Rangel’s Athletes Jump for Joy
Larry Shield
OC Register, May 1998

Laguna Niguel’s Mike Rangel formed Plyo-City Youth Development last year to train young athletes to develop their quickness and vertical jump.

Clay McKnight is one of the recipients of Rangel’s program. McKnight will be the 6-foot-2 starting shooting guard for the University of Pacific this winter as a junior, and has done plyometric training for the past two months.

“Plyometrics is a form of fast twitch muscle fiber movements that makes an athlete react quicker.” Rangel said.

“It’s a series of drills we do to force an athlete to react a lot quicker than he normally would.”
Examples of these drills include hopping on one or two legs, jumping from one box to another.

When McKnight started working out, he could barely touch the rim. Rangel said McKnight recently dunked a volleyball and isn’t far from jamming a basketball.

“(Rangel) is first class person and he runs a first class program,” said Clay McKnight. “He works with you individually. He takes you under his wing to try and make you a better athlete.” McKnight said he developed more quickness and vertical leap. McKnight worked hard this summer with Rangel.

“A lot of people out there are in it just for the money and that’s not the case with coach Rangel’s program,” added McKnight. “He’s in it for the athlete and that’s hard to come by.”

As a result of training Clay McKnight, his dad and Mater Dei coach Gary McKnight has referred several of his basketball players to Rangel. Fifteen years ago Rangel learned about the training techniques from Russian, Cuban and East European volleyball players.
He originally implemented the program to train his son, Steffin and other Aliso Niguel High basketball players.

Now Rangel has 80 athletes, including six females from high schools in the area representing other sports such as soccer, volleyball, baseball and tennis players. Rangel said the word is out that what he does works. Scholarships are available for athletes who cannot afford the $125 per month training fees. Rangel does the training at Crown Valley YMCA on Tuesday and Thursday from 5:30 to 7:15 p.m.

The goal of plyometrics is to have exercises enable the muscles to reach their maximum strength in as short a time as possible.

“Your body weight is being used as you come down to the ground to explode back up, plus it’s called a depth jump,” he said. “It improves your jump without any weight, like three or four inches-that drill alone, over a two or three month period.”

An athlete can stay consistent with the program if he does it once a week during his season, Rangel said. The workout has breaks between each movement, because it’s not meant to be aerobic.