Lessons from Local Leaders:

Dr. Mary Jean Stack

From Ballet to Physical Therapy: How Dr. Mary Jean Stack Built Great Falls’ Most Trusted Practice on One-on-One Care and Community

She spent her early years as a ballet dancer, racking up injuries and spending time in PT offices. She paid close attention. Then she came home to Great Falls and built the kind of practice she always wished she’d had.

Dr. Mary Jean Stack opens with a laugh when she talks about how she started Great Falls Physical Therapy. “I had no idea what I was doing. I just kind of went for it.”

That particular kind of confidence — the kind that moves before it has all the answers — has served her well. Since opening in 2018, Great Falls PT has grown from a solo practice into a multi-location, multi-specialty team of six or seven physical therapists, each with deep expertise in their own niche. Then came the Movement Center: a collaborative wellness space that bridges the gap between acute injury care and long-term maintenance — pilates, personal training, red light sauna, and recovery services under one roof.

None of it was planned in advance. All of it makes complete sense.

The Dancer Who Became a PT

Mary Jean was a ballet dancer long before she was a physical therapist. Dancers know injuries the way mechanics know engines — up close, personal, and usually inconvenient. She spent enough time as a PT patient that she started paying attention to the work being done on her, and something clicked.

“I thought physical therapy might be a great backup career to dance,” she says. “To eventually allow me to continue to work in the dance world, but in a different capacity.”

When her final foot injury made the decision for her, she followed that instinct into PT school. And when she moved back home to Great Falls, Virginia in 2016, she saw the opportunity clearly: a community she knew, a need that wasn’t being met, and a space that felt right.

Two years later, she opened Great Falls Physical Therapy. The practice grew through COVID. The team expanded. A second location followed. And she’s still working with local dance studios — the world she came from, now in the capacity she always imagined.

“It’s come full circle,” she says.

The Case for One-on-One, Every Time

Walk into many physical therapy offices and you’ll encounter a familiar dynamic: your PT checks in, gives direction, and then hands you off to a technician or aide for a significant portion of your session. It’s efficient for the business. It’s not always efficient for the patient.

Dr. Stack built Great Falls PT around a different model, shaped directly by her own experience on the table.

“The type of care I preferred as a patient was one-on-one for the full hour — just with your PT,” she says. “I found that’s where I got the most value. I could do the manual work and the exercise instruction and really see the patient through the entire treatment, making sure they were doing everything correctly.”

She gives an example that anyone who has worked with dancers will recognize immediately: they are exceptionally good at making exercises look correct without actually using the right muscles. A technically beautiful movement that bypasses the target muscle does nothing for long-term recovery. You only catch that if you’re watching closely, for the full session, every time.

That kind of attention is what her practice offers — and it’s the reason patients often come to her after failing elsewhere.

The Second Opinion Practice

A meaningful portion of Great Falls PT’s caseload arrives by referral, specifically from patients who have tried physical therapy somewhere else and not gotten better. They’ve been cleared of surgical candidacy but still can’t find answers. Their doctors send them to Mary Jean.

“When they get referred to us and we can find something different — something that maybe hasn’t been tried or hasn’t been addressed — it’s like solving a puzzle for someone who’s been lost,” she says.

She lights up when she talks about those cases. Not because they’re easy — they’re often the hardest — but because they’re the ones where the stakes are highest and the relief, when it comes, is most profound.

“That feeling when someone gets better and graduates from physical therapy — you’ve done a really good thing for someone.”

She also notes what happens when PT fails patients upstream — when insurance-driven models push providers to see four patients in an hour and no one gets the time they actually need. The patient doesn’t improve. The referring doctor marks them as a PT failure. They’re sometimes pushed toward surgery that wasn’t necessary. Or they simply conclude that they can’t get better.

“That really sets patients up for failure long-term,” she says. “We’re trying to get them past that mindset by the time we get to them.”

The Movement Center: When Graduation Isn’t the End

Great Falls Physical Therapy’s second location grew out of a collaboration with a friend — the owner of Great Falls Pilates — and a shared recognition that their patients were doing better when they crossed over between practices. When patients graduated from PT and kept up with pilates or personal training, they stayed better. The two practices were already cross-referring; bringing services together under one roof was the natural next step.

The Movement Center now offers pilates, personal training, and recovery services including red light sauna. Each service is its own business, and they collaborate. The idea is straightforward: instead of discharging a patient back into the world and hoping they find the right next step, the right next step is already there.

“We’re bridging the gap between acute care and long-term maintenance,” Dr. Stack explains. “Whether you’re actively in PT and need something extra for your healing journey, or you’re just looking for maintenance care — now we can do it all, with people we know and trust.”

A Team Built Around Depth, Not Replication

When Dr. Stack talks about the team she’s assembled, she’s clearly proud — and specific. This isn’t a staff built to handle volume. It’s built around expertise.

Kelsey works with runners, doing running assessments for athletes dealing with overuse injuries. Tom is a hand therapist who has become a go-to for local artists and painters dealing with wrist, elbow, and shoulder pain. Ryan played baseball and specializes in return-to-sport athletes. Pelvic floor PT, neuro PT, and pediatrics round out the picture.

“I love that everyone has something they do really well,” she says. “If I’m not the best fit for a patient, I have someone who is experienced and qualified and will provide the best care for them.”

This specialization has led naturally to community workshops — events designed not to generate business so much as to give the community direct, accessible access to each PT’s expertise. Running assessments, baseball evaluations, and an upcoming workshop for artists on hand and shoulder care. The artist workshop, she mentions with delight, was something the artists themselves asked for.

“I hope people continue to ask us to do things,” she says. “We’re happy to help and happy to put these events on for them.”

What Insurance Gets Wrong

Dr. Stack practices as an out-of-network provider, which means she bills insurance on the patient’s behalf but isn’t bound by the reimbursement structures that shape — and often constrain — in-network care. She’s thoughtful about how she talks about this, careful not to dismiss the importance of insurance access. But she’s honest about what the current system does to quality.

“It’s very difficult to see four patients in an hour to make up for what insurance would reimburse in-network,” she says. “You don’t have time with your PT, and maybe that patient doesn’t get better. To the patient and the doctor, they have now failed physical therapy — and maybe they’re now pushed down a surgical route that wasn’t necessarily needed.”

She would like to see insurance recognize physical therapy more fully — both for what skilled manual therapy actually delivers, and for the downstream savings that come from patients who get better without surgery. Until that changes, she is committed to building a practice that delivers that quality regardless.

Staying Small, Staying Special

There’s a moment in the conversation where Dr. Stack says something that stands out precisely because it’s the opposite of what most growth-oriented business conversations sound like.

“I don’t want to become a big chain place. What we’ve created is something magical and I don’t want to lose that.”

She means it. Her vision for the future of Great Falls PT isn’t empire-building — it’s depth. Adding PT specialties that patients would otherwise have to drive far for or access through a hospital. Growing the knowledge base of the team. Serving Great Falls and the surrounding areas, from Reston to Sterling to Herndon, from a foundation that stays rooted and community-connected.

The practice stops in for ice cream next door and waves hello. People drop by to say hi between errands. It is, she says, warm in a way that a traditional PT office rarely is.

That warmth, she believes, is what keeps people coming back. It’s what keeps burnout at bay for her team. It’s what makes a physical therapy practice into something more — a place people trust, a place they send their families, a place that feels, genuinely, like it belongs to the community it serves.

Dr. Mary Jean Stack is the owner of Great Falls Physical Therapy and the Movement Center, serving the Great Falls, Virginia community and surrounding areas. To book an appointment or ask a question, visit greatfallspt.com.

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