The Ivy Influence: Dr. Deborah Saint Phard

DID YOU KNOW? Dr. Deborah Saint Phard is the only four-time Indoor Heptagonal champion in the shot put and holds the mark for the longest shot put throw in Ivy League history, at 53 feet, five inches.

Phard’s journey to her current role as the Director of the University of Colorado Women’s Sports Medicine Program took her all over the world. Through her travels, she set multiple records, including both the indoor and outdoor shot put marks at Princeton. Now, however, Dr. Saint Phard is setting the record straight on women in athletics.

Dr. Saint Phard was born in Port au Prince, Haiti, but her family moved to Wichita, Kan., when she was an infant. Although she primarily played soccer growing up, she fell in love with track and field in junior high, specifically the shot put. She set several county records and decided to take her talents to Princeton.

At Princeton, Dr. Saint Phard became the only four-time Ivy League Heptagonal Indoor champion in the shot put as well as a three-time Outdoor Heptagonal champion. She also was the outdoor champion in the discus in 1984 and set the outdoor meet record in 1986, which she then proceeded to break in 1987 with a throw of 51-10 1/2. That record stood for 14 years. She established the indoor record in 1985 and then broke it twice. In 1987, she recorded a throw of 53-5 in the Penn Relays, a mark that still stands as the best all-time in the Ivy League.

Dr. Saint Phard graduated from Princeton in 1987 with a degree in Psychology. She went on to compete in the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis and the World Track and Field Championships in Rome. She was ranked in top 20 in the world in the shot put and punctuated her athletic prowess by competing for Haiti in the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea.

After the 1988 Olympics, Dr. Saint Phard moved to Philadelphia to attend Temple Medical School. She completed an internship in internal medicine, did her residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Colorado Medical Center and completed a fellowship in sports medicine at the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. She then served as a physiatrist for the Women's Sports Medicine Center at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, where she treated the physical injuries of athletes, but also remained equally interested in the psychological impact of those injuries on athletes.

While at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Saint Phard combined her Psychology major with her medical training and conducted a study on the affect of athletics on confidence within women, specifically looking at the sports of gymnastics, cross country and track and field. Part of the study involved looking at female political science students as the non-athletic control group. Dr. Saint Phard found a direct correlation between athletic ability and confidence within the athletes but not for the non-athletes.

Dr. Saint Phard, a three-time Best Doctors in America honoree by Best Doctors, Inc., remains focused on women in athletics to this day. Her clinical interests involve sports and spine care to active and athletic women and girls as well as research on the confidence of female athletes. She founded the CU Women’s Sports Medicine Program in 2002 and has served as its director since its inception. Her goal is to use her athletic background along with her medical expertise to teach women and girls the proper way to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

It is clear that Dr. Saint Phard has taken her championship experiences in the Ivy League to become a champion in the medical field and influence the next wave of women striving to compete at the highest levels as she did as a Tiger.