Aug. 22, 2024 ​​— For Garrison Rolle, M.D. ’90, the gridiron and the operating room have much in common. From persistence to teamwork, the lessons learned on both fields push you to be at the top of your game.

“In the operating room, it’s the drive to be perfect every time, knowing the pursuit of that perfection is what’s going to make you good enough to heal people,” he said. “Sometimes you’re trying to fix somebody’s femur, and it’s fractured into a whole bunch of little pieces. You just keep putting them together — pin that one, screw in that one, that one cracks and you put a wire around it — you don’t give up. It’s the same thing they would preach in football. Even when you fumble the ball and you’re down by two, you scoop, score, and lay in the end zone, winning the game with four seconds left. You keep fighting.”

That pursuit of perfection propelled Rolle from a Miami teenager with a passion for science and sports to an undergraduate student walking onto the Florida Gators football team to a University of Florida medical student with a dream to help others. Now, as a sports medicine surgeon with Tallahassee Orthopedic Clinic, he pieces together all the lessons learned in his life to help the next generation of athletes.

The child of a dentist and a laboratory researcher, Rolle was taught from a young age the importance of balancing education and athletics. His interest in science was sparked when he went to work one day with his mom at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Bethesda, Maryland, and got a glimpse into the physiology of animals. Upon shadowing his dad at the dental clinic, he knew that was not his calling but turned his attention to medicine.

After attending West Point for a semester, where he was on the football roster, Rolle transferred to UF as a pre-med student in 1981, and his brother and sister convinced him to make a pass at playing for the Florida Gators. He walked on as a wide receiver, a position he held until 1984. During his tenure, he was named a Rhodes Scholar Candidate and an Academic All-American and earned the Scholar Athlete of the Year award.

Among his highlights with the team, he helped the Gators to a 26-7-2 record and a 14-6 win over Iowa in the 1983 Gator Bowl and became the second Gator to win the Scholar-Athlete Award presented annually by the National Football Foundation.

While at UF as an undergraduate student, he met a mentor who would change the course of his career. Peter Indelicato, M.D., an orthopaedic surgeon who served as the head team physician for the UF Athletic Association from 1977 to 2011, heard Rolle was a pre-med student and, upon learning about his academic success, offered to have him come and watch surgeries.

“He took me under his wing, and that was it,” Rolle said. “He let me see what he did and gave me a feeling like, this ain’t rocket science — you can learn this if you put the work in. That was when I knew I was going to be a doctor and, more than likely, an orthopaedic surgeon.”

After getting accepted to medical school at UF and being picked by the Denver Broncos in the 1985 NFL draft, Rolle was on the team off and on before deciding to leave professional football behind for good to fully pursue medicine. At the College of Medicine, he found support and mentorship from faculty including the late Hugh M. “Smiley” Hill, M.D., the longtime associate dean for student and alumni affairs; Nick Cassisi, M.D., D.D.S., the former chief and later chair of otolaryngology; and Peter Gearen, M.D., then an associate professor of orthopaedic surgery.

Upon completing an orthopaedic surgery residency at the Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation in New Orleans in 1995, a full-circle moment came when Rolle returned to the UF College of Medicine for a sports medicine fellowship under Indelicato.

Now, at the Tallahassee Orthopedic Clinic, his work home for the last 27 years, Rolle splits his time between surgery days and clinic days. Though he mostly works with high school or college athletes, Rolle also treats middle-age or older adults who are avid rock climbers, pickleball players, soccer players, and more.

“You take somebody who doesn’t know if they are ever going to walk again, or they’re not confident in their ability to get back to their previous level of function, and you straighten their leg out or you fix their wrist or reconstruct their ligaments — the next thing you know, they’re throwing touchdowns or kicking a soccer ball,” Rolle said.

In addition to his work in the clinic and operating room, Rolle has spent nearly three decades as the team physician for Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, or FAMU, with this fall marking his 28th season working with the football team.

When he’s not caring for patients and athletes, Rolle stays active — recently swapping running for walking and biking — and works to perfect his golf game with the same dedication that drove his athletic and career successes. He also enjoys spending time with his wife and fellow UF graduate, Katrina Rolle, J.D., and their four children, one of whom is a UF graduate and one of whom is hoping to also pursue a life in medicine as a physician assistant.

Despite living in Seminole territory, Rolle and his family maintain their Gator roots by supporting their alma mater in various ways. He previously served on the board of directors for the UF Foundation and his wife is a past president of the UF Alumni Association. The couple also made a generous donation to name a study room in the athletic complex.

As for football, Rolle can’t shed the orange and blue, no matter what colors he wears on the sidelines every fall or who his home team is. He watches the Gators play on his iPad when traveling with FAMU and still holds season tickets, making it back to The Swamp for a game at least once every couple of years.

“I like FSU and I like for them to win, until they’re playing the Gators,” Rolle said. “Gainesville and UF are entrenched in me. But for the University of Florida, I wouldn’t be where I am.”