Discharge is the goal, not the customer-retention problem.
Most clinics are paid to keep you coming. We are paid to make you not need us — so every plan of care has a finish line written on it at visit one, every session is a full hour with one therapist, and we hand you back to your sport, your job, or your kid with a printed plan for keeping it.
- 5
- 60
- 8.4
- 2013
Six commitments, all of them expensive.
These are not values-statement adjectives. Each one is a decision with a cost attached, which is why so few outpatient clinics still make them.
One therapist, one hour, every visit
You see the same licensed physical therapist for the full hour, every single appointment. No handoff to an aide after fifteen minutes, no three patients running in parallel. It costs us more per hour and it is the reason people finish in eight visits instead of twenty-four.
We measure, and we show you the numbers
Force-plate asymmetry, hop tests, dynamometry, gait video at 240 frames a second. You get the readouts in your portal at intake, at the midpoint, and at discharge. If the numbers are not moving, the plan changes — that is a conversation we would rather have in week three than in month four.
Load is the medicine
Tissue adapts to what you ask of it. Rest is a phase, not a treatment. Our clinics are built around racks, sleds, and plyo boxes rather than around treatment tables, because the last three weeks of rehab should look uncomfortably like the thing you are going back to.
A finish line, written down at visit one
Every plan of care states the criteria you have to hit to be done — a number, not a feeling. You get it in writing at your evaluation. When you hit it we discharge you, even if there is authorisation left on the referral.
We talk to the rest of your team
Your surgeon, your coach, your athletic trainer, your primary care doctor. With your permission we send a one-page update at evaluation, midpoint, and discharge. Rehab that contradicts the surgical protocol is worse than no rehab at all.
Direct access, because the wait is the injury
Colorado lets you see a physical therapist without a physician referral. Most insurers cover it. We hold same-week evaluation slots at every clinic for exactly this reason — an ankle seen at day three is a different problem from one seen at week six.
From one room above a bike shop to five clinics, slowly.
We have turned down more growth than we have taken. Every clinic on this list opened with a lead therapist who had already worked inside the group for at least three years.
2013
One room above a bike shop
Dana Whitlock left a hospital outpatient system where she was expected to see sixteen patients a day and rented 900 square feet on Pearl Street with a plinth, a squat rack, and a second-hand force plate she is still, eleven years later, unwilling to replace.
2016
The second clinic, and the rule
Opening in Denver forced the question that shapes everything since: how do you keep a second location honest? The answer was to write the standard down — one hour, one therapist, discharge criteria at visit one — and to refuse any growth that would require breaking it.
2019
Fort Collins, and paediatrics
A CU Health referral pattern in adolescent sport we could not serve properly from Boulder. Priya Raghunathan joined to build the paediatric line and has since seen roughly nine hundred kids through growth-plate injuries their coaches had told them to walk off.
2022
Therapist ownership
We turned down two private-equity offers in eighteen months, then restructured so that clinicians at three years can buy in. The clinics that get bought get quotas; we would like to still be here, unquotaed, in 2040.
2024
Longmont and Golden
Two clinics in one year, both opened with a lead therapist who had already worked inside the group for three years — which is the only way we have found to open a location without diluting it.
Eleven clinicians and the person who tells you what it costs.
Several therapists cover two clinics, which is deliberate: it is how a patient who moves between towns mid-plan keeps the person who already knows their injury.
Dana Whitlock
Founder & Clinical Director
Dana started Foothold in 900 square feet on Pearl Street after eleven years in a hospital system that wanted sixteen patients a day from her. Board-certified in sports, she still carries a caseload two and a half days a week — mostly post-op knees and the athletes other clinics have already discharged twice. She wrote the group's return-to-sport criteria and refuses to soften them.
Skis badly, on purposeNadia Haddad
Lead Therapist, Denver
Nadia runs the group's busiest post-surgical caseload and is the person our referring surgeons call when a protocol needs interpreting. She spent four years in a joint-replacement service before joining Foothold and brought the habit of writing everything down: the one-page surgeon update that every clinic now sends is hers.
