On the Job

Pelican Sports & Rehab is a small clinic with a big idea. About half the business focuses on traditional physical therapy; the other half is geared toward golfers.

Mike Willet, president and co-owner, was a physical therapist at an outpatient facility in Port Charlotte when he first heard about a program called Body Balance for Performance: golf fitness supervised by a licensed physical therapist. The Fort Myers native attended a seminar to learn more, bought the territorial rights to the Body Balance franchise from Marco Island to Fort Myers, and then set up shop seven years ago in a small strip of offices on U.S. 41 in Naples.
Is it a challenge getting clients to come to your clinic instead of a larger one affiliated with a hospital or doctor they know or trust?

I used to work at bigger facilities, and one of the reasons I wanted to leave was because I couldn’t give the kind of care I wanted to. I was seeing sometimes 25, 30 patients in a day. Here you’ll have one therapist, and there you don’t know what you’re getting. We get a lot of our business from word of mouth from [clients] and golf pros.

You got your physical therapy certification from the Netherlands. How did you end up there?
I was doing undergrad school at Edison Community College and during that time I worked at Lee Memorial as a rehab tech. I was working toward physical therapy school. I found out about an international program in the Netherlands that would take a limited number of Americans. It was rated the top physical therapy school in that country at that time, and I thought it was a great opportunity to go overseas.

What do you do, physical therapy-wise, to help improve clients’ golf game?

The physical therapy and golf training are separate. If a golfer comes in looking to improve his swing and says he has back pain that interferes with the functioning of daily life, [like] picking up a toothbrush or getting in the car, forget golf; that person needs physical therapy. Golfer No. 2 comes in and says he has some lower-back pain but it’s not a problem and he’s had it for 20 years, then we can do physical therapy in conjunction with golf training. Golfer No. 3 is someone with no problems, the golfer who wants to be physically fit and improve their swing. We’ll put him right into the Body Balance program.

If Body Balance is just physical conditioning for golfers, how is that different from going to a golf-oriented personal trainer at a gym?

We have a medical background. We can identify [and help treat] issues that are muscular, connective tissue or joint-related. [With Body Balance] we have computers set up in the gym area. The first computer is video swing analysis. The second computer maps out the clients’ center of balance throughout their swing. The third computer uses 3D technology to see how much range of motion the golfer uses in their swing. Our clients can’t be Tiger Woods, but we want to develop a swing for our clients within their physical limitations that is optimally performing.