Anna Paquin and Matt Damon have both name-checked Clay Burwell to the press on several occasions. He is not a producer, agent or Hollywood maven. He is a New York City-based personal trainer. He has single-handedly kept Sookie Stackhouse (Paquin’s character in the HBO series True Blood) physically fit enough to deal with her vampire boyfriend, and Jason Bourne (Damon in the Bourne film trilogy) quick and nimble enough to stay on the lam as an international mercenary.

There seems to be some confusion about the roles and qualifi cations which separate personal trainers from athletic trainers. To help solve this apparent mystery, the National Athletic Trainers Association (NATA) issued a brochure outlining the differences between the two types of fi tness mavens. NATA has also let us know that March is Athletic Training Month (“Sports safety is a team effort” is the slogan). One telltale sign that someone is an athletic trainer is the alphabet soup that follows their names on business cards or email signatures. Athletic trainers have ATC (Athletic Trainer Certifi cation), sometimes followed by CSCS (Certifi ed Strength and Conditioning Specialist) behind their names.

After talking to Buckie Leach, it becomes evident that fencing is New York City’s version of college football. This metropolis has scant credentials in the NCAA pigskin department, unlike, say, boring cowtowns like Columbus, Ohio, or Ann Arbor, Mich. But when it comes to swordplay, Gotham is Alabama, Texas, Ohio State, USC and the University of Florida all rolled into one. If there was a BCS for refined, gentlemanly hand-to-hand combat, it would be based in Manhattan.

I had high hopes for my young nephews back in Ohio. Two of them seemed poised to eventually have their names called in MLB’s inappropriately-named “First Year Player Draft.” But by the time they got to high school, they gave up the diamond for the hardwood of the basketball floor. Why? They didn’t like their baseball coaches at the Babe Ruth and high school levels. No one did, they said. These “coaches” were dead-end characters toting clipboards, according to the lads.

Perhaps it is easiest to start with an excerpt from the Original Play website: “Original Play is a physiological and psychological process.

She earned her first national medal in the sport at age 14. At the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, she won the gold medal as part of the “Magnificent Seven” U.S. women’s gymnastic squad, using a riveting floor exercise to seal the deal and earn her nickname “Awesome Dawesome.”

He has the power to declare every lunch period a “pizza day” and he might even know the ingredients in the mythical school cafeteria dish known as “tuna surprise.”

There is a new Boss in town. And it is the Business of Sports School, a new high school opening this fall in Midtown, part of the city administration’s effort to update its vocational and trade schools.

When high schoolers describe their classwork as a “grind,” they mean it in a literal sense when they’ve enrolled in Billy Rohan’s skateboarding course. Rohan, a 28-year-old pro skateboarder who lives in Williamsburg, teaches a physical education skateboarding class at three of New York City’s public schools.

Deoxyribonucleic acid—or, DNA as it is more commonly known—used to be the stuff of biology classrooms and X-Men comic books. These days it is the centerpiece for TV cop shows and various other forms of science fiction come to life. The reality is that there’s a company based in Boulder, Colorado—an offshoot of a firm specializing in athletic improvement and talent measurement—that now offers a DNA test that screens broad, general types of sports abilities in humans. Basically, for $150, you can have your child tested to see if he or she has a propensity to become a sprinter or long distance runner or swimmer, etc. It is all based on the alphabet soup of genetics, specifically the presence of the ACTN3 gene.