Mountain Hawk Heroes: Men's Lacrosse Alum Michael Metzger

Every Wednesday, Lehigh Athletics, Lehigh Valley Health Network and Coordinated Health is proud to recognize a Mountain Hawk Hero - someone associated with Lehigh Athletics who is making a difference in the medical field. We continue today with men's lacrosse alum Michael Metzger '95.

Previous Mountain Hawk Heroes
October 28: Jen (Lance) Sikorski (Rowing Alum)
October 21: Shannon Wright (Track and Field/Cross Country Alum)
October 14: Darren Saks (Men's Soccer Alum)
October 7: Jenny Warner Southard (Track and Field Alum)
September 30: Taylor Wise (Swimming and Diving Alum)
September 23: Matt Christman (Track and Field Alum)
September 16: Steph Fratoni (Field Hockey Alum)
September 9: Mike Price (Swimming and Diving Alum)
September 2: Yasmin Deliz (Track and Field Alum)
August 26: Evan Guerrero (Men's Lacrosse Alum)
August 19: Ross Biggs (Baseball Alum)
August 12: Cynthia Izuno Macri (Soccer Alum)
August 5: Susan Westman (Rowing Student-Athlete)
July 29: Megan Hetzel (Track and Field/Cross Country Alum)
July 22: Lexi Martins (Women's Basketball Alum)
July 15: Nii Daako-Darko (Track and Field/Cross Country Alum)
July 8: Ali Linsk Butash (Softball Alum)
July 1: Kimberly Scotto-Wetzel & Jonathan Wetzel (Track and Field/Cross Country Alums)
June 24: Robert Bonow (Men's Basketball Alum)
June 17: Morgan Decker (Softball Alum)
June 10: Jim Guzzo (Former Quarterback)
June 3: Amina Affini (Women's Basketball Alum)
May 27: Natalie Krane (Women's Soccer Alum)
May 20: Tricia Klein (Women's Golf Assistant Coach)

By: Justin Lafleur, Lehigh Sports Communications

Medical professionals make an impact on so many lives.

Lehigh men's lacrosse alumnus Michael Metzger personally felt the impact, which sparked an interest in medicine. It has led to a successful career as a doctor and interventional cardiologist.

"My mother got sick my senior year of high school," he said. "She had a rare form of cancer, a bone tumor in her leg, and she had an extraordinarily heroic surgery. My interest was spurred by seeing the role of medicine on her, the relationship she had with her doctor and what that meant to her and our family.

"Combining that with my natural interest in science and biology, I decided medicine was what I wanted to pursue in life."

Metzger has been highly successful in his pursuits, which have led him to being an Interventional Cardiologist in Delray Beach, Florida.

"I have an office practice, but we do a lot of general cardiology and management of common heart problems – high blood pressure, high cholesterol, angina, blocked arteries and things like that," he said. "I also have additional specialty training to do cardiac procedures to diagnose and fix blocked arteries with things like angioplasty and stenting. They're minimally-invasive procedures done in a hospital setting to diagnose and repair blocked arteries of the heart."

Metzger has been in Florida ever since finishing training in 2007.

After graduating Lehigh in 1995, Metzger attended Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Michael Metzger

"It's an American medical school in Tel Aviv," he said. "I had a lifetime opportunity to live overseas for four years while getting a world-class medical education, which was an experience I would never change for any other experience in the world."

From 2000 to 2003, Metzger completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. He then completed a fellowship in Cardiovascular Diseases at the University of Pittsburgh.

"After Pittsburgh, I completed another fellowship in the procedural aspect of my career, Interventional Cardiology at Lankenau Hospital in Philadelphia," said Metzger.

Metzger felt ready for the rigors of medical school and medicine, due in large part to his Lehigh student-athlete experience.

"As a molecular biology major at a smaller university like Lehigh, many of my exams were written compared to people at massive schools where everything was multiple choice," he said. "Written exams demand an entirely different level of understanding and preparation. You either know it or you don't. There's nothing you can make up and there are no multiple choices you can guess. That aspect of Lehigh definitely prepared me for the type of workload expected when you're trying to process the amount of information presented in medical school."

Medical school is when Metzger's interest and passion in cardiology came to the surface.

"Because of my mom's illness, I started medical school thinking I wanted to go into orthopedic surgery," he said. "I always had a hard time with cardiology, cardiac and circulatory topics in all my biology classes. So when it came time to have the intense portion of those topics in medical school, I decided to commit to learning it really well because it's important and I never understood it."

Metzger decided to be a note taker for his class lectures on cardiology.

"I had to take good notes in lectures, type them up and deliver to my classmates... and I got paid for it," he said. "I knew that would be the way I'd learn the material well.

"As I was sitting in the front row, I was listening and thinking this just makes sense. I was hearing complicated, complex anatomy and physiology lectures and only had to hear it once to 'get' it."

"It" became, Metzger's calling – a calling that literally saves lives.

