Michael Knight of R3BAR

Most people don’t know this, but there’s a basketball court on the corner of Harvard and Union.

The court — one of many secrets inside the old Knights of Columbus building — is being put back into motion even as a major redevelopment planned to overhaul the landmark-worthy building and surround it with new apartments looms.

While the building is slated for a massive overhaul including construction of the two new apartment buildings on either side, R3BAR, an athletic training company, has been quietly moving in since last August, taking over the old basketball court and adjoining rooms.

Entering through a key-coded door, trainers and trainees walk through a short hall that opens out to wide space overlooking a maple wood basketball court on the floor below.

The original court was as old as the 1912-built structure, Michael Knight, co-founder of R3BAR Training explained. “We put a plywood surface over the original floor, and then this group called Plae Athletics placed the new flooring in. The new flooring provides a shock-absorbing quality, with enhanced technology, allowing less impact and more cushion when training.”

R3BAR — pronounced “Rebar” — is an athletic training system that revolves around the R3BAR AlphaPro, a lightweight bar made from aluminum alloy that comes with a set of four bands of different tensile strengths.

“The R3BAR AlphaPro puts the user at the center of core stability through coordinated and functional awareness heightening,” Knight said. “Rather than isolating parts, we’re focusing on the neurological components to coordination and movement. It’s teaching you how to stabilize your shoulders, engage your core, and then manipulate your lower extremities, so there’s this connectivity, this balance of proprioception, working with agility through your strength and conditioning. It’s very unique.”

R3BAR is based on “athletic performance enhancement” veteran Tim Manson’s expertise. Knight says about Manson, “He’s like Yoda to the performance training world out here.”

Knight, a graduate of Seattle University, enjoyed a professional basketball career in Europe and Asia before his body started “breaking down.” He sought out Manson’s help around 2011. “When I met him, I thought I was done playing… my body was kind of broken. My hip and right psoas were just so tight, I thought I was done. I started training with him for a year and a half, and got to a level where I could go back overseas. I went back and played three more years professionally. Tim’s training and The R3BAR AlphaPro were the missing pieces for me, allowing me to rebalance and rethink the way I was training. Intrinsic strength is so important, it’s the future of movement,” Knight said.

Knight soon became a partner, and R3BAR officially launched as a business two years ago.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by R3THINK TRAINING (@r3bartraining)

The three-story building R3BAR currently calls home once belonged to the Catholic fraternity before being sold to SRM Development in 2018. Making a connection with SRM, Knight jumped on the opportunity to secure a facility with a basketball court, even though the location, which also has a locker room and yoga studio, is temporary.

Whether R3BAR is in its location for nine months, or two years, is entirely at the mercy of developers. Knight isn’t phased though. “It’s worth it because everything we have in here is an asset,” he said. “All this stuff I can pull up and I can take it elsewhere.”

That includes the maple wood basketball court.

R3BAR currently offers privatized one on one training, basketball skills development classes, and small group personal training, with plans to offer drop-in classes in the near future.

Find out more at r3bartraining.com.

PLEASE HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE!
Subscribe to CHS to help us pay writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.