Dr Michael Donato
Episode 375
13 APR 2026
He works as a sports medicine podiatrist. At Princeton University he had played four years of varsity baseball and one year of varsity hockey. In high school he had played four years of varsity hockey, freshman baseball and three years of varsity baseball, and freshman football and three years of varsity football. He also played youth baseball and hockey as well as CYO hockey for two different parishes. While he was taking pre-med courses, he even played club rugby.
Notable guest quotes:
“We didn’t learn our prayers at school. We learned our prayers at home. And then we brought that to school.”
“And at the school I went to… Our Lady of Czestochowa was always on the wall. It was in our chapel. It was everything. And there was a great teaching of the love for the Virgin Mary that we always had. And then when I went to high school, it was with the Christian Brothers of Ireland, it made me think about what it means to be a Catholic and how to grow as a Catholic. It’s not just going to Mass and that’s it.”
“My cousin, Peter Walsh is a Holy Cross father out in Portland University… my brother was a professional hockey player, Olympics and all that, my brother Teddy.”
“In the inner city at that time … thank God we were in sports because it kept us out of a lot of the other trouble things that were going on at the time in Boston.”
“Baseball team, we had a good team, when I was a junior we went to the NCAA – we won the Ivy League, we beat Harvard, it was a playoff game because we had equal, tied records – and then we got to go to the NCAA tournament.”
“Maybe it’s our Catholic faith, but it was never about money to me. It still isn’t. It’s meaningless to me.”
“I was working up in Boston… for a company in the mutual fund industry. I just did not feel like this was me… what I’m going to do the rest of my life. I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s not my calling… It’s like you just know, things feel right, you pray, you try to figure out which direction I’m going to go in. And I knew this just wasn’t the direction.”
“The lessons you also learn from sports, you’re on the ground, you get yourself back up, you work hard to achieve a goal, and you just go after it. And that’s what I did.”
“Anything I do is not for my glory. It is for God’s glory. If I am able to heal a patient or make them better, it’s not that I’m so great, it’s that God allowed me to help heal that person.”
“In sports, we stay humble. And this is part of that humility. It’s just, you must stay humble and understand where anything you do comes from God originally. You didn’t come up with anything out of by yourself.”
Related link:
Website for Dr. Donato’s practice