburgh’s Central Catholic High School, spent two summers during high school with his uncle, an ob/gyn at a hospital in rural Indiana, and shadowed his uncle’s colleagues who practice a range of specialties. “I saw how medicine can change somebody’s day-to-day life, whether it be restoring their mobility or curing them from an illness,” he says.

Working with Aaron Mares, an MD and the head team primary care sports medicine physician for the Steelers, “opened my eyes to another side of sports medicine,” Austin says. He was drawn to the way that sports physicians go beyond orthopaedic injuries to treat other issues that may affect a player’s performance.

He adds, “As a representative of Pitt Medicine, I wanted to leave a good impression on the team, as someone willing to learn and willing to help.”

Read more from the Fall 2023 issue.