‘Driven by something greater’: Meet Birmingham’s trainer to the stars of today and the future

The strength and conditioning coach founded his business, ModernDay Fitness, in 2006 and has made a name for himself not just in Birmingham, Alabama, but the entire sports world. His mobile “gym” draws in athletes from NFL pros to teenagers on high school or travel teams, and he makes them all do the same workouts together — performing burpees until they lose count, walking up hills with someone on their back, crawling backward with barbells and more.

They’re the kind of workouts that Kenya Williams thought would get her daughter to leave basketball — and, for her, that was the point.

“My purpose of taking her to Coach O initially was to get her to quit basketball — because I watched his workouts,” Williams said.

Her daughter is a sophomore basketball player at Birmingham’s Ramsay High, and Williams wasn’t sure if she wanted to take basketball seriously. She figured Leverette’s training could be a litmus test.

“His message, the things he was saying and pointing to the kids. He didn’t know her personally, but she absolutely enjoyed working with him,” she said.

Coach O’s brand of athletic training was on full display at a recent workout with Parker High School’s girls’ basketball team. In the middle of a training session, he went into full speech mode after seeing some girls lackadaisically going through the motions, but one girl pushed through the workout with a smile.

“The reason most of y’all are mentally weak is because you spend your whole life in resistance,” he said. “Look at the look she has on her face right now, no matter what she’s been through. The reason she’s mentally tough is because she don’t live her life in resistance. You get tired fast when you resist!”

Before working with Coach O, Williams said her daughter's mental strength or toughness wasn't great. She was constantly being put down by her travel basketball coaches.

“He has helped her tremendously mentally, physically, emotionally, as well as spiritually,” Williams said.

Let’s paint a picture: Coach O is a physically imposing figure. He’s 6 feet, 7 inches tall with a 200-plus pound frame — not to mention his deep, intimidating voice. When you see him, he’s going to have on athletic clothes and, figuratively speaking, a speech in his back pocket — like the one he gave to the Parker High School girls.

After graduating from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and having a brief career as a defensive end in the NFL, he tried a career outside of sports.

It didn't go as planned.

“I started flipping houses and then the houses started flipping me,” he said. “It was like one day, man, God just spoke to me like, ‘You got to go back to what you do best.’”

Soon after, ModernDay Fitness was born. He started small, training only his brother-in-law and his stepson. With his training, his stepson went from being on the bench of his middle school football team to leading his high school team in tackles and earning NCAA Division I scholarship offers. From there, it was a snowball effect.

“It just started attracting people and God just took what I knew best and I rolled with it,” Coach O said.

Today, ModernDay Fitness has an alumni network of hundreds of student-athletes who have gotten college scholarships. Some have become stars in their sport at the professional level, like recent WNBA champion Jaylyn Sherrod, or the charismatic Cleveland Browns quarterback Jameis Winston.

But Coach O said what he does best is not just sports, but preparing young men and women for life. He said sports taught him how to be true to himself, and he’s transferring those same lessons to today’s athletes.

“I probably learned more in a football field and a church than I probably did in any other place in my life,” he said.

While only a few of the athletes he’s trained have made it to the pro level, many of them have gone on to be doctors, engineers, teachers and other respectable careers outside of sports.

Coach O’s wife, Nadia Leverette, has witnessed first-hand how his training translates to the real world.

“Most of our guys, if you follow them in any aspect of their career, even those guys that are not professional athletes, they're the leaders in the bunch,” she said.

She mentions that Coach O lives what he preaches, motivating his family the same way.

“He wants the best for everyone in our family and he is certainly the leader and pushes us and gets us all out of our comfort zones,” she said.

However, his intense training also bleeds over into their family, so she decides to work out on her own.

“I can't keep up with Coach O,” she said. “He’s no longer my husband Otis when we work out together, he turns into Cujo… I tell him all the time, ‘Look, I'm just trying to look decent in my clothes. I'm not trying to go play for the Pittsburgh Steelers tomorrow.’”

Coach O has had chances to become a trainer strictly for professional athletes, but he loves having a direct impact on young people.

What separates him from other trainers is that he implores his kids to give back to the community by being an example. He may take his athletes to school in the mornings, or get them clothes or sports gear.

He also builds a sense of community and networking between the athletes he trains.

At his workouts, everyone is working together — it doesn’t matter if you’re a middle schooler or a professional athlete. Training videos he’s posted on Instagram often show middle schoolers or high schoolers working out side-by-side with Sherrod, Winston, Starling Thomas, of the Arizona Cardinals, or any other athlete that stops through Birmingham to reconnect with Coach O.

Videos of Coach O’s training sessions with Winston have gone viral — sometimes for the wrong reason. People have questioned his unusual drills, like having the quarterback swing a baseball bat while wearing his football helmet or chasing Winston down with boxing mittens while he works on his pocket presence.

Sometimes, the training pays off — like when Browns fans recalled Coach O’s mittens drill and compared a screenshot of it to Winston being able to stay poised under pressure and score a game-winning touchdown against the Steelers in November.

Other times, he’s had to deal with hundreds to thousands of comments from people mocking the benefits of his training style. Former NFL quarterback David Carr once posted a tweet aimed at Coach O and Winston that said “Stop paying your friends to train you”.

Coach O said his unconventional training style came from growing up in his hometown of Americus, Georgia, and not having many resources. And it worked.

“If you want to make it out of what I made it out of, you got to get very, very creative,” he said. “Your imagination got to be on point to get out of a place like that.”

When his athletes do make it to the big leagues, they’re still quick to pick up a call from Coach O.

At the end of the interview conducted for this story, he calls NFL cornerback Michael Jackson, who plays for the Carolina Panthers. Jackson has trained with Coach O since the seventh grade. He said for all the attention on his workouts, what people don’t understand is that Coach O is preparing his athletes for life.

“It's literally every situation I've been in. I can think back to like, Coach Otis was talking about this when I was 15 years old. I just didn't know it at the time,” Jackson said.

For all the love his athletes have for Coach O, he doesn’t take credit for much. He said he’s had to make a lot of mistakes to become the man he is and is still a “work in progress”.

It’s those mistakes, plus his faith, that pushes him to get the best out of his athletes.

“I am not that good of a person, but you realize you get up every morning by the grace of God and you're being driven by something greater,” Coach O said.

This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.