Dr. Cappellino: Former player now doctor
Dr. Anthony Cappellino poses for a portrait at Sayville High School. (Dec. 13, 2011) Credit: Barry Sloan
The man on the sidelines admits he was a little too vocal during a football game at Sayville one fall Saturday afternoon in 2010.
"It was a terrible call and I'm yelling at the refs. The ref said, 'Who are you?' I said, 'I'm the doctor.' He said, 'You say one more word and you're out of here!' "
No one can accuse Dr. Anthony Cappellino of not being passionate about his work. "I drive my wife crazy. I'm on the field Friday nights and Saturdays because I enjoy what I'm doing so much," Cappellino said. "Even though I'm the doctor, I get into it. I love watching the action."
Cappellino, 46, has seen all kinds of action on Long Island high school football fields in a career that has come full circle. The 46-year-old recently became a true triple threat. He was the team physician for Sayville, which won the 2011 Rutgers Trophy as Suffolk's most outstanding team. Twenty-eight years earlier, he was a two-way star for New Hyde Park, which won the 1983 Rutgers Cup as Nassau's best team. That year, Cappellino, a fullback / linebacker, also won the Thorp Award as the county's top player.
The only other person to achieve a similar Long Island football trifecta is Sal Ciampi, who won the 1961 Thorp Award for Rutgers Cup winner Lawrence and later coached East Islip to four Rutgers Trophies.
"The fact that he knows how an athlete feels, for me it's huge," Sayville coach Rob Hoss said of Cappellino. "He's not only a doctor, he's a sports doctor who's walked in those shoes before."
Limped in those shoes would be more accurate. Cappellino missed action a couple of times with various injuries in high school and hurt his knee while at Yale, where he played linebacker for four years. It was during college that his career began to take shape.
"I originally wanted to be a pediatrician," Cappellino said. "But when I got hurt at Yale, I had a good experience with the medical staff. I met a great orthopedist [Dr. Norman Kaplan]. He evaluated me and then I would see him on the sidelines. He knew I was interested in medicine and there was a relationship there. I saw what he did. He opened my eyes to the field."
Cappellino, a Sayville resident who also is the team doctor for Sachem North, West Babylon and St. John the Baptist, went to med school at Stony Brook. He did his orthopedic training at Yale and a year of sports medicine study at the renowned Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic in California. "I worked with the Dodgers and Lakers, and that was a great experience," Cappellino said.
For the past 12 years, he has been involved with high school sports on Long Island, checking out the preseason football schedules of the schools he covers to try to attend as many games as he can.
"Years ago, the term sports medicine didn't even exist. There weren't any team doctors or trainers," he recalled. "The coach took care of you. If you got hurt, you couldn't play. Nowadays, I've had kids tear their ACL and six months later you can get them back on the field. Back then, tear your ACL and you were finished."
Cappellino's medical expertise, along with his athletic background, has earned him the trust of coaches. "He knows that as an athlete, you play through pain at times. But he would never put a kid on the field who's injured," Hoss said. "Any time he says a kid can't go, I know the kid is injured."
While Cappellino acknowledged that the coaches he deals with "know I am a 'doctor-slash-athlete,' " most of the players do not know his background. "He doesn't go around saying, 'I won the Thorp Award. I started at linebacker at Yale. I'm a great doctor.' He has tremendous humility," Hoss said. "A guy that's done all that has a lot to be proud of, but you wouldn't know it. Humble is a great adjective to describe Dr. Cap."
There might be some referees who would use a different word.
