AI-assisted summaryMax Schmarzo, a former Coe College basketball player, posts sports science content on social media.Schmarzo’s Instagram account, @strong_by_science, boasts over 450,000 followers.Schmarzo works with professional athletes like Kate Martin and A.J. Green and posts his training sessions online.This is one in an occasional series on Iowa influencers who are finding new ways to tell the story of the state through social media.By the time Max Schmarzo finished his senior season as a member of the Coe College basketball team in 2015, he thought he had taken his love for the sport as far as he could.

The Palo Alto, California, native traveled nearly 2,000 miles to play Division III basketball in Cedar Rapids. After four underwhelming seasons coming off the bench for the Kohawks, the idea of making a career off playing basketball post-college was far-fetched for the 6-foot-2-inch guard.

“I was never delusional to think that [coming out of high school] I’d be an NBA player, but there were still other options for someone of my caliber to play professionally overseas,” he said. “You have these goals and aspirations, and then you go to Coe and you’re Division III, and it becomes very clear that you’re not going to play professional basketball.”

After Coe, Schmarzo, now 32, continued his education by getting a master’s in exercise physiology from Iowa State University. Then, he took jobs as a sports scientist at performance centers across the country, working with athletes and everyday people on their training and nutrition needs. It was during this time that he said he gave up on basketball completely.

“I stopped playing basketball for like six years,” he said. “It wasn’t until I moved back to Iowa in 2020 to take on private practice work training basketball players that I started to get back into it, and that was just to stay in shape and guard them.”Nearly a decade after he said he was done with the sport, Schmarzo has trained some of the state’s most prominent basketball players, played in $1 million tournaments and talked with teams across the globe about the possibility of playing again.How? It’s all due to his large following on social media, he said.Max Schmarzo’s @strong_by_science account driven by explaining workoutsOn the Instagram account @strong_by_science, Schmarzo posts science-based training sessions to an audience of more than 455,000 followers. Schmarzo’s content is similar to that of other “fitness influencers,” sprinkled with his blend of dry humor and day-in-the-life vlogs about living in Bettendorf with his wife and young child.

Since creating the account in 2017 while he was a graduate student, Schmarzo has posted nearly 6,000 videos and photos. Seeing other fitness accounts fail to explain the reasoning behind the workouts they performed motivated him to start the account.

“The science can be hard to translate to the average person in a 60-second video, and I thought, I’m pretty good at understanding this, maybe I can also explain it in a way that my mom or dad could understand,” he said. “That’s where the idea of being strong through science comes from: Here are the scientific methods of why this benefits you, and you can decide if it works.”

When he first started, he said his content was longer-form blog posts that explained the nuances behind exercises, which complemented his love for sports science.

“Sports was something that I’d put a lot of time into, and as a kid, you’re like ‘I’ve worked hard at this, why didn’t it go how I wanted it to?” he said. “Now that I know more about training through competing as a collegiate athlete and obtaining my degrees, I feel like I could help people in similar situations avoid those pitfalls that held me back.”

Return to basketball includes training with Kate Martin, A.J. Green

In the years since, Schmarzo said he began to feel jaded, even as his account grew in popularity.

“It was a curated form of health and fitness information when I first started on social media, and it really leaned into the learning aspect of things,” he said. “Then all of a sudden it transitioned into being more short-form, combative stuff where I’m selling what you’re buying.”

He said he also began to get consumed with the life of managing a successful social media page.

“[I would] be so caught up in, ‘Is this the right font? Do I post at this time or that time?” He said. “It was horrible at times to be like, ‘I gotta make this post’ or feel the necessity to make a video, because it’s fun to make something you and your friends like, but I don’t want to have to be on social media all the time.”

At a crossroads, he decided to take social media less seriously and shifted his content to be more personable and started posting more about his own fitness journey.

“I really don’t like this version of social media anymore. I’m going to see if I can use my own sports science expertise while my athletes are away playing to see if I can become a better athlete and use that as a conduit to express my joy for sports science,” he said.

Part of this pivot in his content was to re-embrace basketball. Since moving back to Iowa, Schmarzo has trained some of the brightest basketball prospects from eastern Iowa and abroad.

