He Will Not Coach Your Swing. He Will Change the Body Around It.

Zac Ansaldo runs a small, intentional training facility a few blocks from the water in downtown Sarasota, Florida. He coaches strength. He coaches golfers. He will tell you, without prompting, that he is not your swing coach — and that he is not trying to be.

“I’m very transparent with people. You are probably a better golfer than I am. I am not going to try to change your swing. But we can change the body you swing it with — and your potential goes up from there.”

That clarity is the entire pitch at Florida Athletic Club. He is the body guy. The swing belongs to the player and, when needed, to a coach who is qualified to touch it. The result is a relationship that does not compete with the local PGA pro — it complements him.

From the CrossFit Floor to the Olympic Platform

Zac is thirty-eight. He was born in Fort Myers, grew up in Kansas City from the age of six, and came back to Florida in 2018 to buy an existing CrossFit gym. He ran it for two years. In December of 2020 he closed that chapter and opened Florida Athletic Club — a smaller, boutique strength and conditioning studio focused on individual programming inside a small-group setting.

Before any of that, he was a competitive Olympic weightlifter. Cleans. Jerks. Snatches. A sport where the difference between a successful lift and a missed one can come down to where your hand sits on the bar by a few millimeters.

“You move your hand a millimeter and everything changes. Just like golf.”

That parallel is not a marketing line. It is how he thinks about coaching. The movement disciplines he came up in — powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, CrossFit — all reward the same skill the swing rewards: noticing small details, repeating them, and being honest about which ones are still off.

The Way Back to Golf

Zac played his first round of golf around age nine or ten, when his stepdad turned on a Tiger Woods broadcast and never turned it back off. His first job was caddying. He loved the game.

And then, for a long stretch of his twenties and into his thirties, he basically stopped. He would play once or twice a year if someone invited him. The gym had taken over. Golf had become something other people did.

What pulled him back was the clientele. As Florida Athletic Club grew, more and more of his members were golfers. They were the ones asking how to train smarter for the course. They were the ones inviting him out to play. They got him swinging clubs again — not as a tour hopeful, but as someone who finally understood why the people he coached were so addicted to the game.

“I had a golf lesson recently and I got excited every time the coach told me something I was doing wrong. That much opportunity to get better. That is fun to me.”

Florida Athletic Club

FAC is not a big-box gym. Zac runs small-group training where each member has an individualized program written for them, and three or four people are on the floor at a time working through their own day’s session while he moves between them. Memberships are recurring — eight sessions a month at $425, or twelve sessions a month at a slightly lower per-session rate. It sits between one-on-one personal training and a group class, both in price and in feel.

His sweet spot is the player who has been at a desk for forty years and wants to take their body and their game seriously now that they finally have the time. Most of his clients are fifty-five and up. Many are retired. Sarasota and the surrounding Suncoast — Lakewood Ranch, Longboat Key, Siesta Key — sit in one of the oldest-skewing counties in the country, and that is the membership.

It is also, importantly, a membership that plays year-round. There is no offseason in southwest Florida. Programming has to account for the player who is on the course five days a week in February as readily as the one who is dialing back in July to stay out of the heat.

The Player Who Will Not Quit on Himself

One of Zac’s clients is seventy-nine years old. He started training at FAC, kept showing up, and recently walked in announcing that he had just played the best golf of his entire life — out-driving the boys in his foursome on the course down the road. He is almost eighty.

“He does not care how old he is. He is still trying to improve his body and his game. He is having fun with it. I love people who do not give up on themselves because of how long they have been here.”

That is the room Zac is building. The seventy-nine-year-old getting longer. The sixty-five-year-old who can finally rotate. The fifty-eight-year-old who stopped slicing because his hips started turning. The point is not to compete with anyone but the version of yourself who walked in the door.

Why DRVN

What caught Zac’s eye about DRVN years ago, before he ever became a Certified Pro, was the CrossFit DNA — the metcon-style conditioning, the willingness to program for general physical preparedness, the assumption that golfers are athletes who need to train like athletes. It looked familiar in the best way.

What sealed it as he went through the DRVN Method Master Course was the framework around it. A standardized starting line. A measurable baseline. A shared language between him, his golfer, and any other coach in that golfer’s life.

The Golf Fitness Handicap™ is the piece that hooked him. A baseline body-weight assessment he can run with a new client on day one, score, and re-run twelve weeks later. Real numbers next to their handicap index. Real progress they can see without needing to know what an anti-rotational core drill is.

The certification also gave him a credible answer to the question his golfer clients had been asking for years — are you actually trained for this, or are you just a strong guy who likes golf? Now he is both.

Find Zac Ansaldo

Zac Ansaldo operates Florida Athletic Club in downtown Sarasota, Florida — serving golfers across the Suncoast including Lakewood Ranch, Longboat Key, Siesta Key, and the broader Sarasota and Bradenton areas, with clients at courses including Bobby Jones, Laurel Oak, and TPC Prestancia.

He is a DRVN Certified Pro and a former competitive Olympic weightlifter and powerlifter. View Zac’s profile or find a certified coach near you in the DRVN Golf directory.