How Ortho Athlete was born

Dr. Erik Hemmett grew up on what used to be the “Old Town Poor Farm” in a small farming community in Northeast Vermont. Without understanding it at the time, he learned the values of hard work, accountability, integrity, grind, grown through challenge, and self-reliance at an early age. His family worked a large garden, raised pigs, chickens, ducks, cows, and horses. He learned to earn money by
picking blackberries and selling them to the tourists at the end of their driveway. He helped in the dairy barn in the winter, hayed in the summer, and cut and stacked firewood in the fall. In the winter when the spring fed water to the house froze, he would help his father to bucket water from the local school and melt snow on a fireplace with his mother. There were many challenges that all had to be dealt with head on and none could go unresolved. The key to survival was turning challenges into learning and growth opportunities.

Dr. Erik’s father developed leukemia at the age of 34 and lived for 10 years before passing in 1994. Dr. Erik saw his father decline from a strong independent alpha male athlete mentally and physically into a dependent shell of himself. Dr. Erik earned the Vermont Scholar Award and attended the University of