PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – You have probably heard of Caleb Williams, the No. 1 overall draft pick in the 2024 NFL draft. Maybe you’ve heard of Colts quarterback Anthony Richardson, the No. 3 overall draft pick last year. Or what about 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy, who led his team all the way to the Super Bowl this past season.
All three players have one thing in common: they all train with Tom Gormely, a rising star in the rehab, sports science, performance and training community in Ponte Vedra Beach.
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“They improved, they performed, a lot of them performed on Sunday really well,” Gormely said. “It kind of puts gasoline on the fire showing like ‘hey, this system that we built really can develop an athlete over time.’”
That system began with one local high school baseball player in 2017 and has grown to become one of the most prominent and trusted athletic performance infrastructures in the country.
Athletes from all over travel to Cortx’s nearly 5,000-square foot facility in St. Johns County to train, learn and rehab with Gormely. He’s the founder and owner of Cortx, which blends physical therapy with training and sports performance. Athletes like Purdy, Richardson and Williams are some of the bigger names from a professional standpoint, but the roster also includes local high school players, both blue chip stars and those just starting out.
Gormely’s system is tailored to each athlete and can be as high tech or as basic as it needs to be. One athlete who was working out at Cortx on Tuesday did a set of reps on weights and had details of each lift appear next to him in real time on an iPad. For an NFL quarterback, Gormely’s system can include detailed 3D biomechanic breakdowns that help with the rehab of an injury or to refine throwing motions.
For baseball pitchers, Gormely details a ramp-up schedule to start the season based on that specific athlete’s workup.
“You got to offer something different and unique to an athlete especially a professional athlete that can go anywhere in the world to train, anywhere in the world to rehab,” Gormely said. “You better be the best at your job, the same way that they’re the best at their job.”
Throughout the year, Cortx trains around 35 professional athletes who are mostly either football or baseball players. Gormely works with each athlete, but he said that the entire operation requires far more specialties than just he can provide.
Denny Thompson and Will Hewlett work with the quarterbacks, and are two of the best in their lines of work that spans years. Gormely and Andrew Duong are the physical therapists. Cortx outsources other aspects of the business like working with Chad Wheeler at Muscle Wrx for massage therapy, Dr. Scott Dixon at Integrative Physical Therapy for dry needling, and Jenna Braddock for nutrition.
“You need on-field skill acquisition coaches,” Gormely said. “You need training side. You need rehab side, body work side, tissue, dry needling, all that stuff to make an ecosystem for these pro athletes to get to.”
How did Gormely, who hit .384 in his final season of baseball at St. Thomas Aquinas in 2008, wind up on the leading edge of the sports performance curve?
After graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in finance in 2012, Gormely started training athletes back home in South Florida. During that time, he also got his doctorate in physical therapy at Nova Southeastern University. Gormely always played sports, but said that he’d long had an interest in the physio and mechanical side of athletics. He merged that passion into the physical therapy side and the baseline for for his business was born.
In 2017, he moved to Northeast Florida and met Connor Hults, then a player at Creekside High School, who became the first athlete he worked with. Hults, now at Florida State, went 3-1 with four saves this season for the College World Series program Seminoles.
That initial work with Hults led to Gormely working with other local baseball players, and then branching out beyond just one sport to include athletes from just about every other sport imaginable. Business boomed and largely by word of mouth in the local sports community. It has grown to include multiple first-round picks and established veterans across the athletic landscape.
“You’ve built hopefully a culture and ecosystem where they feel like they’re developing, they’re prepared, they’re healthy and they’re putting out big time numbers in big time sports, committing to big time schools,” Gormely said. “The more you can develop that ecosystem and gain the trust in them. It’s like ‘hey this is their future. This is their college scholarship’. That’s our job, right? To help them achieve as high of a level as they can get to.”
Cortx works with athletes at all levels of the game, but the training philosophy doesn’t change.
“We try to filter down the same performance that we’re doing with the pro athletes and offer it to the younger generation,” Gormely said. “Help develop them like a professional athlete from a younger age.”