Smart Hands: Graduate scores with sports massage business

Posted on Friday, July 20th, 2018

Basil Phillips learned a lot when he attended Algonquin’s Massage Therapy program in the late 1990s. But there was something missing, he says.

Thanks to the veteran massage therapist himself, the gap has been filled.

Phillips became interested in massage therapy because of his background in sports. He was looking for a business that would continue to keep him involved in athletics, he says.

He knew Algonquin’s Massage Therapy program taught hands-on skills that would be useful in treating sports injuries, but there was no course that catered directly to his interest. “One of the things that was missing was just getting to work with athletes and with the sports population,” Phillips says.

Now, thanks to Phillips himself, the Massage Therapy program has a specific sports outreach program. He developed it and continues to teach it. “I set it up and introduced it to the powers that be and they were more than happy to go along with it.”

Phillips is well qualified to co-ordinate the sports outreach. Since leaving Algonquin, he has provided injury rehabilitation treatment to all manner of athletes, including elite competitors with provincial and national rankings. He was registered for about seven years with the Canadian Sport Institute Ontario, a sport science and medicine provider funded by Sport Canada, the Ontario government, and the Canadian Olympic Committee.

He runs his own business, SMART Hands (SMART for Sports Massage and Relaxation Therapy) in Stittsville, and also treat clients at the Metcalfe Massage Therapy Clinic in downtown Ottawa.

“I’ve treated athletes from the weekend warriors who get out once a week or once a month, to professional athletes on professional contracts,” says Phillips. Professional ethics prevent him from naming names.

Such elements of professionalism were a key part of the course work at Algonquin, Phillips notes. “I learned a lot about how to interact with people, how to be a professional, how to be in control your own destiny, in terms of how you market yourself and how you produce yourself as a product and a professional individual.”

The massage treatment techniques taught in massage labs and theory courses in the Algonquin program were lessons that Phillips draws on every day, but the professional and business skills he learned were at least as important, he says.

He cautions students who come into the Massage Therapy program thinking it will be an easy ride. “My advice to students is to … take it seriously, put in the amount of work that the program actually requires.”

“And then,” he says, “learn how to be a professional, because once you get out there it’s not about somebody doing everything for you. It’s more about doing things for yourself.”


Comments

Comments are closed.