Rodger Fleming served as an athletic trainer for seven years with the Arizona Diamondbacks organization and three years with Tampa Bay Rays organization.
MACON, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – The 2022 World Games started Thursday, returning to the United States for the first since the games’ inauguration in 1981.
This year, an athletic trainer from Macon will be making sure Team USA’s Racquetball athletes are in top shape to take home gold.
Rodger Fleming, an athletic trainer, massage therapist and owner of Body Awareness Performance and Therapy in Macon, was at the Team USA Track and Field Trials for the Tokyo Olympics last summer when a colleague offered a position with Team USA Racquetball.
“My leader from there had reached out and asked me, ‘Hey, I can’t go due to a scheduling conflict, but would you be interested in helping out USA Racquetball? They’re looking for a dual credential.’ So that was for the World Championships in Guatemala in December of 2021,” Fleming said.
Due to his exceptional work at that event, Fleming was invited back as an athletic trainer for Team USA Racquetball, which will be competing at the 2022 World Games in Birmingham, Alabama. For Fleming, it’s sort of a homecoming since his story with athletic training began in the southern state.
“When I grew up in Alabama, I loved sports, and I played high school football and baseball,” Fleming said. “And at 5’8″, I was naïve, and I had this ambition of wanting to go to college to play sports. And my high school football coach was like, ‘Roger, no, no, but there’s this new profession that’s coming around called sports athletic training. I think you’d be perfect for it.’”
Fleming attended the University of Toledo and then lived the gypsy lifestyle for several years, spending a year as a pro basketball team’s trainer, seven years with the Arizona Diamondbacks and three years with the Tampa Bay Rays. When he looked to settle down finally, Fleming reconnected with a past love.
“What brought me here was I reconnected with my high school sweetheart, and we dated way back, way back. I mean, our friends were Fred and Barney from the Flintstones, and then we reconnected 20 years later. I knew that I was getting out of baseball, and I said she’s an established professional. I’ll go to her, and that’s really how Macon has become my home,” he said.
Once in Macon, Fleming served as the athletic trainer at Stratford Academy, Central Georgia Technical College and Fort Valley State University. Eventually, something a loved one once told him changed his perspective on his career.
“So, my grandmother, who has passed away since, she was telling me, she’s like, ‘Roger, I know why God put you on this earth, and that’s to help people,’”Fleming said. “And it really started making me think about being more than just a baseball athletic trainer. I wanted to help people; I guess more of my calling. So I left Fort Valley, and I pursued my dream of owning my own business. And for three years, I worked in a 100-square-foot room, and I put every bit back into the business. And then Memorial Day weekend 2019, I opened up Body Awareness Performance and Therapy.”
Fleming won’t be in Macon for a while since he’s heading to Eugene, Oregon, after the World Games to help in the 2022 World Athletics Championships. The one thing he’s looking forward to most is being able to learn from all the other great trainers that will be in attendance.
