FUTURE JOCK : High-Tech Reseda Sports Facility Offers Sophisticated Training for Athletic Elite

I t was only a few months ago that Frederick C. Hatfield--a sports psychologist and record- setting power-lifter known as Dr. Squat--was training elite athletes in the two-car garage of his Northridge home. Today, he reigns over a $1.5-million scientific facility that he’s hailing as a one-of-a-kind laboratory where America’s super jocks can get even better.

“We can provide the most sophisticated training ever devised by anyone, including the Soviets,” Hatfield claims.

Hatfield has jumped into what he regards as a void in the free world--a high-tech sports facility that combines science, computer-age technology and an expert staff. “There’s nothing like it anywhere in this country,” Hatfield says. Not even the U. S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., he says, is equal to his own CRAFT Center in Reseda, which opened in December.

“The Olympic facility has damn good scientists and nice equipment but they lack cohesiveness and a passion for what they do,” Hatfield says.

Olympic Training Center officials dispute that claim and raise questions about the academic underpinnings of Hatfield’s approach. Skeptics abound from the academic world where conventional wisdom holds that ground-breaking work takes place in college labs by researchers who are well-known in the medical and scientific communities. Not by a guy named Dr. Squat who tinkers in his garage.

“Hatfield is not a leading sports scientist in this country,” says Jay Kearney, director of sports sciences at the Olympic Training Center. “His professional vita is not outstanding.”

Kearney and other academicians dismiss Hatfield as a lesser player in sports sciences because he hasn’t published articles in prestigious medical and scientific journals--the academic version of making the all-star team.

But Hatfield, a 46-year-old ex-Marine who likes to be known as “the guru of fitness and training,” gets high marks from the sports community, having established himself as a writer, trainer and world-class athlete. Not a pure scientist who “accumulates knowledge for the sake of knowledge,” Hatfield says, “I work in the trenches with athletes. My focus is the real world.”

Hatfield, who holds a Ph. D. in sports psychology from Temple University, was editor of Sports Fitness magazine and has written hundreds of articles for Muscle & Fitness magazine, which has a circulation of 600,000. He also has been published in psychology journals and visited the Soviet Union in 1983, spending 2 weeks at the Institute for Maximum Human Potential, he says, “hobnobbing with top Soviet scientists.”

Hatfield’s professional vita may not include articles in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., but it lists the names of dozens of athletes he has trained, including New York Mets pitcher Sid Fernandez; Olympic sprinter Alice Brown, who won gold medals on relay teams in 1984 and ‘88; and pole vaulter Mike Tully, silver medalist at the 1984 Olympics.

“Fred really knows what he’s talking about,” Tully says, “because he’s done it on himself first.”

At a power-lifting event in Honolulu 2 years ago, the 5-foot-6 Hatfield, weighing about 255 at the time, raised 1,014 pounds in the squat, an American record that would have been a world record had the meet included drug testing. To Hatfield, the Herculean effort validated his training theories. Even Kearney concedes, “He knows a lot about training and has a great background from a practical standpoint.”

While Hatfield’s garage contained homemade apparatus and such esoterica as an irradiation chamber, the CRAFT Center is loaded with state-of-the-art equipment, including a new software program designed by NASA computer specialists and Bob Ward, the Dallas Cowboys conditioning coach for the past 13 years and a Ph. D. in bio-mechanics. The program integrates all known information on an athlete--from endocrine concentrations to strength levels--and comes up with an optimum training and nutritional regimen.

Ward says that the software program gives Hatfield all the tools to “make a major contribution to the science of sports training. Fred’s got the first comprehensive system in the world to integrate everything”--all the technology available today.

The facility includes Computer Bio-mechanic Analysis, which combines high-speed filming of an athlete with computer analysis; an accelerometer that can measure the whip in a pitcher’s arm; and an isokinetic machine that plots a muscle’s fatigue curve. Within a few months, Hatfield says, the center will add a hyperbaric chamber to train athletes at different atmospheric pressures; a sensory deprivation chamber for psychological programming and a hydrotherapy tank with underwater observation windows.

“To an elite athlete, a very, very microscopic change in performance can be the difference in winning and losing,” says Harvey Kurland, an exercise physiologist on Hatfield’s staff who once worked for Dr. Frank Jobe’s National Athletic Health Institute.

But Hatfield is shooting for changes that are bigger than microscopic. He says that he is training an aspiring professional wide receiver who may one day be able to run 40 yards in under 4 seconds, an unheard-of time. Asked whether he could improve someone such as Carl Lewis in the 100 meters, Hatfield says, “I could get him back his world record.” An 8.9 in the 100 is possible. “I set no limits on an athlete’s potential,” Hatfield says.

