Program Overview

SAPS stands for Speed, Agility, Power, and Strength — the four qualities the program is built around.

Participants learn how to lift weights safely, starting with movement basics and progressing as their technique and training experience develop. Alongside the lifting, sessions include conditioning and work on sprinting, change of direction, and jumping and landing.

Programming is adjusted to what each participant is working toward. For someone preparing for a sport season, that means training that supports the demands of their sport. For someone focused on getting stronger, building muscle, and being healthy in everyday life, the work is shaped around that instead. Playing a sport isn't a requirement to join — the program is open to any young person who wants to train, and both goals are served in the same room.

Everyone benefits from being strong and powerful, physically and mentally. Learning to move well and handle load builds capability that carries into whatever a participant does next.

Groups are capped at 6 participants, which allows coaches to correct technique individually and adjust the work session to session.

Fall Block 1

• Mondays & Wednesdays · 3:00–4:00 PM
• Begins Monday, September 14 · 6 weeks
• Group cap: 6 participants

Programs run in 6-week blocks scheduled around the school seasons and calendar. Each block runs the full six weeks, which allows the training to progress from the first session to the last.

Coach Dan

Dan Flanick is an owner and head coach of SkanStrength in Skaneateles, New York, and enters his third year as the Associate Head Baseball Coach at Cayuga Community College.

Dan has spent more than twenty-five years in athletics as an athlete, strength and conditioning coach, and sport coach. His career began in the Hudson Valley, where early success in competitive sports led to a Division II baseball scholarship at Molloy College. After stepping away from the game after his freshman year of college — following the loss of a family member and a period of burnout — he found his way back through coaching and athletic development.

He transferred to Ithaca College to study Exercise Science, graduating in 2014, and then served as a Strength & Conditioning intern at Cornell University, working across baseball, football, basketball, track and field, and equestrian sports. 

In 2014, he moved on to Baylor University as a Graduate Assistant in one of the country's top Division I programs, training under Coach Kaz Kazadi — the 2013 Collegiate Strength Coach of the Year — while working with football, tennis, acrobatics and tumbling, and cross-country. He earned his Master's in Sport Pedagogy (Physical Educaton) at Baylor in 2015.

After graduate school, Dan returned home to Central New York. In 2017, he and his family opened SkanStrength in a 500-square-foot space below a local bar, and over the years that followed they grew it into an 8,800-square-foot facility serving thousands of people across a wide range of ages, abilities, and athletic goals.

Over his career, Dan has worked with an unusually broad range of athletes — youth, high school, and college players across baseball, softball, lacrosse, hockey, basketball, soccer, wrestling, tennis, and golf — as well as individuals with disabilities, including athletes with Down syndrome, autism, and other intellectual and developmental disabilities.

His approach combines strength and conditioning, sport-specific skill development, sound pedagogy, and the mental skills and confidence athletes need to perform — all built around a long-view philosophy of sustainable athletic development. He's especially focused on what keeps athletes healthy and improving over years, not just weeks and seasons.

Dan holds a B.S. in Exercise Science from Ithaca College and a Master's in Sport Pedagogy (Physical Education) from Baylor University.