About Forge Athletics

Coach Wil's first gym was his family's backyard. At four, he began learning to box from his father, who had boxed since childhood in Cuba. The heavy bag was filled with sand and felt like cement. Training meant footwork, defensive drills, sparring with his dad, and round after round on that bag.

At seven, he entered Grand Master Byung Ho Choi's Taekwondo and Judo school in Miami. Choi held a ninth-degree black belt in both disciplines, one of only five in the world at the time. He appeared on the cover of Black Belt magazine and entered its Hall of Fame as Instructor of the Year in 1979.

Wil trained five days a week, two to three hours a day, for almost seven years. Choi began preparing him for Olympic-level competition. Then, at fourteen, Wil's family moved to Naples. He needed a new teacher, but his commitment to training was already part of who he was.

In Naples, Wil found Robert Fletcher and a different kind of training: hard-contact American Karate and kickboxing, rooted in Kyokushin through the Tiger Schulmann lineage. Under Fletcher, he earned his black belt at fifteen.

Fletcher was preparing a second dojo inside Coastland Center when the instructor scheduled to run it moved to California. Wil asked for the responsibility. Just after turning sixteen, he took charge.

At first, there was no assistant instructor. Wil ran every part of the dojo himself. He had to hold the room's attention, keep students engaged, correct their technique, and make sure the character behind the training developed alongside the skills.

Those years taught him to see the whole room while still noticing the individual. He calls it a coaching "third eye": catching the small details, knowing who needs help, and responding before a problem grows. That attention remains central to how he coaches today.

In March 1997, at seventeen, he won at the Arnold Classic. Arnold Schwarzenegger raised his hand onstage, Chuck Norris shook it, and the Columbus Dispatch put his flying split kick on its front page. Wil was building his own competitive record while already helping young martial artists build theirs.

Teaching never replaced being a student. Wil learned directly from Michael Chat, Bill "Superfoot" Wallace, Jhoon Rhee, Joe Lewis, and other martial arts legends, bringing their lessons into his own practice and instruction.

College took him back to Miami to study business and finance, and his training expanded into Jiu-Jitsu. He later returned to Naples and opened Elite Martial Arts, the first school completely his own, from the curriculum to the logo on the door. He ran it for over a decade and completed his finance degree at Florida Gulf Coast University while building the school.

In February 2000, he was the youngest of twenty-five veteran black belts invited to the Cooper Institute's first universally recognized Martial Arts Instructor Certification course in Dallas. The faculty included Joe Lewis, attorney Scott Conway, and motivational educator Brian Tracy. The experience added another dimension to his development as a professional instructor.

Under Fletcher, Wil progressed to third dan in kickboxing. He later received his third-degree black belt in Shorin-Ryu karate from Tadashi Yamashita, with Master Bryan Lentz and Sensei Lee present at the ceremony.

He also trained under Haganah founder Mike Lee Kanarek, becoming a certified F.I.G.H.T. instructor. That work expanded his training in hand-to-hand combatives, tactical knife fighting, gun disarming, and ground survival.

His fitness education continued through the Cooper Institute, the American Fitness Institute, and CrossFit. He also helped build and run larger training facilities, including Jaco Athletic Club in Boca Raton, where he was part owner and acting manager. The club housed fighters including Vitor Belfort, Tyrone Spong, Kamaru Usman, and Gilbert Burns.

Across more than thirty years of teaching, Wil has promoted more than fifty students to black belt, and his students include twelve national and world champions. He has now coached more than 50,000 hours on the mat. Many of the young people who first trained with him have grown up alongside the coaching community he built.

In April 2017, Wil opened the original Forge Athletics in Naples as a private personal training and small-group studio. It brought his martial arts experience and fitness coaching together in a more personal training environment.

In March 2026, Forge opened inside Coastland Center. More than thirty years after a sixteen-year-old took responsibility for his first dojo there, Wil returned to the same mall with everything he had learned since.

Today's Forge brings strength training, conditioning, and mixed martial arts together in a state-of-the-art facility. The purpose behind it is personal: help children grow in confidence, give teens strong role models, and offer adults the coaching and support to work toward what matters to them.

For the people who train here, Wil's history shows up in the everyday details. A correction that makes a technique click. A coach who notices when someone needs encouragement. The expectation that every student should learn something new or improve something they already know.

The story comes back to the person on the mat. Forge is where Wil passes those lessons on, helping people work hard, enjoy learning, and leave with a reason to look forward to coming back.