By Reid Posey

news@oxforeagle.com

Sometime in the past year or two, the owners of Cornerstone Rehabilitation and Oxford Rehabilitation began to realize that they could do more good for Oxford and North Mississippi as partners rather than competitors.

“Looking at the change in the healthcare market, we just thought, hey why not pool our resources and use it together?” said Niles Norris, owner of Oxford, Senatobia, and Batesville Rehabilitation Clinics.

After kicking around the idea for a while, Norris and co-owner Joel Montgomery decided to team up with Kelly Shinall, Kyle Wicker, and Vance Holland of Cornerstone Rehabilitation to form Endurance Physical Therapy.

Norris said that the partnership made sense because all of the co-owners of Endurance Physical Therapy have come to know each other through the Oxford community.

“The five of us have known each other for 10, 15, 20 years,” Norris said. “We just have a lot of things in common. We all know each other. We go to church together. Our kids go to school together.”

Norris, a Batesville native, first opened Oxford Rehabilitation in 2007. Soon after, he expanded by adding Batesville and Senatobia Rehabilitation Clinics.

Montgomery, Norris’ co-owner at Oxford Rehabilitation, brings nearly 20 years of experience in the physical therapy field, with an emphasis on the treatment of musculoskeletal and neuromuscular disorders with an emphasis on acute and chronic spinal dysfunctions.

Cornerstone Rehabilitation, on the other hand, has provided care to the local community for over 18 years. All three co-owners of Cornerstone played collegiate athletics, subsequently drawing on their experiences with physical therapy and athletic trainers as inspiration for their services.

Now that the two teams have joined forces, Endurance Physical Therapy looks forward to offering services in areas such as orthopedic and spinal rehabilitation, occupational therapy, hand and upper extremity rehabilitation, sports medicine, athletic training and more.

“We’re extremely excited,” Norris said. “We think we can take what we’re doing really well with both organizations and grow.”

Although Endurance Physical Therapy will look to take strides forward with its pool of resources, all of the clinics involved in the merger will stay at their current locations for the time being.

Accordingly, Endurance will have two locations in Oxford for the foreseeable future, Norris said, including the Oxford Rehabilitation location at 2714 W. Oxford Loop as well as the Cornerstone Rehabilitation location at 2205 Jefferson Davis Drive.

Norris said that although there is nothing definite outlined for the future, that Endurance would be open to exploring the option of building a larger single facility to house their Oxford branch. Right now, however, demand is too high to merge both Cornerstone and Oxford Rehabilitation’s operations under either’s roof alone.

As for the near future, Endurance is looking forward to opening a new location in Hernando. The new branch is currently under construction, but is expected to be open within the next couple of months.

Norris said that further expansion across North Mississippi is certainly among their plans for the future and that the new Hernando location is a concrete example of the benefits of the merger.

“That’s new services right off the bat,” Norris said.

A large part of Endurance’s strategy moving forward will be utilizing social media platforms to promote and educate people about the field of physical therapy.

“We really look forward to getting ourselves out there with video and social media to educate our community about what we do,” Norris said.

That said, Norris emphasized that the prime component of the merger is always to offer a better experience to those seeking care.

“The main thing to drive home is that we want to offer better services,” Norris said. “We want to take the strengths of both of our businesses and make them one.”