"I'm the guy who gets up in the middle of the night when someone's having a heart attack," he said. "There's the thrill of that, combined with the long-term relationships of seeing these people in the office. I feel cardiology, and interventional cardiology, were the perfect fits for my personality, work ethic and skills with my hands.

"In interventional cardiology, we're proceduralists, but my training went through a route of internal medicine first, not surgery," Metzger continued. "If someone is having a problem with a blocked artery in the heart, we put catheters in the artery of either their hand or leg and snake it up to the heart. We can inflate a balloon, place a stent as well as other ancillary procedures like extracting a clot out of the heart, or drilling a calcified plaque to make it more amenable to receiving a stent."

It's clear Metzger is passionate about everything he does, a passion that's gone back many years.
Michael Metzger

"I believe at my core, I have an obsessive personality," he said. "When I'm faced with a challenge or decide I'm going to do something, I go all in."

It started at Lehigh.

"My first semester, I didn't study that hard and got all B's – a straight 3.0 GPA," said Metzger. "I said to myself, this isn't going to get it done. I need to get A's for medical school."

Metzger asked himself what it would take to get all A's, and decided to go all in.

"Beyond lacrosse, I had to find time and did some work early in the morning and late at night," he said. "Every Friday night, I went to the library. I couldn't go out socially because we always had lacrosse on Saturday mornings, so why not spend the night being productive and staying out of trouble?

"Being a student-athlete at Lehigh helped me juggle and organize my time efficiently, to be committed to balancing multiple commitments from a time management standpoint," Metzger continued. "It was like having two significant full-time jobs, striving to be successful in each of them.

"And by the way, for the rest of my time at Lehigh (seven semesters), I got straight A's."

Metzger has been a high achiever, dating back to his time at Lehigh and it has certainly continued today. Beyond dealing with emergencies, Metzger values the people part of what he does.

"I'm 47 now, been in practice for 13 years and still have some patients from when I first came out of training (as a kid in their eyes)," he said. "Some of these people I met in the emergency room during a crisis at 2 in the morning have become stable, chronic patients."

For all his years in medicine, Metzger has never faced a challenge like the COVID-19 pandemic.

"In the very beginning (March and April), Florida got hit very hard," he said. "I have around 10 medical colleagues who got infected, so we've had to worry about our personal safety of getting in the hospital and caring for our patients. My children were a little afraid to be around me in the beginning, worried they would get COVID from me. It's been a very stressful endeavor."

Like practically everyone in the country, and world, Metzger's life got flipped upside down.

"We're doing more telemedicine and have been relegated to sitting on a computer all day," he said. "One of the other things I love about being a doctor is it's typically such a diverse day. I'm running around the hospital in the mornings, doing procedures, seeing patients, then I go to the office and bounce around to different rooms. I have up to 50 different patient encounters in a day."

Especially in the early months of the pandemic, Metzger found himself in front of a computer eight to 10 hours daily.

"It was exhausting and became physically draining, getting dizzy, vertigo, nausea, just staring at a computer screen all day," he said. "It remains challenging because we're still doing telemedicine for most of our work. I'm in my office two half days a week now. There are four doctors [in our practice], we share an office and we're trying to keep our congestion down so everybody feels safe."

There's no one better to lead when times get tough than Metzger. Among all his accomplishments, he was also recognized for bringing novel cutting edge therapies to his hospital and community for critically ill patients having pulmonary embolus (blood clots in the lungs) (click here for more).

It's just another example of Metzger going all in.

"You need to decide what you want out of your career," he said. "You need to stay current. You should always be learning and have your pulse on what's happening in your field and where you see yourself in the field, balancing that with what's happening in the rest of your life. The struggle is keeping perspective.

"I don't live and breathe for medicine anymore," Metzger continued. "I try to keep balance and keep my sanity. I have kids and I have other interests. But obviously, medicine is still a very large part of my life, so I still have to be committed to staying on the cutting edge, being the best doctor I can be and providing good treatments to my patients."

A large part of Metzger's success stems back to his time at Lehigh, balancing demands as a member of the men's lacrosse team with his drive for academic success.

"Being a student-athlete at Lehigh was a phenomenal experience," he said.

"I don't even know if I could have made it through medical school or worked as hard in my career and practice without my college experience at Lehigh."

Lehigh University Athletics

Completed Event: Men's Lacrosse versus Colgate on April 29, 2025 , Loss , 10, to, 14

Completed Event: Men's Lacrosse versus Lafayette College on April 25, 2025 , Loss , 7, to, 12

Completed Event: Men's Lacrosse at Boston University on April 19, 2025 , Loss , 7, to, 12

Completed Event: Men's Lacrosse versus Colgate University on April 12, 2025 , Win , 12, to, 9

Completed Event: Men's Lacrosse at Holy Cross on April 5, 2025 , Win , 10, to, 6

Completed Event: Men's Lacrosse at No. 4 Princeton University on April 1, 2025 , Loss , 12, to, 17

Completed Event: Men's Lacrosse versus Loyola University Maryland on March 29, 2025 , Win , 7, to, 3

Mountain Hawk Heroes: Men's Lacrosse Alum Michael Metzger

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