Early in my career, I realized that if we wanted people to do the right things—stay healthy, focus on preventative work, and recover fully from injuries—we needed to create the right environment.
I started thinking about what that environment should look like. What if we built a blended performance center, a place where rehab, recovery, and performance all lived under one roof, working together instead of existing in silos? This is much closer to what you see in top-tier professional organizations and miles away from what most people experience.
The idea really started to take shape during my own college days. I watched teammates train with no issues one day and then suddenly go down with a stress fracture or tendon injury that would sideline them for weeks, or months. It struck me how thin the line was between being healthy and being hurt. At the highest levels of performance, that’s often true. The margin is razor-thin. Athletes are constantly walking that tightrope between pushing hard enough to improve and overtraining to the point of breaking down.
Then came my own experience. My senior year—the year I was supposed to contend for an NCAA title—I got injured. Suddenly, I was spending most of my time in the training room, which felt more like being sent to jail. It was a dim, fluorescent-lit, indoor space. I would look out the window and watch my teammates heading to practice, out on the track or trails, doing what I wished I was doing. It was isolating and depressing. There was such a disconnect between the injured and non-injured athletes. The injured really struggled with feeling like part of the team.
That experience made something really clear to me: when athletes are healthy, they hate going to the training room. Preventative work feels like a chore. But that is completely backwards. Training and recovery aren’t separate—they’re two sides of the same coin. Good therapy is necessary to improve performance. I wanted to build an environment that made therapy enticing.
At Novos, therapy isn’t done in some dim room separate from the action. It’s out in the middle of the energy of the facility. We include therapy in our youth performance programs, in our membership, and keep it as part of the training plans for all of our one-on-one athletes. Training, recovery, and rehab all happen at a high level here.
If someone gets injured it doesn’t feel like they’ve been benched or sent away. We keep them engaged in their sport with Plan B work. We give them clear measurables so they know they are consistently progressing. And we’ve seen it again and again: when athletes commit to that process, they come back stronger and perform better than before.
I constantly remind our athletes to view setbacks as part of the journey. These moments are not roadblocks, just steps toward their highest potential.
Novos was born out of my own frustrations and fears as an athlete—the stress of injury, the mental toll of watching teammates go down, the constant worry of “what if it happens to me?” For me, building Novos has been a way to flip that narrative. It’s an antidote to the old model—a space designed to keep athletes healthy, connected, and moving forward, no matter where they are on their path.