By: Jason Mastrodonato, LGU Staff

Three years after Monica Seles was stabbed with a kitchen knife by a deranged fan in the middle of a tennis match, Dr. Drew Cleary found himself on a private jet of Seles’ husband, Paul Allen.

Cleary was just 26 years old, a few months into his first job as an assistant strength and conditioning coach for the Portland Trail Blazers (Allen owned the team), and nobody was quite sure why Cleary was in a billionaire’s private jet.

The flight attendants finally asked him: “What are you doing here?”

“I’m going to train Monica Seles,” he told them.

Cleary was given one week to work with the tennis legend. At the end of the week, she’d decide if she wanted to hire him or send him back to Portland. 

Five days later, she told him to stick around. 

And less than a year after finishing his Master’s degree, Cleary would become the personal trainer to the one of the greatest tennis players of all time. 

Cleary worked with Seles for a year, then went on to have an 18-year career as a strength coach in the NBA, working with Scottie Pippin and Michael Jordan, before he made his way to California, first as the strength coach for Santa Clara University’s women’s soccer team, where he helped train a Broncos team that won a national championship, and then to Los Gatos United, where he’s now in his fifth year as the club’s sports performance director.

In Los Gatos, you can find Cleary working with soccer players of all ages and skill levels, providing the same lessons he was able to give some of the best athletes in the world. 

This summer, Cleary will hold multiple week-long courses, open to all players, and registration is now open. Click here to register.

Reflecting on his remarkable journey, he recalled his time with Seles from May, 1996, through Aug., 1997, as she tried to rebuild herself after the stabbing. She had taken two years away from tennis to mentally recover from the trauma. 

Seles later described the stunning attack in her autobiography, “Getting a Grip.” 

She was sipping her water during a short break between sets when she felt a sharp pain between her shoulder blades. She turned around and saw a man clenching a 9-inch kitchen knife.

“I didn’t understand what was happening,” she wrote.

Seles was just 19 at the time and on top of her game. But the incident had a deep psychological impact that kept her from taking the court for two years. 

“I was for so long in such a dark place,” Seles told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. “I felt I was in a deep hole and getting deeper.”

When she decided she was ready to train again, Cleary was soon alongside her every step of the way. 

He was her personal trainer, her personal chef, her physical therapist and her strength and conditioning coach. 

“I went to all the Grand Slams with her,” Cleary recalled. “She never won another one after the incident, but we made the semi-final of the US Open. We made some inroads. Made the semi-final of the French Open, which was crazy because she wasn’t a clay player.”

“We went all over the world. But when she wasn’t training, I came back to the Trailblazers. So I got the best of both worlds.”

After a year with Seles, Cleary returned to Portland and restarted his career as a full-time strength coach in the NBA. 

Basketball was a natural fit for Cleary, who had been a college player himself. An Australia native, he was recruited to play overseas and landed at Lewis Clark State College, where he played for four years.

While playing, he studied kinesiology and enjoyed learning about the human body. He always wanted to know what he could do to get a leg up on his opponent. 

After finishing his undergraduate studies, he went on to earn a Master’s degree from Boise State University.

Educated and eager, Cleary decided he wanted to train the best basketball players in the world. He reached out to a handful of NBA teams and heard back from a few, including the head trainer in Portland, who scheduled a job interview the following Monday.

He moved to Portland that Friday.

Thus began a wild, 18-year journey in which he went on to train the Trail Blazers, Orlando Magic and Washington Wizards.

At one point, he had become Pippin’s personal trainer when the former Bulls legend was trying to extend his career in Portland. Cleary worked with the man he calls “Pipp” for six years and is still friends with him today.

After the NBA, Cleary made stops at the University of Tulsa and Santa Clara University on his way to Los Gatos, where he met technical director Shaun Tkasiris.

For the past five years, Cleary has become Los Gatos United’s go-to professional for all-things strength and conditioning.

Working with kids has kept his love of sports burning brightly. He cares deeply about optimizing strength and speed while reducing injuries, particularly on the girls’ side, where ACL injuries are prevalent.

Since he began working with the top girls teams regularly last fall, the club has seen only two ACL injuries. In the 12 months prior, the club counted at least 10 ACL injuries.

How was he able to so drastically reduce ACL injuries?

Drawing significantly from FIFA’s studies regarding mechanical warm-ups, Cleary built a targeted physical strengthening program that bolsters hamstring and oblique strength, combines queuing and landing on one leg, and focuses on reactive agility and unexpected changes of direction that can prepare players for even the most unique movements within a soccer match.

Working with professional players or youth players, basketball players or soccer players, “the challenges are the same,” Cleary said. 

“Moving your feet transfers no matter what sport you’re playing,” he said. “There’s two definitive things. There’s a change of direction, which is going through a ladder, in and out. But if I add a stimulus to it, and I say red, and you have to get out of the ladder now and sprint out of here to a red cone, that’s agility. There’s a difference between change of direction and agility. So it doesn’t really matter whether you’re playing tennis or basketball or soccer. Change of direction patterns are valuable.”

Cleary is excited to continue his work with LGU athletes throughout the spring season. He’s been hard at work developing summer programs that can help athletes stay fit and develop strength leading into the fall season.

To register for one of Cleary’s week-long sessions, click here.

And be sure to say hi to Dr. Drew if you seem out on the pitch.

“It’s been an amazing journey,” he said. “I feel really lucky.”