Everyone is in the athletic department.

Refer to a regular person as an "athlete," and he or she is likely to shrug sheepishly if not outright guffaw.

"Me? An athlete?"

But, as legendary track and field coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman put it, "If you have a body, you are an athlete."

Amy Powell, M.D., a sports medicine physician at University of Utah Health, shares a similar mentality.

"I feel like there are a lot of people who are very humble who would never use the term 'athlete' because they see athletes on TV, and they don't see themselves on TV," Powell said. "I think we underutilize the term 'athlete' when we're taking care of our active patients. There's resistance in people to accept that label."

So, why not just embrace it?

"The athletic mentality is one of goal-setting--it's health-focused and performancefocused," Powell said. "I think all three of those things are important life lessons."

Powell is part of U of U Health's multidisciplinary team of sports medicine doctors, orthopedic surgeons, nutritionists, psychologists and physical therapists. They treat everyone from the Utes' NFL-bound football stars, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes and the Utah Jazz to weekend warriors, yoga devotees and the treadmill jogger next door.

"We're honored to be trusted to take care of our university athletes, and that's something we really enjoy, but I would say probably 80 percent of what we do is take care of our local community," Powell said.

The overlap has created a system in which regular people can tap into the same coordinated...