UTC third-year Doctor of Physical Therapy students Jaimin Rasmussen, Rebecca Sullivan, Candace Ricketts and Lauren Clark took home top honors in the 2025 American Physical Therapy Association Knowledge Bowl..
photo by Dr. Nancy Fell
A team of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Doctor of Physical Therapy students made an impressive debut at the American Physical Therapy Association’s annual Knowledge Bowl, competing for the first time on the national stage.
It turned out they weren’t just there to compete.
Third-year DPT students Lauren Clark, Jaimin Rasmussen, Candace Ricketts and Rebecca Sullivan—all set to graduate in May—defeated student teams from some of the nation’s top-ranked DPT programs in winning the APTA Combined Sections Meeting Knowledge Bowl in Houston.
The Knowledge Bowl is a Jeopardy-style competition designed to test DPT students’ knowledge of various topics related to physical therapy—including clinical practice, biomechanics, pathology, patient care and professional standards.
Physical therapy programs across the country were invited to compete in a fast-paced and highly competitive environment to showcase their expertise and problem-solving skills.
With April’s National Physical Therapy Exam fast approaching, soon-to-be DPT graduates have been hard at work preparing for the boards. Participating in the Knowledge Bowl is a precursor, but—unlike the NPTE—this high-stakes challenge came with a live audience.
“It was really cool to have a lot of audience members and other students from UTC that ended up coming. We could hear them cheering after each round,” said Mr. Rasmussen, who is doing his clinical education at the Blount Memorial Health Center at Cherokee in his hometown of Maryville, Tn. “We ended up becoming the people to watch out for halfway through.”
The UTC team defeated student groups from the University of Delaware (ranked No. 2 nationally among DPT programs) and Duke University (No. 6)—along with teams from the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the University of Texas at El Paso, Shenandoah University (Virginia), Marymount University (Virginia), Regis University (Colorado), and a combined group from the University of California, San Francisco and San Francisco State University.
Ms. Ricketts compared the Knowledge Bowl to “a competition day for a sporting event or dance performance.”
“It’s like exam day—you know that the answer is coming and you’ve studied for it—but you have that rush of anxiety wondering, ‘Am I remembering this correctly?’ The adrenaline is definitely building as you’re going along,” said Ms. Ricketts, a native of Chattanooga who received a bachelor’s degree in health and human performance from UTC in 2022.