Restores road bikesPriya Raghunathan
Lead Therapist, Fort Collins
Priya built the paediatric line and has seen close to nine hundred young athletes through growth-plate injuries that somebody told them to walk off. She explains the injury to the twelve-year-old rather than over their head to the parent, which sounds like a small thing and is the reason her home-programme adherence is the best in the group.
Coaches U14 hockeyMarcus Oyelaran
Lead Therapist, Longmont
Ten years as an athletic trainer before his DPT, six of them on industrial sites, which is why Marcus is the group's reference on work-injury cases. He will ask what you lift, how many times an hour, and at what height, and then build the plan around that rather than around a diagnosis code. He writes his own return-to-work letters.
Competes in strongmanJuliet Fenwick
Lead Therapist, Golden
Juliet took over Golden at opening after three years in Boulder, and she has quietly turned it into the clinic trail runners drive to. Her gait sessions run ninety minutes because she reviews twelve weeks of your training log before she looks at a single frame of video — the form problem is usually a volume problem.
Ran Leadville twiceSamuel Okonkwo
Physical Therapist
Sam handles most of Boulder's shoulders — cuff repairs, stabilisations, and the overhead athletes who arrive convinced they need surgery and frequently do not. He is deliberate to the point of being slow in the first three weeks post-op and then aggressive in a way that surprises people, which is roughly the correct order.
Bakes competitive sourdoughEloise Tran
Physical Therapist, Pelvic & Postpartum
Eloise splits her week between Fort Collins and Boulder and carries the group's postpartum return-to-running caseload. Board-certified in women's health, she is blunt about the thing nobody tells new parents: six weeks is a surgical clearance, not a training clearance, and the gap between them is about four months of actual work.
Open-water swimmerBenjamín Arriaga
Physical Therapist
Ben came up through collegiate soccer and treats a lot of it — hamstrings, groins, and the ankle sprains that everyone assumes resolve on their own. He runs the group's strength-and-performance block in Denver, and he is the therapist to ask for if you would like the rehab conducted mostly in Spanish.
Referees adult leagueHarriet Lindqvist
Physical Therapist
Harriet joined as a new graduate on the group's mentorship track and stayed to take Longmont's total-joint caseload. She is exceptionally good with nervous patients — the ones who have been told for years that their knee is bone on bone and that movement will make it worse — and spends the first visit dismantling that carefully.
Keeps three bees hivesTheo Castellanos
Physical Therapist
Theo covers the CSU and high-school athlete flow in Fort Collins: throwing elbows in spring, ankles and knees through the autumn, and a steady year-round load of adolescent overuse. Board-certified in sports and unusually willing to phone a coach directly about a training volume he does not like.
Climbs at HorsetoothRowan McElhinney
Physical Therapist
Rowan splits between Golden and Longmont and does the group's mountain-bike and trades caseload — wrists, shoulders, and lower backs belonging to people who were never going to take four weeks off and should be planned for accordingly. Trained in the UK, so expect the metric system without warning.
Rides Apex weekly
Not in a treatment room
Camille Devereux
Director of Patient Access
Camille is not a clinician; she is the reason you know what your visit costs before you arrive. She runs benefits verification and authorisations across all five clinics and personally handles the appeals when an insurer denies visits mid-plan, which happens more than anyone would like.
Plays in a brass band
Ownership
We turned down two private-equity offers in eighteen months, and then made sure we could not be tempted again.
Foothold has been therapist-owned since 2022. Clinicians at three years are eligible to buy in on terms we publish internally — real equity, no vesting cliff engineered to hold anyone in place, no options that evaporate on the way out of the door.
The reason is not sentiment. A clinic group that answers to an outside owner will, sooner or later, be asked to raise visits per day, and every commitment on this page is downstream of the answer to that question. Owning it ourselves is the cheapest way we know to keep the answer no.
Foothold Physical Therapy · NPI 1487200946 · Physical Therapist — Sports (2251S0007X) · Licensed in Colorado. 5 clinics across Colorado's Front Range.
Come and be measured.
Ninety minutes, one therapist, and a written finish line before you leave. Five clinics on the Front Range, all of them holding same-week evaluation slots.