Alumni Spotlight: John-Kevin Dolce

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Four years after graduating from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, John-Kevin Dolce went back to school, this time to pursue a bachelor’s in biomedical sciences from the University of South Florida.

As a boy growing up on Long Island, N.Y., Dolce dreamed of becoming a doctor, and he never abandoned that goal. Never mind that he’d be in his 30s by the time he started medical school.

His mother, a physician, supported Dolce in his quest, as did the rest of his family. Others, however, questioned the unconventional career path he intended to follow.

“I’ll be honest, that’s all I ever heard,” Dolce recalled on a Zoom call from Tampa, Fla. “Along the way, I was told to go into different industries, whether it’s coaching, whether it’s personal training, whether it’s anything. People were like, ‘If you want to do medicine, you should go into nursing, so you can get started quicker.’ But for me, it’s not about the money. This is about a passion.”

In 2006, he arrived at UVA as a first-year student on a football scholarship. Nearly 20 years later, Dolce is headed back to Grounds. His five-year residency in orthopedic surgery with UVA Health begins in June.

“For me to match at UVA still feels very surreal,” said Dolce, who turns 37 in July.

“It’s a great story,” said Winston Gwathmey, a surgeon and professor who directs the orthopedic surgery residency program.

When Dolce played defensive tackle for the Cavaliers, Gwathmey was an orthopedic resident at UVA. “I was, I’d say, tangentially involved in the football team,” Gwathmey said. “I was never directly involved, but I certainly knew who John-Kevin was.”

Several of Gwathmey’s current colleagues, including David Diduch, Stephen Brockmeier and Bobby Chhabra, remembered Dolce from his playing days, too, and all of them were intrigued when they learned last year that Dolce was attending medical school.

“He sent us a really eloquent email about some of his experiences at UVA and how the medical staff there inspired him,” Gwathmey said. “It was an email that piqued our interest, just because we saw this guy actually is in medical school and he actually is interested in orthopedics. And so we started really thinking about the reality of him perhaps coming to UVA as a resident. I looked him up and was curious what he had done, and every step along the way this guy has demonstrated his leadership ability. That’s the kind of person you want to bring into the fold, no matter what.”

Still, Gwathmey said, it wasn’t enough that he, Brockmeier, Diduch and Chhabra knew and liked Dolce. “We had to convince the other 31 faculty that this guy was not just some good story,” Gwathmey said. “What we do is pretty high-intensity stuff. So we kind of kept our mouths shut and let him go through the interview process.”

Dolce went through eight interviews at UVA, Gwathmey said, meeting with “our trauma surgeons, our research team, all the different people who are in our faculty. They each score him based on the interview, based on the strength of his application. And then we all sit down as a committee and we review each applicant. We get over a thousand applications for any given year, and we have to pare down to five people. And so John-Kevin comes through, and we’re all kind of biting our tongues because we didn’t want to influence them either way.”

Gwathmey is in the charge of the committee, and when he started recording the scores from each interview, he saw that Dolce consistently received the highest mark possible on a scale of zero to five.

“We went down the board and there were fives all the way through,” Gwathmey said.

If Gwathmey and his colleagues worried that Dolce might choose another program for his residency, their concerns were unfounded.

“My family and I, since I got to Charlottesville in 2006, have bled orange and blue,” Dolce said. “So for me to even get an interview with UVA was a dream come true.”

A graduate of St. Anthony’s High School in South Huntington, N.Y., Dolce came to Virginia to play for head coach Al Groh, who also grew up on Long Island. Dolce, who redshirted in 2006, earned his first letter in 2008 and was third on the team in sacks in 2009.

In 2010, Mike London’s first season as UVA’s head coach, Dolce was one of the team captains, and his story was featured in the first segment of Episode 8 of The Building of a Program series. His most memorable play that season was the punishing hit he delivered to Miami quarterback Jacory Harris. Dolce said he still runs into people who bring up that play.

Football wasn’t his only passion when he arrived on Grounds. As a sixth-grader, Dolce had written that he planned to be a doctor or a veterinarian when he grew up, and in 2006 “that path was still on my mind,” he said. “However, playing a full-time sport is a full-time job, and I ended up—I wouldn’t say taking the easy way out—but the medical route wasn’t as feasible as I once thought. You’re going to miss too much practice or miss too many labs. You’ve got to choose.”

