Demand grows for personal trainers

Five years ago, Adam Kessler opened Fitness Planning Consultants in Gahanna.

Kessler was the strength coach at Columbus Academy and saw a demand for athletes wanting one-on-one training. He also was a high school athlete in the late 1980s when the club sports boom started.

"When I was in high school, you went from sport to sport to sport," he said. "Now, you start to see more and more kids drop a sport and focus on one. Those people are going to club sports. Not that I necessarily agree with specializing in a particular sport, but people want to pay to try and get athletes better and kids better."

Kessler now sees parents who hire his company for strength or conditioning training and personal coaches.

"Most parents want to make sure their kid has the best experience possible," he said. "It's more about the best possible experience for their kid. If it can parlay into a college scholarship where they save money, they're going to go for it."

Until then, the money spent on trainers and personal coaches adds up. At Fitness Planning Consultants, an hour-long personal session with a trainer is $60, training with a partner is $35 and a group session capped at six athletes is $25.

"Usually it seems like with a lot of club sports, parents coached them and they've seen little things but got to a point that they don't know how to get their child faster or stronger," trainer Jono Green said. "On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of athletes who excel in a sport want to make sure they have an edge all the time. They are already great athletes that want that little extra."

On the morning of July 11, Green was meeting with 2008 Bexley graduate Brynn Kolada, who was the anchor of the Lions' girls soccer team's record-setting defense as its central defender. She was named Player of the Year in the MSL-Cardinal/Ohio Division, district and state and is a preferred walk-on at Michigan.

In the weeks leading to her arrival on campus in Ann Arbor, Kolada worked out three times a week with Green at $60 a session.

Green's most common client is not Kolada's age, but younger.

"A majority are athletes coming into their freshman or sophomore years of high school," Green said. "They're looking to make an impact coming into their junior and senior years."

Green's clients are as young as 8 years old.

"The perception used to be if they were that young, over-training is a big issue," he said. "It can be, but if you do it the right way, young kids are more resilient than anyone."

In addition to personal trainers, young athletes are meeting with personal coaches in the offseason.

"I was talking to a parent the other day whose kid was going into the eighth grade," Kessler said. "He sends him to a pitching coach, a batting coach and to us."

Personal coaches are not limited to sports that are more individual-performance based. Toni Roesch is the founder of Ohio Sports Plus and former point guard at Ohio State and basketball coach for college and high school programs.

"In defense of the coaches, they only have so much time," Roesch said. "Coaches don't have that much time to work on individual skills. What I do is help those kids develop skills. Here, we're so technique-oriented."

For $30 an hour, Roesch provides individual and group lessons at her Dublin facility that features a full-length basketball court. Group lessons are limited to a handful of players, allowing Roesch to provide as much individualized teaching as possible.

"I do this seven days a week," she said. "In the winter on Sundays, I'll be on the floor for six hours and have eight to nine kids an hour. I'll never turn kids away. As long as they want to come in, I'll help them."

Roesch has heard the rumblings before that her students who come in for training are doing it to get a Division I scholarship. According to the NCAA, approximately three in 100, or 3.3 percent, of high school senior girls will play college basketball.

"A small percentage of the kids I work out legitimately are going to get the money," Roesch said. "A majority of the kids who come in here are truly trying to make a team, go from seventh to eighth grade or trying to go from not much playing time to more playing time to even kids who just want to make a team after getting cut the year before."