He has worked with A.J. Green from the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, former Wisconsin Badgers star Ethan Happ and Iowa women’s basketball alum and current Golden State Valkyries guard Kate Martin.

“It’s a highly specific training program when I work with pro athletes to not just train harder, but smarter with the efficiency and the methods to yield results,” he said. “How do I help them have long, successful careers and continue to play the sport that I love so much, but don’t get to anymore?”

Will Carius first met Schmarzo in late 2022 after finishing his graduate program at Western Illinois. The Bettendorf native played six seasons of collegiate basketball at all three division levels, ending his career playing Division I for the Leathernecks.

After averaging 14.5 points and four rebounds per game over two seasons with Western Illinois, Carius didn’t have any offers from professional teams, so he went back to his hometown to train. He said he noticed Schmarzo after seeing him film at a local gym.

“We don’t see too many people in Bettendorf making content in the gym, so he kind of stood out,” Carius, 27, said. “I posted some of my own basketball clips on my Instagram, and he reached out to me asking to collaborate on a post, and we’ve been working ever since.”

Carius said initially he was the test subject for many of Schmarzo’s workouts that were planned for his professional athlete clients.

“He wanted feedback on the workout because he didn’t want to try these techniques on the high-ticket athletes who pay him for his expertise,” he said. “I had nothing better going on and I love the weight room, so I was fine with taking this role.”

Carius said his initial sessions working with Schmarzo went well, and by March 2023, he had signed with a professional basketball team in Australia. The 6-foot-7-inch forward has done well for himself as a pro, playing in leagues in Austria as well.

“Playing overseas, teams will have a trainer on staff, but they won’t always be available,” he said. “Sometimes you have to be your own trainer, and having worked with Max and picking his brain on dealing with certain injuries, I feel knowledgeable in managing things like that.”

How ‘Iowa’s most famous dad’ tried to make a pro basketball team

While Schmarzo had always trained basketball players and posted workouts with them online, it wasn’t until late 2023 that he started posting more clips of his own highlights.

As he began to see improvements skill-wise and athletically — he didn’t start dunking consistently until after college — he set out for his most ambitious goal yet: to make a professional basketball team.

For the next year, Schmarzo would post workouts and meal prep while advertising that he was a “32-year-old dad trying to make a professional roster.”

“I was hoping [my] social media page would allow me maybe to get a tryout with a team,” he said. “I wasn’t asking to be on a team, but I thought someone would agree to it, and it would be good publicity for them.”

These posts would get tens of thousands of likes as he would share videos of himself traveling and playing in semi-professional tournaments to attract attention. The increased attention also led to Schmarzo giving himself the title of “Iowa’s most famous dad.”

“It’s clearly a joke, but the irony is it also might be true, which is hilarious because it’s so specific that I might just be Iowa’s most famous 32-year-old dad,” he said. “Some people get mad when I say that, which is fine. I hope they don’t continue to follow me if I bother them for some reason.”

While he’s closing the window on becoming a pro player for now, he said he was in contact with agents and general managers of a few teams in Europe.

“There was a little more baggage with becoming a pro than I imagined,” he said. “In a pure meritocracy, am I good enough to make a professional team? Probably. But there’s also the self-marketing side of finding game footage, finding an agent and making a media package that I underestimated.”

“I also have a family, and it would be very hard to leave them, so if a pro situation came up, that would be cool, but I want to be a good husband and parent first and foremost.”

Though he didn’t go pro on his second attempt, he said he’s not giving up on basketball this time and wants to keep improving by playing in tournaments and connecting with more people.

“One of my goals is to bring more attention to the basketball being played in eastern Iowa,” he said. “We have like 15 professional basketball players in this area, and I would love to host a basketball pro-am here.”

Carius said Schmarzo is an example of how former collegiate basketball players can still be connected to the game and be successful even if they don’t make it as a pro.

“He’s a lot more than your average local rec player, that’s for sure,” Carius said.

Where to find and follow Max Schmarzo

Cooper Worth is a service/trending reporter for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at cworth@gannett.com or follow him on X @CooperAWorth.