Located a few blocks east of the always-bustling Central Avenue in Blaine, just off Highway 10, a nondescript gray cement building beckons hockey players of all ages. 

Inside those walls, insulated from the hustle and bustle of one of the north metro's busiest thoroughfares, the next hockey season's standouts are built.  

Athletes busy themselves with pull-ups, bench presses, and box jumps. Trainers offer encouragement and criticism. Deep breaths and sweat are mandatory.  

Amid the controlled chaos, Brandon Marino is in his element. As Director of Player Development for The Hockey Lab, he must be. 

"My goal is to make sure, and my job is to make sure that's what we're providing to our players, that we have the right staff in our gym, Marino says. 

"We have a lot of certified strength coaches that train at our facility, and then obviously, the hockey side on the ice, we have highly qualified skill coaches and guys that have been coaching for a lot of years in our program."

Opened in January of 2021, The Hockey Lab's versatile instruction has already built a loyal following among teams and players in the Twin Cities metro area. 

In addition to training individual athletes, The Hockey Lab also provides instruction for entire teams, including the Centennial and Champlin Park/Coon Rapids girls' programs last season. 

After consulting with the coaching staff of their various team clients, for Marino and The Hockey Lab staff, training high school athletes represents a distinct challenge, considering the myriad of variables among the age group's schedule. 

"(At the) high school level is very unique in that it's actually more similar to a pro level in the way that the game's structured than some of our college teams would be," Marino said. 

"College is Friday, Saturday, you play, you have all week to train, so you can go hard Monday, Wednesday, and still recover. Whereas a lot of these high school kids are playing Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, they're playing every other day."

A former North American Hockey League standout and four-year contributor to the Bemidji State men's hockey team, who also holds a Master's Degree in Exercise Science from the California University of Pennsylvania, Marino added that training high school athletes is more varied due to the vast range of stages the body advances through during the high school ages.

That variance calls for a level of program tailoring that exercises Marino and his staff's creativity. 

"Even though (an athlete) is 15 years old, this is still the first time you've ever lifted a weight. So we need to really get to the basics, make sure that we drive home good form and technique," Marino said before expanding to the other end of the experience spectrum. 

"Or, you have the athlete that comes in at 15 that's had good development somewhere, and now they can start in a more advanced portion of the program. So we have a standard where we start, when the first time we see them, we do some baseline testing, and see where they are. And then we build our program out from there and progress or regress as necessary."

In recent years, Marino and The Hockey Lab have benefited from an uptick in youth and prep players investing more heavily in their offseason workouts. No longer is shooting 100 pucks on plastic ice and jogging going to be considered an adequate summer regimen.  

"I think that it's slowly shifting to now, if you're not doing those things, you're going to fall behind," Marino said. "If you don't come into training camp in shape or go into your high school tryouts in shape, you kind of get overlooked. That's a prerequisite now for making a team is you've got to prove that you put in the work and that you came ready. So I think that there's definitely been a huge shift in the off-ice training focus for high school athletes."

While some of hockey's old guard may deride players enlisting the skills of professional trainers during the summer months, the benefits of structured off-ice training not only include a stronger shot or a faster first step, but injury mitigation as well.

A strained groin or a hip pointer at a critical point during tryouts or early in the season can sometimes be avoided, or at least more effectively managed, if the work has been put in beforehand. 

"You got to find somewhere where you get taught the right way, and you're ready to go when you get to high school to give yourself the best opportunity to make the varsity team (and) play at a high level," Marino said. 

"You can't wait until you're there to do it."