Ned Bolcar is passionate about Phillipsburg. Ask the former high school football legend turned Notre Dame collegiate captain turned NFL player turned Orangetheory Fitness franchisee about his hometown, and he'll gush effusively about the people and places that populated his formative years and molded him into the man he is today.
“Looking back now, I think how lucky I was,” he says. Bolcar is equally as complimentary about the Lehigh Valley. “People who aren't from the Lehigh Valley, who are from places that don't have as much pride and history, they don't know what they're missing.”
Whether Phillipsburg is actually part of the Valley, or an outlier on the other end of the Free Bridge, has been the subject of some debate over the years. But that's neither here nor there to Bolcar—he considers himself both a native son of Pburg (or Lopatcong Township, if you want to get technical about the precise location of his childhood home) and the Valley. So, when a business opportunity came knocking in his old stomping grounds, he was happy to answer the call and deliver. Bolcar (along with his wife, Carolyn, and brother Brian) opened the Lehigh Valley's first Orangetheory Fitness location in April. It's inside the Allentown Towne Shopping Center off of Tilghman Street in South Whitehall Township. “We were always looking to get into the Lehigh Valley,” Bolcar says. “We're proud to be here.”
Bolcar's upbringing mirrors that of many other blue-collar kids and their families in the region in the 1970s and '80s. “Very proud people. Very hardworking people,” he says of them. His dad was a state trooper; his mom was a nurse. One of three children (brother Brian is three years older, and sister Jean is a year and a half younger), Bolcar can recall shopping trips to the Whitehall and Palmer Park malls, pizza breaks on College Hill, swimming at the Lopatcong Pool, neighborhood barbecues and playing flashlight tag and jail break with friends on summer nights. “It was a great life,” he says. “We had everything we needed: a house, three meals a day, one vacation a year.”
It was also a life where sports were a priority for the young Ned. Bolcar started play baseball, basketball and football in elementary school. He excelled at all three, but it was football that made him a bold-faced name at Phillipsburg High School. He racked up a number of honors wearing the Stateliner garnet and grey, including his selection in 1984 as a USA Today High School All-American, and in 1985 as Parade magazine's national football co-player of the year. From there, he joined the ranks of Notre Dame's Fighting Irish squad in South Bend, Indiana, where the linebacker was a two-time captain: in 1988—when the team won a national title—and again in 1989. Bolcar can vividly recall the training and intensity of his collegiate football career. “They were the toughest years of my life, but also probably the greatest,” he says. Luckily, he had a supportive fan base to keep him going. Bolcar says during the five years he spent at Notre Dame (he was a redshirt freshman), his parents missed only two games, traveling the 12 hours from their home to South Bend to see their son in action over and over again. Some of the people who watched him play in Phillipsburg were also in the stands; many others in Stateliner country rooted him on from afar and kept tabs on him through occasional write-ups in the local newspapers. Bolcar says he was honored to represent his hometown in the national spotlight. “You carry that pride and that respect for the home where you were raised.”
While Bolcar was racking up tackles at Notre Dame Stadium, he also made sure to hit the books off the field. After freshman year, he switched his major from engineering to economics and liberal arts and went on to graduate in 1989. He was drafted in the sixth round by the Seattle Seahawks the following year, but injuries cut his professional football career short. He spent one season with the Seahawks and two with the Miami Dolphins before hanging up his helmet for good.
Bolcar doesn't speak with any bitterness about his abbreviated time in the NFL; perhaps that's because other opportunities awaited him, both personally and professionally. He got a job on Wall Street and worked there for 19 years. A bachelor until the age of 44, he married his wife, Carolyn, in 2011. They welcomed their son, Cash, in 2012, and daughter, Vivienne, a year and a half later. They live in Warren, New Jersey, about 40 miles outside of Phillipsburg. Bolcar says he returns to the Pburg area whenever he can to visit family and friends who are still there. “I still have such an affinity for the Lehigh Valley,” he says.
Florida-based Orangetheory Fitness first popped up on the Bolcars' radar in 2013, when it was still a relatively new franchise. Bolcar says it stood out to him because it's not a typical gym setting. “It's not a place that you just walk into,” he says. “It's all coach-led.” Orangetheory offers hour-long group fitness classes that blend cardiovascular activities and strength training. Participants wear monitors that broadcast their performance metrics in real time. The goal is to elevate the heart rate to the “orange zone”—84 to 91 percent of the individual's maximum heart rate—for at least 12 minutes during that sweat fest of an hour. Orangetheory's founders posit that such a workout will metabolically charge the body by forcing it to work harder to recover oxygen, resulting in a revved-up metabolism that burns calories long after the hard work is done. Even if you can't quite wrap your head around the science of it, know this: “You're going to walk out and say, holy heck, that was the best workout I've ever had,” says Bolcar. And boredom, he says, won't be a problem, because the routines change every day.
The Bolcars opened their first Orangetheory franchise in New Providence, New Jersey, in October of 2014. Locations in Middletown and Shrewsbury followed in July of 2016 and April of 2017, respectively, before they launched Orangetheory in the Lehigh Valley this past April, and they're not done yet. Bolcar says they're eyeing one or two more potential locations in New Jersey, plus a spot outside of Easton, for a grand total of seven sites. It's a franchise, he says, that he believes in. “It's a great brand. You hear these [success] stories over and over again,” Bolcar explains. “People who haven't worked out in ages are now running on the treadmill. I love the fact that any person, whether you're in shape or not, can walk in and know that we will help them through the beginning stages.”
The key, he says, is a coaching staff that knows how to motivate without overdoing it. “You are pushing yourself to your own limits at your own pace.”
Another win, Bolcar says, is being able to provide job opportunities for 80-plus people from all walks of life in his beloved Lehigh Valley and beyond. “You're helping people stay healthy, and you're helping the community. That's something to be proud of.”