To open the CRAFT Center, Hatfield brought together specialists in bio-mechanics, exercise physiology, psychology and computers, the so-called “team” approach used by the Russians at their training institutes and only by the Olympic Training Center in this country. “It’s a valid concept,” says Dr. Robert Leach, the chairman of the Olympic Committee’s sports medicine council who has visited Soviet facilities.

But Leach added a qualifier: “No one will fight Hatfield’s idea to put a team together,” he says, “but what matters is who you get on your team and how their expertise is applied.”

Like himself, Hatfield’s team is better known in the sports world than in academia. The director of sports sciences is Dr. Guillermo Laich, an Argentine who earned an M. D. from the University of Madrid and has been published in neurological journals in Spain. His speciality is enzymatic and structural changes in muscle tissue on the sub-cellular level, which can determine the highs and lows of an athlete’s training cycle.

Laich grew up in San Carlos, Calif., and played on the San Carlos Babe Ruth world championship team in 1961. He has a black belt in karate, and he is a training consultant for Argentina’s World Cup champion soccer team as well as for numerous record-holders in track and field such as the Netherlands’ Nellie Cooman. A few years ago he tried unsuccessfully to open an elite athlete training center in Spain, then met Hatfield at the ’84 Olympics in L .A. and moved here 2 years later.

“Bill is better qualified than most to work with elite athletes,” says Juris Terands, head of the sports sciences department at Colorado State and founder of the International Society of Bio-mechanics.

How did Hatfield manage to move out of the garage? “I came up with a hot concept,” he says. In 1976, while teaching physiology and sports sociology at the University of Wisconsin, he dreamed about opening his own lab but concluded that “there’s no way to make a living training elite athletes.” Equipment was too expensive, the potential client list too small.

Then he conceived the CRAFT Center. Although the name sounds like a place to make lanyards and potholders, CRAFT stands for Consortium of Rehabilitation and Fitness Therapy. Hatfield figured out that he could support his work with elite athletes by using the same equipment and personnel to treat workers injured on the job. Occupational and physical therapy, paid for by insurance companies, is the center’s bread and butter.

“Now I don’t have to worry about making money with sports,” Hatfield says. “But everybody benefits. Workers get the latest technology and top specialists. And employers get workers back on the job quickly.”

In 1980, Hatfield, married with 4 children, moved to New Orleans and looked for investors to launch his concept. He says he raised the money but “21% interest blew the deal.” Two other deals fell apart at the last minute, one in Texas and the other at Lake Tahoe. Six years ago, he moved to Northridge, still convinced that his concept was “viable and salable.” Finally, Hatfield was introduced to 5 Australian physicians by a friend in Adelaide and they formed a limited partnership in early 1988.

Last August, Hatfield renovated a 16,350-square-foot Post Office on Sherman Way and hired a staff of 23 (12 full time), including occupational therapists and a laser-acupuncture specialist. But the center didn’t open until December because of problems getting licensed as a medical rehab clinic without an M. D. on the premises (Laich is licensed to practice medicine in South America and Europe). The California Department of Health Services eventually issued the license--1 of only 3 issued in Los Angeles County.

Although the center’s large front room, with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and 30 gleaming Cybex variable-resistance machines, looks like a standard chrome-plated gym, the back half is a labyrinth of computers and digitized equipment. LeRoy Neiman sports prints hang on walls and staff members wear long white lab coats.

Elite athletes are charged $900 for diagnostic tests and a customized training regimen; $1,500 for 1 month of training and diagnostics at the center, $2,500 for 3 months. There’s also a $1,200-a-year membership fee for average athletes who just want to get in shape.

“But we’re not here for people to hang around the gym,” says Kurland, who has treated numerous professional athletes, including California Angels pitcher Bert Blyleven (who signed a photo in Kurland’s office with “thanks for getting all the fat off my body”).

After he gets the “administrative bugs” out of the Reseda operation, in about 9 months, Hatfield plans to “clone” the CRAFT Center in another city, then franchise it all over the world. He has a 3-inch-thick protocol manual for operating the physical therapy side of the business, and another twice as thick on protocol for training elite athletes. The Japanese, he says, want to open 15 centers, the Australians 5, and franchises are possibilities in 6 other American cities.

“I’d like to see a center in every hamlet in the country,” Hatfield says.

Which would be a boon to American athletes, especially Olympic athletes. The Soviets require their elite athletes to attend training institutes in their respective sports, “which is why the Russians are so successful in many areas,” Leach says. Aside from small Olympic facilities in Lake Placid, N. Y., and at Northern Michigan University, the United States has one major training center, in Colorado Springs, but it’s too remote.

“We can’t draw athletes to the place,” Leach says.

But the CRAFT Center shouldn’t have that problem. “Hatfield and Laich are really good--they can tell an athlete what to do better than anyone,” says Mike Tully, who lives in Encino. “They’re going to have a lot of athletes going through the center. I’m glad they’re here.”