Former Trail Blazer Antonio Harvey launches new training program for local athletes

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — It was in the mid-90s when NBA role player Antonio Harvey quickly became a fan favorite in Portland during his time with the Trail Blazers. 

Harvey was a power forward for the Blazers from 1999 to 2001.

Fast forward to the present day, and the 6'11" Mississippi native is starting a new venture in Portland after planting his roots in PDX for more than a decade.

“Two years in Portland as a Trail Blazer led to 12 years as a broadcaster, which is 14 years in the city,” Harvey said. “And even now, I’ve been gone for almost 10 years away from broadcasting and when I see people on the street, they still are remembering me as that guy, which I just think is super cool.”

Harvey has kept busy in life away from Moda Center as a business owner and a father.

But it’s his latest book and coaching program that just launched that will undoubtedly have people talking about him once again making a difference in the community.

“I wrote a book,” Harvey explained. “I tell people, the book was not so much about helping anybody, it was really written for my son.”

“I was 41 when he was born and it’s kind of morbid but it’s the way I think – all I could think when he was born was about my age, my height, my weight, you don’t see many tall big people and so I started to get concerned that what if something happened to me and I wasn’t able to be here for him as he got older.”

So Harvey used his "notes app" on his iPhone to jot down what he wanted his son to know as he got older.

But the former Trail Blazer soon realized that there were themes to his notes that he thought could not only help his son, but many other young athletes around the world.

“I took those notes and put them in what I feel like were categories, things that I feel like all athletes should know,” Harvey said. “But really it started with the three common themes that I started to see in the notes that were -- you have to be willing to work extremely hard and you have to understand what that is… Hard work is what we do today, right? You show up today, work hard.”

“And the dedication is what you do tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, so hard work is what I’m doing right now, dedication is the repetitive nature of the hard work.”

“And the third piece was accountability.”

The book, Building Success Brick by Brick, is just the beginning of Harvey’s next chapter in helping young athletes and people in general who are looking for guidance in finding their identity as a person and as a competitor.

“I started realizing there were other gaps and there were things that were missing and one of them we noticed was the disconnect on the mental side of basketball,” Harvey expressed.

And that's how Apex Competitor was born -- a personal training tool for athletes looking to train for the mental aspect of sports.

“We started to put together a curriculum, to help teach those things, but then we realized that we can’t teach if we don’t know what your starting point is,” Harvey said.

“Who am I as a basketball player, what type of competitor I am, how do I learn, how do I teach, how do I read the game of life, not just basketball but the game of life in general… So, the idea was to come up with an assessment, kind of like a disc test or any of the personality assessments that you’ll find out in the world. We basically just tailored one of those tests to athletes and to sports in particular and we found a lot of success with it.”

Antonio and his staff have gone through roughly 150 mock assessments, and have found that these assessments are true to the individual athletes’ personalities.  

That’s what makes this program so unique -- it’s individualized to each athlete.

Harvey explained, “There are six modules in the curriculum, each one involves one of the archetypes. So, there's an intrinsic motivator, there’s a steady anchor, and the steady anchor is the guy you know, it’s the glue guy, it’s the guy in the locker room that always says the right thing at the right moment to calm things down and get us going.”

Within the Apex Competitor program, there are four different levels of subscriptions to choose from.

“At the base level, you take the assessment, at our pro level, you get the assessment and then you get a re-assessment in six months, so after you start taking the courses we can see if we’re seeing change and if we are then we can see where the changes are, where the changes aren’t and how we can re-tailor the assessment.”

Harvey created Apex Competitor to focus on the mental part of the game and to be a helpful tool at any price point.

Harvey added, “I think what I would tell a parent who is looking at it and not really sure. 'You spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month on training the body, right? Hundreds and thousands of dollars, and yet everybody says the game is 90 percent in the brain, right? So you spend all your money training your body and none of your money training your brain and then you wonder why there’s this disconnect in athletics'... It gets expensive when you try to go to a sports psychologist, and so we’re trying to bridge that gap as well.”

“Sports is what I know, but success is what I want to teach.”