By the time you read this Editor’s Page, the 2009 Major League Baseball season will have started and the Masters golf tournament will be underway. All sports fans know that some sports – such as golf and tennis – are based largely on individual efforts. For example, golf is an ‘‘individual’’ sport – Tiger Woods won the 2008 Unites States Open Championship because he played better than any other player. Other sports, such as baseball, football, and basketball, are ‘‘team’’ sports. Thus, for example, the Pittsburgh Steelers won Superbowl XLIII earlier in the year because their team played better than their opponents. Their victory was not based on the play of any individual player – although a few did play extraordinarily well – but because of the efforts of the offense, the defense, and the special teams. In a team sport, unless all team members play their best, the result may be a poor outcome. As practiced in the United States, echocardiography is – and has been for many years – a ‘‘team sport’’. While in some parts of the world physicians do perform and interpret their own echocardiographic studies, echocardiography in the US has been a joint effort by sonographers and physicians for about the past 40 years. Dr. Harvey Feigenbaum, founding President of the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) and founding editor of the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography (JASE), recognized early in his career that well-trained non-physicians could learn to obtain echocardiographic data with great skill. He also realized that a collaborative effort, involving both physicians and non-physicians who shared an interest in using ultrasound to evaluate cardiovascular disorders, would be a ‘‘win-win’’ situation for patients. Busy physicians performing their own echocardiographic studies sometimes had to focus on answering only specific clinical questions, while sonographers could spend the time needed to do complete and thoughtful examinations. In this way, physicians would have more complete and higher quality examinations to review, and could spend their time more productively in caring for their patients. Eventually the discipline of ‘‘cardiac sonography’’ was born, and this profession has continued to evolve and flourish. Today, most echocardiographic studies in the United States are performed by cardiac sonographers and subsequently reviewed and interpreted by physician echocardiographers. While one could offer the simple-minded explanation that the sonographer records the echocardiographic ‘‘images’’ (including two-dimensional and often three-dimensional views as well as color images of blood flow and additional images of blood flow velocities, myocardial velocities, and myocardial deformation) while the physician interprets the images, this division of labor is an oversimplification. Both cardiac sonographers and physician echocardiographers have special training in cardiovascular ultrasound – they must understand the physics of ultrasound and its interaction with the cardiovascular