ELLENSBURG, Wash. - Central Washington University Athletics has announced its 2026 Hall of Fame Class to be inducted on May 2 inside Nicholson Arena. To purchase tickets, click HERE
 
Among those being inducted are longtime CWU Team Orthopedic Surgeon Dr. Richard Roux.
 
For nearly three decades, Dr. Richard Roux served as the CWU Team Orthopedic Surgeon volunteering countless hours annually to provide care and guidance for student-athletes and athletic trainers, making him an invaluable part of the Wildcat athletic department. Specializing in sports medicine with particular emphasis on knee and shoulder procedures, Roux treated hundreds of CWU student-athletes, coaches, and administrators throughout his career.  Known for his expertise in minimally invasive knee replacement surgery, Roux averaged over 100 knee replacements per year while practicing with Orthopedics Northwest, a part of Multicare, where he served from 1990 until retiring in 2022.
 
Roux's distinguished academic and medical background includes bachelor's and master's degrees from Stanford University, followed by medical school at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. He completed his internship at the UC San Diego Medical Center and his orthopedic residency within the Harvard Combined Orthopedic Residency Program. Roux continued his training with a fellowship in orthopedic sports medicine at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. His decades of service, expertise, commitment, and his impact on the health and careers of countless Wildcats is immeasurable.
 
Below is a Q&A with Dr. Roux about his time, thoughts, and memories with CWU and the Ellensburg community:
 
Q: What does being inducted into the Central Washington University Athletic Hall of Fame mean to you?
 
Dr. Roux: Well, it really means a great deal to me. Sports medicine has been a huge part of my professional career and Central has been a real highlight of that. I've really enjoyed all of the professional relationships I've had with athletic directors, trainers, and over the years university presidents, but especially with the student athletes, they're the reason we do sports medicine. I really enjoy working with them and trying to get them healthy or to get them back to good health.
 
Q: You were with Orthopedics Northwest – now Multicare – for over 30 years, walk me through how you ended up in Yakima following your studies.
 
Dr. Roux: So, going to my studies as an undergraduate, I graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Biology. I then got my master's degree, also from Stanford, in Biology. I then went to medical school at UCSD (University of California, San Diego), and when I was at UCSD I got interested in research and I did quite a bit of research, especially in how musculoskeletal tissues heal and their mechanical properties. So, that got me interested in sports medicine. I then went to Harvard for my residency in orthopedic surgery and after that I stayed at Harvard for two years doing a fellowship in orthopedics medicine. After that I came to Yakima to practice at Orthopedics Northwest, which was then Yakima Orthopedic and Fracture Clinic, names have changed over the years.
 
One thing to understand is that a lot of orthopedic jobs go off of referrals and people that you know over time. When I was at Harvard, a lot of faculty there were from Duke University and vice versa. One of my favorite professors had gone to Duke and he was good friends with Dr. Todd Orvald who was at Orthopedics Northwest and Dr. Orvald actually came out to Boston and recruited me. He was saying how they really needed a fellowship trained sports medicine physician for central Washington. So, I guess the short answer is that Dr. Orvald recruited me and so my wife and I came here and we both liked it. She's a physician too, Dr. Michele Murray, she's a radiologist and at the time they needed a radiologist, and they needed a sports medicine doctor, and we really liked it here. So, we came and it was a good choice.
 
Q: How did you become involved in helping out specifically with CWU student-athletes?
 
Dr. Roux: So, when I came, I was really the first trained sports orthopedic medicine doctor in central Washington. That did a lot to build my practice and then students and especially student athletes from Central started to come to me even before I was the physician there. At the time Gary Smith was the Head Athletic Trainer and Dr. Gary Frederick was the Athletic Director. So, first Gary, then later Dr. Frederick, said "hey we'd really like for you to come up," and so it really started with me covering some football events and then it led to being the team physician across the entire department at CWU. So, that's really how I came up there and I'm very happy for that because I loved my time at CWU.
 
Q: Your career focused heavily on minimally invasive knee procedures. How did that expertise shape the way you approached caring for collegiate athletes?
 
Dr. Roux: First of all, I really believe in minimally invasive techniques. A lot of what we do is tremendously invasive, even when we use minimally invasive techniques. Often times, especially in sports medicine, we're rebuilding ligaments or constructing ligaments or repairing menisci and sometimes you have pretty devastating injuries where we might be putting together every ligament in a knee, menisci, among other things. So, you want to do as little harm with your approach as you can and preserve as much normal function as you can. Part of the reason I got involved in sports medicine is I really enjoy doing those types of surgeries, it's a challenge that I've accepted and worked hard to get good at. So, that led me to do it. I've been around athletics my whole life, I come from a family of athletes, my two daughters are athletic, I've been an athlete, a parent, a coach, a team physician at both the collegiate and the professional level, and an orthopedic surgeon, so I'm just attracted to that type of medicine and that type of care. I believe in both preventative medicine and then curative medicine for treating people in all of those aspects which has been attractive to me and is why I got interested in sports medicine.
 
