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Sports performance improvement specialist Spencer Wood, whose clients include the likes of NCAA Final Four teams, recently offered a series of seminars and a testimony of faith for student-athletes at Bluefield College.

November 18, 2008

Sports performance improvement specialist Spencer Wood, whose clients include the likes of NCAA Final Four teams, recently offered a series of seminars and a testimony of faith for student-athletes at Bluefield College.    

A 1998 Bluefield College graduate with a degree in exercise and sport science, Wood spoke during two separate sessions about mental skills and toughness training and addressed ways to improve speed, agility, and quickness.    

Open also to the public, the seminars were designed to show participants how to achieve "peak athletic performance" from an internationally known athletic trainer and motivational speaker.     "Spencer is a very charismatic, knowledgeable person, and our students found him to be extremely appealing," said Dr. Scott Bryan, a professor of exercise science who taught Wood as a student at BC. "He is a graduate who is rapidly achieving national prominence."    

An NASM-PES and NSCA-CSCS exercise specialist, Wood has worked with players from the University of Kansas, the University of Illinois, and Rutgers University. His work with women's basketball players from Rutgers was featured on ESPN.    

During a more formal session on his return trip to BC, Wood shared a testimony about his experience as a student at Bluefield College and the privilege to return to his alma mater as a guest speaker and presenter.    

"This is truly an honor," he said. "I get to speak at venues all across the world, but Bluefield College is truly special to me. This is a home away from home for me. This is a very meaningful moment."    

Wood came to Bluefield College, a Christ-centered liberal arts college, in 1994 as a student from London, England on an athletic scholarship for men's basketball. As he recalled during his return visit to campus, he came as an atheist with no faith and no believe in Christianity.    

Once on the BC campus, he said, he began to think about "the rest of [his] life" and "immortality." In the midst of earning two degrees with a perfect 4.0 grade point average and becoming a star athlete on the basketball court, he said he began to develop a different perspective of life.    

"It hit me like a ton of bricks," Wood said. "I'm pouring all that I have into the rest of my life -- an education and a career -- but no time and effort into what happens after that. So, a different journey started for me."    

Wood, who later earned a master's degree in exercise science, explored evolution, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and while all those faiths interested him, none he said "resonated with [him] like Christianity."    

"To find a God that loves me so much that he would die for me, a God who would love me not on the basis of my merit or works," Wood said, "this kind of God gave me a sense of peace."     Through the influence of Bluefield College faculty and staff, Wood made a Christian profession of faith in February 1999. While the college, he said, prepared him for a successful career in exercise science, he learned more about the love of God than anything on the BC campus.    

"Bluefield College put some very special individuals in my life, who would sit and talk with me, invite me into their homes," said Wood. "It was not so much the intellectual conversations, but the fact that they gave up their time to share with me when there was nothing personal for them to gain. It taught me more about the love of God than anything."    

Today, Wood is founder and president of Icebox Athlete, a premier provider of mental toughness instructional programs and speed, agility and quickness training plans.

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