Grain Valley grad finds success with sports performance and physical therapy business

7/10/2025

by Michael Smith, Grain Valley News

A 2016 Grain Valley High School grad thought it was time for a change.

Blake Desselle, who graduated from William Jewell College with a degree in psychology and exercise science, decided to open his own business.

Desselle began working for EXOS Physical Therapy & Sports Performance in Grain Valley two weeks before he graduated from college in 2021 until May 2024. Right before he left the company, there was an ownership change, and that’s when he decided to join his friend and business partner Tommy Hargrave to open Upward Performance & Physical Therapy in Grain Valley.

“Ever since I started at EXOS, my goal was to run my own facility,” Desselle said. “I wanted to do it in my hometown. There are not a lot of high-performance facilities around the eastern part of Jackson County.

“I was confident in what we were doing. Tommy and I worked together for a couple of years at EXOS. We knew each other’s dreams and visions. We wanted to do it for ourselves and the community.”

Added Hargrave, who was Desselle’s physical therapist when he played soccer at William Jewell: “We were able to market into a niche. The low hanging fruit was there and we thought, let’s go get it ourselves. We just kind of jumped on it.

“We didn’t want to follow in (EXOS’) footsteps. We wanted to do our own thing.”

Last Friday, the Grain Valley Chamber of Commerce, Desselle and Hargrave celebrated Upward Performance & Physical Therapy’s one-year anniversary.

Desselle admitted there were some obstacles along the way, but he and Hargrave have built a successful business. Desselle runs the sports performance side of the business, while Hargrave focuses on the physical therapy side.

The duo work mostly with high school athletes, including ones from Wellington-Napoleon, Lexington, Blue Springs South, Blue Springs, Fort Osage, Oak Grove, Lee’s Summit North, Lone Jack and Grain Valley.

The duo has also worked with a few college and professional athletes, including for Grain Valley soccer player Rylan Childers, who played professional soccer in Denmark; and Tanner Taula, a former Blue Springs football player who plays for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the National Football League.

“It has always been in my heart to bring this to Grain Valley,” Desselle said. “It’s scary to do something like this but we have overcome obstacles and work with a lot of high-level kids in the area.”

Desselle said he uses a scientific-backed approach when working with athletes on improving their performance in their respective sports. He said he has his athletes do certain exercises and uses force plates and has his clients jump on them and to test their shoulder strength.

He then collects that data and goes over it with the athletes, the coaches and parents and lets them know what areas his clients can improve on like jumping, throwing, running or working on strengthening a specific muscle.

“The technology we use lets me develop a program for that kid specifically,” Desselle said. “It’s specialized.

“Everything that we do here is tracked. I tell all my athletes, coaches and parents, If you aren’t tracking and collecting data while you are training, you are just working out. We are going to track everything and we have goals to get better. We sit down monthly and we go over the data and performance plans.”

Desselle said over the summer he had trained more than 200 athletes per day three days per week. He also travels to Lone Jack High School three days a week to work with their athletes for three hours per day.

On the physical therapy side, Hargrave has had so many athletes come in for treatment, that he has to book some appointments several weeks out, so that’s why the duo hired another physical therapist, Kelly Partington, to assist.

Hargrave said he works with athletes who are rehabbing from an injury or who just had surgery. He also does preseason and postseason screens for some local sports teams and spots areas of weakness or potential parts of someone’s body that is susceptible to injury.

“We can look at these different kids and be proactive,” Hargrave said. “You have a kid that is susceptible to injury because they will have a certain part of their body that is weak or unstable.

If we can catch them early, and get them in a program early that they can work on, we can help reduce their chance of getting injured. We have done some work with the Grain Valley basketball team, some with the football, baseball and softball teams. We are able to get these kids in a program early because they score low on these screens.”

“Some parents and athletes have aspirations to play sports at the college level and get a scholarship. If they get hurt, the chance for that opportunity goes down. Not getting hurt is sometimes your best ally.”

Desselle and Hargrave said they are proud of how far their business has some so far and they don’t plan on stopping any time soon. Hargrave said they hope to offer athletic training services sometime in the near future.

For now, they just want to serve the community and help as many athletes as they can.

“I want to train as many kids as I can and give back to the community,” Desselle said. “We want to be a place where every school, every teacher and every coach is comfortable sending their kids to for high level training and treatment.”

To inquire about the services of Upward Performance & Physical Therapy, Desselle can be reached at [email protected] and Hargrave at [email protected]. You can also reach them by phone at 816-268-2707.