Minot Physical Therapist Returns to CrossFit After Her Own ACL Tear

• Dr. Kayla Lambrecht, a physical therapist and coach at Souris Valley CrossFit in Minot, North Dakota, tore her ACL and meniscus playing recreational basketball, then had to answer for herself the questions she asks patients every day.
• Her clinic and her CrossFit box share one address, so she rehabbed at the same gym where she coaches, working through the same phases she prescribes for other athletes.
• Full return to competitive sport after an ACL tear typically takes eight to twelve months, and doctors now clear athletes by performance testing rather than the calendar alone.

The physical therapist who became her own hardest patient

“How bad is it? How long will I be out? Will I be the same again?” Those are the questions Dr. Kayla Lambrecht has heard from dozens of patients over her career as a physical therapist in Minot, North Dakota. She had never had to ask them about her own body until she planted awkwardly in a recreational basketball game and felt her knee give out.

The diagnosis was a torn ACL and meniscus, the kind of injury that ends seasons for professional athletes and reroutes ordinary lives for a full year. Lambrecht is both: a full-time doctor of physical therapy, a mother, and a CrossFit athlete who had been training four to five times a week at Souris Valley CrossFit, the Minot gym where she also works as a coach.

Eight months, four phases, one gym

Lambrecht’s clinic operates out of the same building as her CrossFit box, at 2915 10th St SW in Minot, a setup that let her walk the same floor as both patient and provider. She followed the standard recovery arc she prescribes to other athletes: six weeks of protecting the joint and restoring a normal walking pattern, then roughly two to four months of strength work targeted at the muscles around the knee and drills meant to retrain balance and control. Somewhere around the five month mark, light jogging and simple direction changes entered the plan, though she noted that many patients, herself included, still unconsciously favor the healthy leg on every landing at this stage.

The final stretch, from roughly eight months to a year out, adds sport-specific work: cutting, jumping, and the kind of contact and chaos an actual workout throws at a body. National data on ACL recovery puts the typical return-to-competition window at eight to twelve months, and clearance increasingly rests on passing a set of roughly a dozen strength and movement tests rather than simply waiting out a date on a calendar.

“Why me? Why now?”

Lambrecht has written about the moment the injury forced past the clinical script she uses with patients. “Why me? Why now?” she asked herself, by her own account the biggest question of the entire process. She has treated the emotional side of ACL recovery for years, telling patients that fear of re-injury often lingers longer than any physical limitation. Living through it herself, she found the fear just as real as anything a patient had ever described to her, and just as hard to talk yourself out of on a bad day.

Her conclusion, shared with the athletes she now coaches at Souris Valley CrossFit: “Recovery isn’t just about returning to sport. It’s about returning better.” That belief shows up in how she now programs return-to-CrossFit work for the gym’s other members recovering from knee surgery. She treats the twelve months after an ACL tear as a chance to fix movement patterns that were already flawed before the injury happened, not just a countdown back to where an athlete started.

A small gym built around a former police officer’s idea of community

Souris Valley CrossFit opened in 2023, founded by Bryce Broome, a former Minot police officer who left law enforcement to open a gym after watching CrossFit change his own life. Broome built the roughly 2,000 square foot space around what he calls a “zero intimidation environment,” pairing Rogue equipment and rowers with a coaching staff that includes a nutrition coach and, in Lambrecht, a physical therapist who treats injuries in-house with dry needling and cupping alongside standard rehab work.

That combination, a CrossFit box with a licensed physical therapist on staff, is still uncommon outside larger cities. It counts most for members past their twenties who show up worried a single bad rep will end their training for good. Lambrecht’s own recovery gave her a harder answer to give those members than any textbook could: full return to CrossFit after an ACL tear is common, it takes the better part of a year, and the road back runs through the same gym floor where the injury or the fear of one first showed up.

What a small North Dakota gym says about the sport’s growth

Minot sits far from the coastal cities that usually drive CrossFit and hybrid fitness coverage, a city of roughly 48,000 people anchored by an Air Force base and a state university. Souris Valley CrossFit’s roster reaches teenagers through a strength program built for younger athletes and adults training around full-time jobs, a pattern showing up at small CrossFit affiliates nationwide as owners look past pure competition training toward rehab, youth development, and long-term member retention.

The gym’s coaching roster runs six deep for a facility its size, including Emily Weeks and Ethan Rieder on the main training floor, Crystal Tulip handling client success, and Dr. Krista Kelly running nutrition coaching alongside Lambrecht’s physical therapy work. Broome designed that staffing on purpose, betting that a small city gym could compete with big-market boxes by wrapping more services around each member rather than chasing membership volume alone. An athlete who tears an ACL at Souris Valley CrossFit never has to leave the building to find a coach, a physical therapist, and a training partner who has been through the same surgery.

For Lambrecht, the injury reshaped how she coaches as much as how she trains. She still leads sessions at Souris Valley CrossFit, still treats patients walking through the same door, and still tells anyone nervous about a comeback the same thing she had to learn to believe about her own knee: the questions never fully go away, but the answers get better with every month of honest work.