Rowan Dillon

In the Spring of 2023, I developed knee pain in my right knee during the offseason of my junior year, just when I was making steady progress with my lower body strength for football. I ended up going to Dr. Moira McCarthy at HSS Stamford, who had me get x-rays and an MRI. Though nothing showed up on the x-rays, the MRI revealed that I had minor bone edema (thinning of the cartilage). Although it was not a major structural issue, it sidelined me from football for the next couple months.

After physical therapy and rest, I returned for my senior season but avoided heavy lower body training. During the following offseason and with the pain still significant, Dr. McCarthy gave me injections and recommended more PT. I stayed dedicated to the PT and home exercises, but the pain never truly went away. I felt a sharp pain behind my right knee whenever loading or cutting, but I couldn't seem to get rid of it no matter what I did.

Due to some non-injury-related complications, I ended up not playing football my freshman year of college. Again, I continued consistently doing PT exercises and eventually started running routes and training with a developed tolerance to the knee pain, but the pain was still strongly prevalent and hindering. In June of 2025, I met with Dr McCarthy one more time, since I finally got the opportunity to play college football. Thanks to her recommendation, I started working to Max Castrogaleas, which ended up being a life-changing experience for my athletic career.

When we initially met, he did a performance assessment, where he evaluated in many different tests my movement patterns. After providing a well detailed report of my weaknesses and incorrect tendencies, he found the exact reason for my knee pain - quad dominance in my movements such as squats, cutting, and overall movement patterns. He also offered me a solution to fix this issue by emphasizing the importance of using my posterior chain and being able to brace my core properly as well.

Max created a workout program for me to follow which was specifically focused on these to areas to prepare me to get back to playing football for the upcoming season. In our training sessions, Max also helped me work on improving my running form and showed me techniques on how to be more explosive, which was exactly what I had been needing for the longest time but never got proper direction on. Now, it is the start of my sophomore year of college, and I am fully back to playing football confidently with little to no knee pain. I can not thank Max enough as he has helped turn my career around and provided the foundation for me to move properly at the next level.