Jun 4, 2021 5 min read

Cliff Wonsettler went to college with a plan.

After a successful career at Bentworth High School, he was going to wrestle at Penn State Uni-versity, for four years and, if all went well, achieve All-American status.

As plans will be, however, plans will go awry.

Wonsettler went 14-9 in his freshman season, but after just four matches in year two, his career came to an end due to neck surgery.

Wonsettler was still a part of the team for the remainder of his time in State College — support-ing his teammates and working out with the strength coach during practice, but the thrill of com-peting at a high level was gone.

“For the longest time, I had my identity wrapped up in thinking and knowing I was an athlete,” Wonsettler said. “So when that changed, and I no longer had structured practices to attend, and I wasn’t focused on competition and how to improve, I had to reorient my own value system around who I was and what was important to me. That was not easy.”

No, it wasn’t. Having a dream taken away in any field always comes with heartache and Wonset-tler’s misfortune forced him to do a lot of searching.

Fortunately, that search led him to find a new passion that, today, he uses to help others that are going through what Wonsettler had to face nearly 20 years ago.

Wonsettler came to Penn State University already familiar with the health science field. One day, a biology professor suggested he look into physical therapy.

“As I learned more about it, I knew it was in line with what I wanted to do, which was to be able to help people, in some way, overcome some issue that they’d had, just like I’d had,” he said. “I had some issue that prevented me from wrestling again, and I wanted to help people avoid that pain of not ever being able to do the thing that you love again.”

Wonsettler became a physical therapist more than a decade ago, traveling across the country. The Wonsettler family has been in Washington County for more than 200 years, but it was a different Washington — Seattle — where Cliff Wonsettler settled upon.

But he didn’t want to stay in the Great Northwest forever, so he came back to the Washington he knows best.

“I knew I wanted to come back to Pennsylvania and do exactly what we’re doing here now,” Wonsettler said.

What Wonsettler does now, and has been doing since February 2019, is run a business that bears his name — Wonsettler Physical Therapy & Specialized Health — conveniently overlooking Wonsettler Farm, located on 100 Wonsettler Rd. Scenery Hill, Pa. (located off Route 40.)

Here, he gets to work with patients who have had their lives affected by injuries and can add from his own experience if the injury is a neck or back problem.

“Countless, really,” Wonsettler said. “I’ve had neck surgery, and about 10 years ago I had lower back surgery. Both of those experiences really helped me develop a deeper understanding of what people’s issues are and what they’re dealing with so that I can know more clearly what they need to do.”

Wonsettler’s main goal is to help make a change in physical therapy around Southwestern Penn-sylvania, and that change is that he wants a greater emphasis on physical therapists spending one-on-one time with their patients, thus giving them the help they need.

For Wonsettler, he saw too many cases of patients waiting 40 minutes for an appointment, and then only getting five minutes to work with a doctor, is something that needs fixing.

“It’s not like that doctor doesn’t care about you,” he said. “They definitely care, but they’re kind of just operating in a system that is not necessarily the most advantageous for the patient in terms of how much time you have access to somebody that really knows what they’re doing.”

To do this, Wonsettler Physical Therapy & Specialized Health dedicates an undivided hour with a physical therapy doctor for every single patient during every single visit.

“That’s afforded us the time to help uncover people’s problems, understand what the root causes of those issues are, and really be thoughtful and intentional about how we individually craft a plan that addresses their needs and addresses their goals,” Wonsettler said.

The one-on-one mindset also paid dividends for Wonsettler Physical Therapy & Specialized Health when COVID-19 took over the world last March.

“We only treat our patients one-on-one,” Wonsettler said. “It’s not like we’re bouncing around between several different clients at one time. So, from a social distancing perspective, it’s always been there. We haven’t had to change anything in terms of how we do that.”

Overall, Wonsettler feels his life might have gone in a different direction had he never gotten hurt and wrestled all four years.

“My injury certainly shaped how I view the world, what I thought about a career,” said Wonset-tler.”I had to make sense of what it was like to no longer really be an athlete. That caused me to reflect a lot, and to think through my circumstance. Those injuries certainly played a role in me deciding that I wanted to help somebody overcome physical issues. I certainly could have been in a different position right now if I hadn’t dealt with those injuries myself.”