Henry Lee has a question that has followed him most of his life.

‘Why not?’ Why not leave to play college football hundreds of miles from home? Why not go to med school? Why not spend a summer in Ethiopia? Why not build a company in the corner of healthcare that everyone else had overlooked? Why not pull your kids out of school, homeschool them for six months, and spend the time visiting twenty countries?

He says it with a laugh — and then adds the other part: "I always tried to dream big."

That combination of audacity and self-deprecating humor has carried the 1999 Macomb High School graduate from western Illinois to Southern California, where he and his wife Victoria built one of the nation's largest physician groups serving post-acute rehabilitation patients — a company of 150 doctors operating across more than a dozen states, eventually acquired by a private equity-backed organization in what Henry describes as a generational outcome for his family.

But if you ask him to trace it back, he goes straight to Macomb.

Football was the first door. A top-25 liberal arts school in Minnesota — Macalester College — recruited him to play, and he made the most of it, running track there too. He appreciated the scale for the same reason he'd appreciated Macomb: professors knew your name, relationships were real, and you couldn't disappear into a crowd. "That was the perfect place for me," he said.

After college, he came back to Macomb, coached wide receivers and defensive backs at the high school under Coach Horrell and Coach Sears, and worked on a master's in molecular biology. He figured medicine might be in his future, but he could just as easily have seen himself as a biology teacher and football coach for the rest of his life.

Then came Ethiopia. Before medical school, he spent a summer there on a Fulbright, developing curriculum for American educators teaching about Ethiopian culture and history. It reinforced what his mother — a geography professor — had always told him: there was a world much larger than western Illinois, and he was encouraged to explore it.

Medical school came next, at Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, followed by residency at the University of Miami and fellowship training in interventional pain at both Miami and VCU in Richmond. He chose physical medicine and rehabilitation — PM&R, a specialty he calls "the best-kept secret in medicine" — because it combined his love of sports science with the ability to watch patients functionally improve.

When he landed in Southern California in 2013, he found the gap. Insurance companies were moving patients out of acute rehab hospitals faster, routing them to skilled nursing facilities — but those facilities had almost no physician coverage. Henry and Victoria started filling that gap, facility by facility. Regional contracts became national ones. Five years in, they had roughly fifty doctors across six states. Ten years in: 150 doctors, fifteen states, the second-largest company of its kind in the country.

After the exit, he took his sons, Shaun and Alex — then five and seven — pulled them from school, and spent six months traveling the world  to twenty countries. "Why not?"

He's still moving. He serves as an executive board member and part owner for the Portland Thorns FC, is involved in various healthcare and investment ventures, and coaches his boys in flag football.

And when he needs perspective, he still calls Coach Horrell. Recently, he'd been second-guessing himself for waiting until his sons were nine to start them in baseball — worried he'd started them too late. Horrell's answer was immediate: "Professional MLB players still hit off a tee. Just get a tee, get him a glove, and if they like it, the cream eventually rises to the top."

That's the voice Henry still calls home.

His mother always said it takes a village to raise a child. Henry Lee was lucky enough to be raised in Macomb.

He’s never stopped asking why not. And in that question, he’s become the rising tide that, in no small part due to his Macomb beginnings, is lifting other boats.