High-tech athletes

If you want to get bigger, stronger and faster, there are all sorts of options out there for you, from fitness clubs to athletic training facilities and even personal trainers.

And then there’s the United States Sports Training Academy, which boasts a hyperbaric chamber, specialized 3-D vision training and a treadmill that can reach a whopping 35 miles per hour (sprinter Usian Bolt recently clocked 31 mph in breaking the 100-meter record).

Overseeing weight training is weightlifting guru Gayle Hatch, who’s trained everyone from Olympians to NFL stars. Then there’s co-owner Derek Stingley—son of the late Darryl Stingley—who brings a lifetime of experience with sports to this new team.

Stingley runs the place along with local football coach Randy Leindecker and former Tulane baseball player Duke Robin. How all these components came together in an out-of-the-way building on Pecue Lane between Airline Highway and Perkins Road is a fascinating story, with a happy ending of good sports fortune for the athletes they plan to develop.

But pay attention, because the intertwining of their relationships is like a complex sports road map.

Leindecker, 38, is from New Orleans but went to high school at Woodlawn in Baton Rouge. He played some football at Southwestern Louisiana and coached at a few places in Baton Rouge, including Tara, where he was defensive coordinator from 2001 to 2005.

The defensive backs’ coach on that Tara High staff was Stingley—but more on him later.

Robin, 43, is a Chalmette native who went into the family business after attending Tulane. His dad was once port director of St. Bernard Parish. “I hung around with him and his friends and understood business development,” Robin says.

Until last year, Robin worked in St. Bernard Parish. He now lives with his wife Stacy in her hometown of Prairieville.

Leindecker and his wife Tressy have three children. Area football fans know of their oldest, Calob, 18, who lost part of his left leg in an accident last year. Calob is a senior at Parkview Baptist, where he was still hoping as the fall semester began to play football with a prosthesis. But the Leindeckers have two younger ones at Parkview too, including Kendal, who’s 9, and Cobin, 7.

The Robins have four kids, including two at Parkview. Their youngest, Sydney, is also 9. Kendal and Sydney are friends, which helps tie this together—Scout’s honor—right after we catch up with Stingley.

Older football fans will remember his father Darryl, who was an excellent receiver for the New England Patriots. Tragically, Darryl Stingley is better known for taking a vicious hit in August 1978 from the Oakland Raiders’ Jack Tatum that left him a quadriplegic.

Derek Stingley, now 38, was just 7 at the time of his dad’s accident. Derek was a baseball player who didn’t really take up football until he was a senior in high school. But, he says, “I always had the football IQ.”

He had exceptional speed, too, and that got him to Purdue—his father’s alma mater—where he tried football and baseball. He eventually transferred to Triton College then left when drafted by the Philadelphia Phillies. He gave baseball a shot, but he never made it out of the minors.

Instead, that’s where his Baton Rouge connection began.

In 1995 Stingley visited a cousin here. He decided to give football a shot and tried out for the semi-pro Louisiana Bayou Thunder in Hammond. “They offered me $600 every two weeks to play,” Stingley recalls. “They wanted me to play defensive back.”

He also enrolled at Southern University, where he met his wife Natasha, who is from Lake Charles.

Success with the Thunder led to a lucrative arena football offer from the Albany (N.Y.) Firebirds. He stayed with that team through 2000, even getting a tryout with the New York Jets in 1999. Before he quit playing, Stingley had offers to play in the NFL’s European operation, but he continued in arena ball, playing for teams in Chicago, Arizona, North Carolina and Dallas until 2004.

During that time he kept up with his studies at Southern and maintained his friendship with Leindecker. In 2005, Stingley was hired as defensive coordinator for the Macon, Ga., arena team. Soon after, he was named head coach, and one of the first things he did was call Leindecker to join his staff.

Leindecker stayed with Stingley until Calob’s accident. At that point, Leindecker knew it was time to give up coaching and spend all his time in Baton Rouge. Because of the friendship between Kendal Leindecker and Sydney Robin, the Leindeckers often were hanging out at the Robin house.

“We were barbecuing on the back porch,” Robin recalls, “and Randy said he had to figure out something to do. And the concept was born.”

Leindecker told Robin that he wasn’t sure he was through with coaching, but he wished he could be a part of a facility that offered “professional-style athletic training.”

They brainstormed, coming up with the basics of their United States Sports Training Academy dream. At the same time, Stingley was hired by the New Orleans VooDoo arena team, but the sport basically folded soon after. So he joined the USSTA team, the members of which believed strongly that they should offer high-tech equipment and high-intensity training “so they can really push themselves the way an elite athlete is taught to do,” Robin says.

United States Sports Training Academy and Hyperbaric Therapy

7987 Pecue Lane

Baton Rouge, LA 70809

(225) 456-5456

theussta.com

That equipment includes that ridiculous treadmill, which also inclines at a 35-degree angle. There are, of course, plenty of weights, and a strength program installed by Johnny Long, a Hatch disciple. There are machines and equipment geared to help all kinds of athletes in different sports with different goals and needs. There’s also the three-dimensional vision training, which Robin and Leindecker say will improve an athlete’s recognition and reaction times. The training improves how well athletes see the action around them and—most importantly—helps them react that tiny instant quicker than the next guy.

USSTA opened early last summer and has already moved to a bigger building right next door to accommodate its growing business—and the addition of Hatch, whose Olympic weightlifting operation is as big as it is famous.

The USSTA founders say they want to train athletes from middle school to the pros.

“We’re teaching, especially young kids, proper techniques that for years to come will make them better athletes. We want them to be seen by other kids and have them ask, ‘How in the heck did you get the way you are?’ I’m excited about it,” says Stingley, who is also moving his father’s charitable youth foundation to Baton Rouge and tying it in with USSTA.

This is a team that’s thinking big.

“We want to reach as many young athletes as we can and make them better,” Leindecker says. “And we want to expand, so we have 25 of these around the country.”

That’s a dream that might take this team down another long and complicated road. But the USSTA’s crew of talented past professionals have the nationwide connections to lead them almost anywhere.