The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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August 12, 2008

Vikings team doctor has Kato roots

Chris Larson, East grad, is in second year on medical staff

By Brian Ojanpa

MANKATO — It didn’t take Chris Larson long to realize that pro football players can function with injuries that would fell lesser athletes.

“These guys have an amazing reserve,” the Minnesota Vikings team physician said. “They’re so tough and talented that even at 80 percent, they can still function well.

“When you’re evaluating these guys, it’s not like you’re evaluating high school and college players. It’s a totally different world.”

Larson, a 1986 Mankato East High grad, has been on the training camp sidelines daily the past week as part of the team’s medical staff.

The Twin Cities orthopedic surgeon is in his second year with the organization and attends every game — home and away.

“It’s time-consuming. You’ve got to love what you’re doing,” says Larson who, ironically, can’t recall ever attending a training camp session while growing up in Mankato.

Larson is one of two orthopedic surgeons on a staff that includes a team dentist and chiropractor.

The 40-year-old Larson says the Vikings solicited his services when the team changed coaching regimes.

During training camp, his days begin and end in the trainers’ room, following up on players’ injuries.

The sports medicine specialist also is a team physician for Edina High School, the Minnesota State High School League, and has provided medical coverage for the USA Cup Soccer tournament and the U.S. women’s national soccer team.

Though his interest in medicine may have been whetted by his mother Kay’s work with an orthopedic and fracture clinic (his father Mike was editor of The Free Press), his career path to medicine wasn’t a straight route.

He says he took a pre-med biology class in college — “I hated it” — then decided to pursue a business degree.

But when an economics class was even less to his liking, he reconsidered and cast his lot with medicine, earning a medical degree from the University of Minnesota.

“In medicine, it seems that you spend half your life learning, when the rest of your buddies are out there working,” Larson said.

He spent six years in residency training at the University of North Carolina and another year in a sports medicine fellowship in Minneapolis before beginning his medical practice in his early 30s.

He specializes in hips and knees, and lectures nationally and instructs other orthopedic surgeons in arthroscopic surgical procedures.

Torn anterior cruciate ligaments — ACLs in sports medicine vernacular — are a bane of athletes, and Larson has seen his share of knees that go south.

“With ACLs, we tell people: six to nine months recovery, and 1 to 11⁄2 years before you can be 90 percent.”

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