Randall Hunt first built a noted golf career as a championship college athlete, then as a professional on the PGA circuit, competing and winning matches on three continents from 2002 to 2006. He then pivoted to a career as an entrepreneur, leading sports coaching clinic Back9 Performance as co-founder, president, and CEO from 2006 to 2008, and the Athletic Apex chain of fitness clubs as founder, president, and CEO from 2006 to 2019. At Athletic Apex, Randall Hunt led an award-winning business with locations in three states.
A range of publications and organizations have featured articles on Mr. Hunt and his success in sports and business. In 2017, the International Health, Racquet & Sports Association (IHRSA) profiled him as a health club owner who overcame multiple challenges to achieve his goals.
The IHRSA piece noted Mr. Hunt’s focus on transforming the way people look at the whole issue of health and fitness, a perspective that grew out of one particular incident during his time as a college athlete.
Although he gained fame as a member of the Pepperdine University 1997 NCAA Division 1 men’s golf championship team while attending on a full athletic scholarship, he also suffered painful injuries that year due to an automobile accident. Mr. Hunt emerged with a partially paralyzed right arm, lasting pain, and a bleak prognosis.
Out of that challenge, he began to learn everything he could about the body, physiology, and training. The result: He tried various approaches to see what would work best, and developed his own program, now branded as Bionetics, designed to provide relief from pain without recourse to surgery. The Bionetics system has been taken up by the United States Navy and by numerous professional athletes, including those training for the Olympics.
He put the same empirical approach to work in developing some of the nation’s most successful health club locations, working to make each a place where clients can learn the best new techniques, using the most innovative fitness technologies available, that work best for their own long-term fitness goals.
