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July 1, 2012

Spin doctors: Tennis helped determine career paths for North grads

Andy Amey The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE — It’s all about teamwork.

When Dr. Tom Reifsnyder and Dr. Alex Kor combine to save someone’s foot at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, perhaps they have the same feeling of accomplishment they did when the Terre Haute North boys tennis team had a successful match nearly 36 years ago.

The Baltimore area — which has more than its share of bad feet, Reifsnyder says — is probably lucky for the two doctors’ tennis backgrounds, because the sport had a great deal to do with getting them together in the medical field.



Back in the fall of 1976, Reifsnyder was a senior, playing No. 2 singles for coach Charlie Seitz’s Patriots — who were pretty good.

Steve Herndon was the No. 1 singles player and Joe Rourke the No. 3.

The No. 1 doubles team was Dave Cannon and Dan Coleman and the No. 2 doubles team involved some combination of Kor, Greg Hulbert and Jim Oxford.

Neither doctor remembers statewide high school tennis team rankings back then, although Reifsnyder says now the Patriots would surely have been in the top 10. North won the sectional, then lost a regional match at Terre Haute South to a Brebeuf team that had at least two players who were individually ranked among the state’s best 18-under players.

“We should have won that regional,” Reifsnyder says now, remembering both the attitude and the attire of the Brebeuf player he defeated that day.

Kor was a sophomore on that team, so it was the only time he and Reifsnyder were teammates (ninth-graders were still in junior high back then). The two were acquaintances — Reifsnyder and his family were regular visitors to the drugstore where Michael Kor, Alex’s father, was a pharmacist — but not really friends.

Both aspiring doctors went away to college, Reifsnyder to Washington University in St. Louis and Kor to Butler, and both continued to play tennis. In working on their games during summer months, they started playing together.

Their paths diverged for a while, Reifsnyder continuing to medical school at Indiana University, then internship, residency and fellowship at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Kor getting a master’s degree at Purdue before studying in Los Angeles and completing residency at Chicago.

A national age-group tennis tournament brought Kor to Pittsburgh annually, and by that time Reifsnyder was an attending vascular surgeon at Western Pennsylvania Hospital there. Meetings there between the two ended when Kor stopped playing in that tournament. Reifsnyder moved on to Johns Hopkins in 2006.

In 2003, Kor became one of the podiatrists at Kaiser Permanente, a clinic in Washington, D.C. “I lost track of [Reifsnyder] for several years. One day I decided to Google him, and I discovered that he was working at Johns Hopkins Bayview,” Kor recalled. “I sent him an email and we re-connected.”

Some of the best tennis courts along the I-95 corridor are about halfway between Washington and Baltimore, so the two began playing together occasionally again. And in the course of work-related small talk, Reifsnyder learned that Kor was serious about his job, and that he was having some frustrations in Washington.

“He called me one day at work [last fall] and asked if we might be looking for a podiatrist,” Reifsnyder said. “I literally walked down the hall and ran into [a supervisor, who was indeed looking for one].” By March 1, the two were in the same hospital.

“Podiatrists come in all shapes and sizes,” Reifsnyder said recently, “from nail trimmers to orthopedic surgeons. If I can fix the circulation [in feet damaged by diabetes or persistent drug use, for example], a lot of times there are dead toes, so somebody has to fix the feet.”

Kor, who has a particular interest (no surprise) in tennis injuries and other athlete-related foot problems — and who writes a column on injuries and their prevention in a tennis journal — is an accomplished surgeon. A No. 1 doubles team, if you will.

“The whole thing started because of Tom,” Kor said. “Kaiser Permanente is a great place but Johns Hopkins [has more of the kind of work I want to do] — and it’s a little more prestigious.”

“It’s nice to have somebody I can trust [to do good work on the rest of the foot],” Reifsnyder said.

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