Crunch time D1 Athletics 1-on-1 training program helps local talent maximize their sports potential
August 16, 2023 at 9:51 p.m.
For the first time ever, Port Chester's Crunch Fitness has introduced its initial Division 1 Athletics 1-on-1 sports training program at its Waterfront Place gym location.
Its aim is to help athletes crush their fitness goals on their way to achieving them on a pro or collegiate level instead of just dreaming about them.
The program involves walking the walk, lifting the lift, and talking the talk with positive reinforcement while training to maximize the desired results with a fusion of exercise techniques that bring the outdoors in.
Flesh out words
Instead of just words that wish upon a star, the program fleshes out those words with a combination of weight training, exercise machines and compassionate professional knowhow that brings the challenges of the playing field indoors to the Crunch Fitness gym at 24 Waterfront Place.
Two local athletes are taking advantage of that program to maximize their potential.
Not just any kind of athletic potential, but the real deal, the determination to work and take that talent to the next level.
And that takes heavy lifting, what athletes call drilling. That means repetition after repetition of seemingly endless basic moves while grinding slowly towards excellence. And that kind of dedication includes hours and hours of practice, practice, practice, without expecting immediate results but expecting results nonetheless.
The local aspirants
These two local athletes from widely different backgrounds have that kind of potential as they single-mindedly pursue their goal with routine and concentration on what it takes to get there.
Even as they are at different stages in their progress towards their goal.
Port Chester's Andres Beccera, 16, came here from Ecuador with his family when he was six and has been kicking a soccer ball around ever since. He is a rising junior at the high school, has never played soccer for the Rams, instead focusing on playing fast-paced travel team academy ball. He hopes to catch the eye of college recruiters and maybe turn pro someday.
It is a different story for Rye Brook's JP D'Inverno, one of the best student-athletes in Blind Brook Trojans history, an All-League, All-Section and All-State wide receiver, Blind Brook's first in at least a decade. His father is a retired Greenwich cop with deep Port Chester familial roots—stretching all the way back to Calabria and Rome in Italy—who has coached the Blind Brook modified and varsity football teams, played college ball and has been training John Paul (better known as JP) in the art of football from a young age. That training has already paid off because JP will be attending Connecticut's Sacred Heart University, an ultra competitive Division 1 collegiate power, on scholarship in September—the only Port Chester or Blind Brook athlete recruited to play Division 1 sports this year.
Rye Brook’s JP D’Inverno, All-State wide receiver for the Blind Brook Trojans who will be playing Division 1 football for Sacred Heart University this fall, has also been training at Crunch Fitness in Port Chester.File Photo
New dual plot twist
Two athletic teens from Rye Town. Different backgrounds. Both striving to get better at Crunch Fitness.
This is where two other athletes turned personal trainers—John D'Inderomo and Lizandro Espinosa—enter the picture, both older, both at different stages of their career, both working at Crunch Fitness.
D'Inderomo, slight, wiry, intense, had more than a quarter of a century with personal trainer certification from NASM (the National Academy of Sports Medicine) and was a former two-way running back at Greenwich High School before going to Crunch with an idea—to combine sports fusion, athletic ability on the field featuring hand to eye coordination and footwork with weight training while also using gym machines like the stair master and treadmills.
An idea takes shape
He discussed the idea with Espinosa, a former Rams wrestler and football linebacker, who is now the Crunch fitness manager and has an ISSA certification from the International Sports Science Association. Out of those talks came the Division 1 Athletics 1-on-1 sports training at Crunch. And a new D1 sports training was born with an aim to provide what its trainers call "the fastest and safest way to get some seriously awesome results."
But, of course, those results take time.
"What we basically try to do is bring the challenges of the playing field inside to the gymnasium and take it from there with weight training infused with the desired sports program," D'Inderomo said before a recent Monday evening training session with Beccera as Espinosa listened. What that means in soccer, for example, is building up leg strength and endurance in the muscles used on the pitch, alternating floor exercises in leg agility, say, with weight training, increasing the training level as the athlete progresses throughout the development in a series of one-hour training sessions filled with positive reinforcement.
Nuts and bolts on menu
That kind of encouragement makes swallowing the nuts and bolts of exercise easier, moving on from leg kicks to dodging around cones, from isolating various muscle groups to gradually increasing the poundage in the weight lifts.
Beccera, 5:6, slight, determined, modest to a fault, takes it all in, working hard to get better. His ambitions are simple: hone his ability by playing at various age group levels for more than a decade with the New York City Football Club (NYCFC), a professional soccer club that competes in Major League Soccer (MLS), the highest level of American soccer, as a member of the league's Eastern Conference, the soccer version of the collegiate Big East. He says no one game stands out in his mind, nor does any single shining athletic moment in his career.
"I play to keep getting better," he says. "And I hope to be recruited to play in college and maybe someday turn pro."
With Rye Brook's D'Inverno, the plot takes on a life of its own because it is filled with local color.
Charting the progress
JP started playing football in the third grade with the Packers in the Rye Town Football League, advanced a step further with the Greenwich Mavericks in the Greenwich Football League and played modified football in Blind Brook before starting for the varsity as a freshman. He grew into a widely recruited 6:1, 205-pound wide receiver who led the Trojans to the Class C semi-finals for the first time in 30 years as a senior, was selected as the school's best male athlete, and has no trouble remembering his career highlight: gaining 182 yards as a wide receiver while scoring three receiving touchdowns, ironically, in a close loss to league power Dobbs Ferry as a junior. He also ran track for his first two years, starred in basketball as a junior, but had the discipline to give up hoops to concentrate on football as a senior. That discipline paid off with his being recruited to play football for multiple colleges.
He essentially was living his father's dream of playing D1 ultra-competitive football because his dad had played D2 less competitive college ball for Pace, starring in both football and baseball.
Faith plays a role
"So for as long as I can remember I wanted to play D1 football, and because of my strong Catholic faith and family ties, I wanted to play D1 for a Catholic college close to home," JP said. "It came down to Sacred Heart (in nearby Fairfield, Conn.) and St. Francis College (in Pennsylvania), and Sacred Heart seemed like the better fit," JP said, adding that he has been working hard all summer so he could hopefully start as a freshman on the varsity. That includes mornings working mostly with weights in the D1 program at Crunch, where he has built up to bench pressing 225 pounds, doing 10 consecutive 185-pound bench press repetitions and squatting with 335-pound weights. Afternoons he spends mostly on the local playing fields, working out with his father as his coach, mostly on footwork and agility drills. And now he awaits the start of the new school year Sept. 2, albeit on a college level, while Beccera is focused on the Sept. 5 kickoff of his junior year at Port Chester High School.
Both feel the Crunch Fitness Division 1 Athletics 1-on-1 program has helped.
As to what happens next, who knows.
"My parents always remind me to keep God first in my life and trust in His plan and process because it is far greater than what I could ever imagine on my own," D'Inverno said. "And to be grateful for all we have."
He is. So is Beccera. And so are D'Inderomo and Espinosa at Crunch.
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