This Athletic Performance Coach Uses His Experience to Help Athletes Reach Their Potential

DeVentri Jordan, 43, is an athletic performance coach based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After working with athletes at IMG Academy, he founded GameFace Training, which helps to prepare elite athletes for their sports. He's trained NFL players like former QB Teddy Bridgewater and ex-Steelers linebacker Ryan Shazier. Jordan is on the Men’s Health Advisory Panel and is currently working with football prospects ahead of the 2024 NFL Scouting Combine.

IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY where I grew up, we didn't really learn about health and fitness, we were just naturally gifted at playing sports. Excelling in these sports became the validation that we needed to feel important. Through the years as I got older, I saw my family dynamic in the community—my family was overweight, at holiday gatherings we ate greasy food, people started becoming diabetics, they started experiencing heart attacks and their ability to do basic things decreased—and I noticed this wasn’t the case for other families. A life-changing lightbulb went off in my head, I have to change what I’m doing to become different.

I took this observation with me when I went to college at Saint Cloud State in Minnesota. There I played football and ran track, and I was also one of the only Black guys in a predominantly white college. As I played alongside these athletes, I wondered, "Why are these athletes so lean? Why am I so bulky?" I was still really fast, but that made me curious to what they were doing differently. [The white athletes] ate their vegetables—they didn't put a bunch of salt in their broccoli, they steamed the broccoli. I had never seen that before. Then I worked at IMG for years. This is what sent me overboard to become an extremist. I had finally learned the details of what these athletes were doing differently and most importantly I learned how to teach it. I decided I wanted to be one of the top performance coaches and let my culture know hey, we can do something different. We can change some simple things and become better athletes, become better people, and have more longevity.

Now, a lot of sports that I train [athletes for] are predominantly controlled by people who don't look like me. But the people who look like me come to train with me so they can keep the longevity and keep fighting to stay in the game so they can take care of their families.

It matters where you choose to train for your sport, and who you choose. You need someone genuinely on your side. You have to weed through people who don't want to see you be better, people who want you to stay where you are. You’ll find this even in your own culture, your Black people who you grew up with don't always want to see you win. People want to see you do well, just never better than them. I’ve learned there’s only a few people that want to see you break the mold. I’ve got agents who have a certain level of expectation for you [as a trainer] for their athletes, and athletes that have a certain level of expectation for themselves. I had a kid who went to my same high school, but his family wanted him to go out of state vs. training with me, a person who could take care of him personally, with a proven track record. On top of that, another Black performance coach who doesn’t do Combine training directed the family against the kid coming to train with me out of spite. Because he didn't want to see me win. This isn’t about me winning or gaining more athletes, it’s about what is best for the kid, the athlete and his future—I want the kid to win. If he wins, I win.

It happens every day. People think you're acting funny if you make it out of the box of their expectation for you. When you choose to not partake in old habits and old ways of being. When you create your own path and avoid your old lifestyle people are used to seeing you live. People close to you that are stuck will look at you and think that you feel superior to them because you're giving back to the community. People don't think that you’re good because you haven't made it, and they thought you would make it. They keep moving the finish line on you. And then if you’re making it, they expect something from you. I'm not even talking about family—just talking about people. We don't understand how to support somebody that's trying to win—that's trying to better our life, that’s trying to better the Black community, that’s trying to better our neighborhood.

I'm always honest when I work with my athletes. And I try to approach that work with what I've been through and that's the best way for me because it's more authentic for me. In our culture, a lot of us don't have a two-parent household, so it's really hard. I didn't have my father. I never met him, I still don't know his name. So my mom had to play both roles, which she couldn't do because she’s not meant to. She was just trying to do the best things that she could and equip me with the best things that she could at that time. I learned to be a man by making mistakes and learning from them, but from her I learned hard work, saving, persistence, and the value of just showing up every day.

Through my struggle, I've been able to exceed the expectations the world has for me based on where I come from. People don't know I've been evicted, that I've been to court, that I’ve lost my training spaces. To even start GameFace I sold my car to afford the equipment I needed for my athletes. But the thing about me is that I just never gave up, I didn't let my circumstance define me. In 2013, when I left IMG, I knew once I got on my own and I had the platform, and I got a chance to showcase my curriculum and all I can do, I knew success was inevitable.

The thing that we don't understand as Black culture is the different levels that we must rise to. We read, we listen to podcasts, we look at Instagram, we can see [knowledge] and we can hear it, but we don't know how to implement it. Knowing better and doing better are two different things. It's about implementation for our culture. It's like working out, right? You don't go into the gym one day and expect yourself to be able to put up 225 [on bench press] 20 times, or run 10 miles with no training, right? You know it will take training and progression to get to that. That's in business, and life.

It took me 43 years to say I’m winning. Even saying that is hard for me. It took me so long to accept the fact that I can celebrate some wins because I'm so used to fighting for everything. We need knowledge, but more than that we need help implementing. We need to be in a position to understand from start to finish, where we're going, what we're doing, and how we are doing it. That comes based off of my experience building to what I’ve been able to build.This story is part of Black in Fitness, a series of articles highlighting the challenges and triumphs faced by Black trainers, athletes, and gym owners within the fitness community. Read the rest of the stories here.