CLEVELAND — Luke Costello is an elite baseball player.
He has been scouted since he was 13 and was expected to enter the MLB draft after high school until a pickup basketball game derailed those plans.
"I just felt it pop. I didn't think it was an ACL injury at the time, I just thought it was maybe like a sprain or something along those lines. But as it went on, it just started to swell really bad," Luke said.
Fortunately, Luke already had a backup plan. At 16, he accepted a full scholarship to Wake Forest University to play baseball if he couldn’t enter the draft after High School.
But his collegiate and pro future was at risk. First, his ACL needed surgery.
Luke is from Erie, Pennsylvania. He sought medical opinions in Pittsburgh, and his family did research for experts elsewhere, but they chose Ohio and University Hospitals to rebuild his future.
“We have sports medicine with the most advanced technology. That way, when an athlete walks in the building, they know they'll get age-appropriate care no matter what their injury is, from their surgery to their rehabilitation, to their imaging, and then all the way back to their return to sport. We've invested heavily at our Drusinsky Sports Medicine Institute in our rehabilitation technology to have those latest and greatest tools that our athletes have available to them, and we continue to evolve and add over time,” said James Voos, M.D. UH Chief of Orthopedic Surgery, team doctor for the Cleveland Browns and the President of the NFL Physicians Society.
“We knew that he was the Browns team doctor, and I mean, he did Nick Chubb's surgery, he has such a good track record, he's the knee specialist,” Luke said.
While Dr. Voos did the surgery, it's the physical therapists who are truly getting Luke back in his game. He drives nearly two hours two to three times a week for therapy specific to his sport.
“I’m close to 100% back. I don't need it as much, but in the early stage it kind of blew my mind because this is the technology that they have, that I’m coming here for, this is the stuff that they have that no other place really does,” Luke said.
“All of our physical therapists have gone out to get the latest certifications and credentials to be able to offer all of the different modalities. When you start rehearsing your sport again, having a physical therapist and an athletic trainer and a performance coach who know how to help you participate in that sport safely, I think is very important,” Dr. Voos said.
Luke is off to Wake Forest University, where his UH physical therapists have already shared his training plan with the baseball team trainers to help keep him in shape and his knee strong.
His goal is to get out on the field and be ready for the MLB draft as soon as he’s eligible after his junior year.