This trailblazing Atlanta doctor broke barriers in sports medicine

When Dr. Letha Griffin first came to Atlanta in 1981, she said she found only a couple other women on the medical staff at Piedmont Hospital.

She made history that year as the first active female member of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, and in 2025 she was inducted into the organization’s Hall of Fame.

Griffin was a team physician for Georgia State University for more than 35 years, with the Hall of Fame announcement noting her “trailblazing career has inspired generations of women in orthopaedics.”

Over her decades-long career at Peachtree Orthopedics, Griffin worked with collegiate and professional athletes, published research that advanced care for ACL injuries and raised her hand often to be of service, from helping plan medical coverage for the 1996 Olympic Games to mentoring the next generation of sports medicine professionals. She retired in 2023.

“Always make sure you turn around and help the next one in line and you’ll find that you learn a lot from doing that. Everybody can teach you something,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an interview.

Griffin shared with the AJC what drew her to orthopedics, what it was like to work at the Olympics and how she became a pioneering woman in her field.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How did you know you’d found the right career path?

A: I was going to be a chemistry major and then I looked at (physical chemistry) and I said, ‘Oh gee, this is a lot of math.’ Some people know exactly what they want to be but I did not.

I came from a small steel mill town and I just sort of found my way. I loved immunology and I worked for a year and realized that if I wanted to get the grants I wanted, then I needed to get an M.D. I was lucky enough that about that time Ohio State was starting a three-year program. I had a relative die and leave me some money and I got accepted into the program I wanted at Ohio State, which financially was the best fit for me. So it just all came together.

Then once I got into medicine, I thought, ‘Orthopedics is great. The people love what they’re doing.’ When you think about it, orthopedics is one of the fields in medicine where you can make people absolutely better. If you have a fracture, you fix it and the kid goes on and does whatever he wants to do as if there was nothing wrong with him ever when he was little. I think it’s a very self-gratifying field and that is appealing.

Q: What was your experience working with athletes in the 1980s?

A: When I first started at Georgia State, we had basketball and they were escalating sports very rapidly down there because the president thought that was an important thing to have as a part of college education.

Georgia State started out mainly as a night school — people working during the day and going to school at night — and then that all changed somewhere in the late 70s, early 80s to become a full-time university with students that have a life on campus, and they made campus activity centers and we had a lot of intramural sports.

When I first interacted with the players, I wondered what they’re going to think about a girl. Now you accept that all over, but in the 1970s, women were just starting to get into sports as athletes.

They were developing the athletic programs after the ruling in 1972 to have equal sports in colleges and universities. There weren’t many women involved in any of those (sports) roles. So you wondered, what are these guys going to think? You found that if you treated them with respect, you knew what you were doing, you got them better — that’s all they’re asking.

A lot of times, I think it’s easier for those guys — or it was in that day — to speak to a girl and tell them where they’re hurting. They didn’t have to be a macho person. I was like their mother. You could say “I do hurt,” you don’t have to put on a big facade and be the hero man who can take whatever. So it worked out well and I never had any problems with recognition of the players because of that.

Q: What was it like working on the 1996 Olympic Games?

A: Dr. (John) Cantwell, who was a cardiologist and an excellent man, was in charge of the whole medical team. Instead of being overwhelmed with how to handle all the medical issues that might come up, he nicely divided it into: How do you deal with athletes and their people from outside the United States who come with them? How do you deal with the people working the Olympics? And how do you deal with the visitors? And every venue we had, we had to look at those three sections — a tremendous learning opportunity for those of us involved, but it was a privilege to be there.

The bomb that went off sort of blew a hole in everything. We responded to the event at the Olympic Park as we should and nobody panicked and everybody took care of any injured. Security became much tighter all the way around, unfortunately, afterwards.

But it was indeed a thrill. It was impressive to see the quality of the athletes and intermingle with them and see what they thought was important and what are we doing right and what are we doing wrong. So advice to younger people is: Always take advantage (of opportunities), learn from those who are teaching you so that you’ll have that knowledge and can impart it to others.

Q: How have you seen things change for women in your field?