He left UVA with his degree in sociology, hoping to pursue a pro football career. In 2011, he ended up signing with the Tampa Bay Storm of the Arena Football League. In his first game with the Storm, Dolce suffered a season-ending knee injury. He rehabbed and returned the next year, only to miss much of the 2012 season with a pulled hamstring. Reality sunk in, and he changed course.

“As soon as I got injured and I knew that the NFL wasn’t happening, it was back to Plan A,” Dolce said. “So, I applied back to USF with the objective of going to medical school.”

His mother served as his role model. She earned her medical degree in Haiti and practiced medicine there but had to earn her license again after she immigrated to the United States.

“When she came here and had my brother and me, she had to do it pretty much from the start and had to do residency again,” Dolce said. “So I knew it would take work, but I could do it.”

Gwathmey said that “probably the biggest hurdle along the path of becoming an orthopedic surgeon is getting into medical school, because you have to do your college prerequisites. And those prerequisites are really challenging. You have to get a good GPA in order to even get into medical school at all. And so the fact that he was able to actually achieve that is really remarkable.”

Dolce was not on scholarship at USF, so in addition to taking classes full time he worked as a car salesman at a dealership in Tampa.

“I was pretty decent at it, too,” Dolce said, laughing.

Through it all, he was helping to raise his daughter, Pearl Marie, who’s now 16 and applying to UVA. She was born when he was an undergraduate in Charlottesville. Dolce and his wife, Ruby Thomas Dolce, also have a son, Kevin, who’s 8.

That’s a lot to juggle, but Dolce graduated from USF in 2017 after satisfying the prerequisites for medical school. To strengthen his résumé, he then worked as a researcher in the Digestive Disorders Institute at AdventHealth, a hospital in Tampa, while studying for the Medical Collegiate Admission Test (MCAT).

Dolce was not accepted at the medical schools to which he applied in the U.S., but the Ross University School of Medicine in Barbados offered him a scholarship worth about $115,000, he said, “and I couldn’t say no to that.”

He started medical school in 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing, and his first two semesters were online. In 2021, he began taking in-person classes in Barbados. For his final two years of medical school, Dolce said, he did clinical rotations in Miami.

Dolce, who graduated in November 2024, distinguished himself in medical school. Even so, orthopedic residency is “one of the top two or three most competitive specialties to get into,” Gwathmey said. “John-Kevin’s biggest challenge, I think, was that he didn’t go to a U.S. medical school. He went to a medical school in the Caribbean, and that’s not typically a place where we look for talent. In fact, I can’t remember the last time we even looked at a student from a medical school outside the United States. But given his UVA background, we took a look at him.”

To say Dolce followed a non-traditional path would be an understatement. He was nearly a decade older than some of his classmates in medical school. He plans on doing a fellowship after his residency ends, and so he’ll be in his early 40s by the time he starts practicing.

“It’s worth all the sacrifices,” Dolce said, “and I can’t wait to get back to UVA.”

His college teammates included quarterback Marc Verica, one of the Cavaliers’ other captains in 2010. As chance would have it, Verica is applying to medical school this year.

“He’s been a close friend of mine,” Dolce said, “and the beauty about friendships is sometimes friendships and mentorships kind of overlap. So I’ve been able to give him guidance throughout this process, and we’ve stayed close throughout it.”

From his first time in an operating room as a research intern, Dolce said, he knew he wanted to become a surgeon. “And after getting introduced to some of my mentors in orthopedic surgery, it was just a no-brainer,” he said.

“I love it. I love orthopedics. I love everything musculoskeletal. I love learning about how it works. It’s a very challenging field, and I love to challenge myself.”

His enthusiasm for his work is palpable, and Dolce believes the patients he treated during his clinical rotations “could see that passion in me. And I think it’ll translate well when I get to UVA, because people know when you care. And this is the passion for me, not just for myself as far as learning and training, but helping others and helping them the right way.”

To receive Jeff White’s articles by email, click the appropriate box in this link to subscribe.