Gepps Cross is the five-way junction where Main North Road, Grand Junction Road and Port Wakefield Road all meet, and Isaac Gepp put an inn there in 1848. The pub is still going under a different name.
But the reason this page is different is what sits around that junction. Gepps Cross holds the Adelaide Super-Drome, the state velodrome. It holds the State Hockey Centre, known locally as The Pines. It holds ServiceFM Stadium for soccer, and it is home ground for the North Adelaide Lacrosse Club and Adelaide Raiders. There is not another suburb in my catchment with that concentration of serious sport in it.
Which means the injuries from Gepps Cross skew hard toward the sporting end, and toward sports with specific, predictable failure points.
Track cycling loads hips and lower backs in sustained flexion, and it produces power through a very narrow range. Hockey does the same thing in a permanently flexed posture, plus the hamstring and groin demands of repeated sprinting. Soccer and lacrosse bring ACLs, hamstrings and groins, which is the territory I know best.
I spent three years as a sports trainer at Port Adelaide in the AFL and seven years as a physio in semi-professional football. The standard in those rooms is that return to sport is a decision made against actual criteria, not against a date on a calendar or how the athlete says they feel.
That is how I run it here. If you are coming back from something significant, the back end of the rehab is the part that decides whether you play again or keep re-injuring, and it is the part most often skipped.
About nine minutes down Hampstead Road.