All over the country, they’re sprouting. Performance training sites geared toward making the great athletes even better.

The Huffington Post has traced this training phenomenon to the NFL Combine, the event this week in which athletes show NFL scouts how they can do everything but tackle and catch a football. It’s part of what has led to a boom in the performance training industry.

Specifically, the Post writer looked at the Athletes Performance training facility at Home Depot Center in suburban Los Angeles where dozens of prospective NFL players work out daily.

Sports agencies make the considerable investment of sending their prospects to all-inclusive programs that average $2,000 per week. Athletes’ Performance works in unofficial partnership with sports agents such as Octagon’s Senior Client Director Doug Hendrickson, who are committed to giving their clients the best possible chance at becoming members of the National Football League. Unrepresented college hopefuls “on the bubble” of draftability frequently raise the money to pay for their own training as a means to shoot for their dream.

Athletes’ Performance is probably the most well-known NFL Combine preparation program in this exploding performance industry. That reputation reflects a client list featuring the biggest young names in the NFL: Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III, Sam Bradford all trained here. In 2012, 63 draft picks honed their considerable skills at one of AP’s four locations (Phoenix, Los Angeles, Texas and Florida). Fourteen of those were first-rounders and included the top three selections (Luck, Griffin and RB Trent Richardson).

Given only a few short weeks, NFL Combine prep programs take on the daunting task of equipping college athletes with enough psychological, physical, social and self-preservation tools to withstand sudden immersion in the biggest business in American sports. That they succeed at all is a marvel.

The Post concluded that the businesses seem to care more about their clients than others we may see.

Amidst raging debates about the amateur status of college athletes whose football labors fund universities, the too-often unchecked power of college coaches, the prominently corrupt antics of some agents and the all-too-frequent cavalier disregard for player safety at all levels, this “true believerism” is somewhat perplexing to your average skeptic. What is one to think when a profit-based company is rife with authentically sincere employees who genuinely seem to care about their clients?

– Bill Bradley, contributing editor