Q: From your perspective, how important is the relationship between physicians, athletic trainers, and coaches in keeping student-athletes healthy and able to compete?
 
Dr. Roux: It's everything. It's really another reason that I was so happily able to do 30 plus years at Central. Everything is collaborative when working with the athletes. The athletic directors, we always had their support, working with the trainers, they're the ones doing the most work and the hardest work every single day and that collaboration is really really valuable to me. Then, at Central, we've been blessed with really good coaches, especially to me from the medical standpoint because they were always looking out for their student athletes and I was never pressured to get somebody back too soon or anything like that. I was always supported across the board by the coaches, especially the athletic trainers and the athletic directors to do the right thing for that student athlete's health. That's a tremendous environment and it doesn't exist everywhere, but it certainly does at Central. Their professionalism, their leadership, their caring attitude and communication and deep understanding of athletic care allowed them to help me take care of the patients, the student athletes, also, to get involved with preventative measures.
 
I give all the credit in the world to the athletic trainers. The coaches they're out there to develop players and win games, but to me their number one motivation was taking care of and developing their student athletes to help them better take on the challenges of life and I love that. The athletic directors like Dr. Dennis Francois, just purely are supportive of the athletes we take care of. During my time at Central I served under several athletic directors, all of whom were wonderful student athlete advocates, but with Dennis he was an unwavering advocate for athlete health and safety, a wonderful collaborator, and a trusted partner in navigating the evolving challenges in collegiate sports medicine. It's a changing world, rapidly changing world out there, and I particularly value and respect his ability to deal with that always while keeping the student athletes health as a main objective. With coaches, I can honestly say that in 30 years I only had one small disagreement with a coach about the best way to go with a student athlete. That's amazing when you think of the pressures they deal with. The team physician is a part of it, not even the biggest part, I give a lot of credit to the athletic trainers who are there every single day taking care of these patients. With young people, sometimes it's easier to communicate with them, sometimes its not, but it is just so nice to have that support at that level with communication.
 
One of the nice things about the athletes at Central is that they're just so motivated to get better. They're so young and healthy that working with them is a joy. Honestly, it makes somebody like me look good because they have so much potential. They're so easy to work with both because they're so healthy, but even more so because they are so motivated to stay healthy if they're injured.
 
Q: How have you been enjoying retirement?
 
Dr. Roux: It's funny how often you get asked that question. Overall, I enjoy it a lot because I have more time for family, more than when I had when I was working. That's probably the number one thing. I do miss my patients, I'm a surgeon, I miss doing surgery and I miss my colleagues, but I still stay involved with the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and the American Board of Orthopedic Surgery and do a little bit of consulting. I'm lucky I am sometimes able to have a coffee with Ken Kladnik, one of the athletic trainers at Central, and also the chairman of the hall of fame committee (and hall of fame inductee), and I still communicate with all of the trainers I worked with up there. So, yeah, I miss it, but sometimes there's a time for the next step in life.
 
Q: During your time as CWU's team orthopedic surgeon, you worked with hundreds of student athletes, coaches, and administrators. Are there any moments or stories that stand out as especially meaningful to you?
 
Dr. Roux: One thing that I always did when I was at Central is I firmly, firmly believe in the privacy of medical information, so that makes it a little bit difficult for me to answer that question, but with no names or anything, I can remember a few cases. I remember one football player who was a linebacker who had a gruesome injury where he injured all of the ligaments, acl, mcl, pcl, and the lcl and both menisci. So, it was one of the worst knee injuries I've ever seen, and that's saying something because I went through several hundred knee procedures a year. So, he elected to undergo the reconstruction, and we really had to, to put his knee back together. So, we basically reconstructed or repaired every ligament in his knee and both of his menisci. I warned him it was quite a severe injury, and he might never be able to come back from it. He worked so hard in rehab, and he brought that knee back all the way back and he came back and played the following season where he actually made all conference. Just the work he put in, where even I didn't think he'd be able to come back, but not only did he come back, he came back at a high level. Now, I'm not going to say what industry he works in, but he works in an industry that's a physically demanding job that I think is just amazing and a credit to his hard work. So that's one story, and I have a million of those about the resilience and hard work of these student athletes to be willing to come back. Another one is just kind of a thankful note to CWU. When I first started covering in early 1990, we didn't always have an ambulance on hand, especially for football games, and to tell you the truth you don't always need them. Shortly after they did get them at games, it was infrequent that we needed to send somebody to the hospital but there were times that we did. I'm very very thankful for that and I still remember walking out there and seeing the ambulance out there for the first time and thinking "that's such a good thing and I'm glad that we have it."
 
I was lucky enough to work with four trainers: Ken Kladnik, Isaac Perry, Kari Johnson, and Gary Smith and all of them were just so great. They had that professionalism, leadership, caring attitude, and deep understanding of athletic care. It really made my job easier, and I'm thankful for that. Dr. Francois really supported me in that mission of taking care of athletes, both on a preventative basis and on a treatment basis and I'm really thankful for that.