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Coffee County Central High School graduate and Dr. Lydia White is headed to the Summer Olympic Games as a volunteer on the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee for the Summer Olympic games in Paris.

An orthopedic sports medicine surgeon with the Tennessee Orthopedic Alliance, White attended Coffee County Schools from kindergarten through graduation. These days her practice is in Murfreesboro.

White’s Olympic journey begins during the winter of 2022, when she began looking for a way to give back through participating in a medical mission trip.

“I have wonderful patients and they have made my career so successful and so rewarding that I was really looking for a way to give back to the world,” she said.

White would come to find out that those mission trips required more time than she was able to commit, so she continued to search for the right opportunity.

“The Olympics happened to be going on and one of the volunteer opportunities I came across was to be a team physician for Team USA,” White said.

The next step was to send in her application, which White described as rigorous.

“It needed all my training, recommendation letters, they were going to look through my reviews online, they were going to look through my training and it had to be a very detailed application,” she said. “A couple of months later I got a letter in the mail saying congratulations we selected you to be a part of Team USA, which was super exciting.”

White next participated in an Olympic training camp as well as the Paralympic Games in November 2023.

In July, she will be headed to Paris to serve as an orthopedic surgeon for Team USA.

“I and most of the team will get there about a week before the opening ceremonies to train and to acclimate to the time difference and we will be based out of the High Performance Athlete Center,” White said. “Multiple teams will be training in this one venue all at once and I will be there and just kind of have a spot in the building.”

When it comes to what injuries she anticipates possibly having to treat, White said they can really run the gamut.

“It is going to be things like finger dislocations, shoulder dislocations, lacerations, especially in the combat sports like boxing, will have lacerations that need to be sutured,” she said. “We will have to treat other things like concussions and heat exhaustion, so it won’t just be sort of orthopedic musculoskeletal things.”

White said she does not anticipate a significant difference in how she would treat an injury during the Olympics to the way she would at her practice back home in Murfreesboro.

 “I get to do a lot of sideline medicine in my job now,” she said. “I went a lot of local high school football games and college football games where I am on the sidelines. It is not going to be that much different working in Coffee County or Rutherford County than it will be going to the Olympics. Injuries are still the injuries.”