On the Job

Pelican Sports & Rehab is a small clinic with a big idea. About half the business focuses on traditional physical therapy; the other half is geared toward golfers.

Mike Willet, president and co-owner, was a physical therapist at an outpatient facility in Port Charlotte when he first heard about a program called Body Balance for Performance: golf fitness supervised by a licensed physical therapist. The Fort Myers native attended a seminar to learn more, bought the territorial rights to the Body Balance franchise from Marco Island to Fort Myers, and then set up shop seven years ago in a small strip of offices on U.S. 41 in Naples.
Is it a challenge getting clients to come to your clinic instead of a larger one affiliated with a hospital or doctor they know or trust?

I used to work at bigger facilities, and one of the reasons I wanted to leave was because I couldn’t give the kind of care I wanted to. I was seeing sometimes 25, 30 patients in a day. Here you’ll have one therapist, and there you don’t know what you’re getting. We get a lot of our business from word of mouth from [clients] and golf pros.

You got your physical therapy certification from the Netherlands. How did you end up there?
I was doing undergrad school at Edison Community College and during that time I worked at Lee Memorial as a rehab tech. I was working toward physical therapy school. I found out about an international program in the Netherlands that would take a limited number of Americans. It was rated the top physical therapy school in that country at that time, and I thought it was a great opportunity to go overseas.

What do you do, physical therapy-wise, to help improve clients’ golf game?

 

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