GRANGER, Ind. – Former Dowagiac resident Gary Benedix, has led a partnership to purchase the assets of Armor Technologies Inc. (www.armortechnologiesinc.com) in Oklahoma City, Okla.

Armor’s primary product is Armor Elite-Trainer strength and conditioning software used by high school, college and professional sports trainers.

Armor Elite-Trainer was created to provide coaches, trainers and individuals with software tools to automatically design, create, build, measure and analyze specific workouts to produce the highest athletic performance possible.

The software can be used for any team sport.

Notable clients include the football teams of University of Oklahoma, New Mexico State University and the University of Michigan.

“Most strength and conditioning coaches are still doing workout assignments and charting manually. By automating this work through Elite-Trainer they are can save up to 40 percent of their time,” reports BJ Cummings, Armor founder and developer who remains a part of the new partnership.

“One college football coach’s favorite report is the Combine Report that they can hand to professional football scouts when a student athlete is trying out for the pro ranks after completing his college career.”

“We went looking for a niche product either in consumables or technology,” states Benedix, president of the new company.

“We found Armor Elite-Trainer to be a wonderful product that has tremendous upside potential with very little sales and marketing effort pushing it.

“Armor Elite-Trainer is flexible and easy to use. It is multilingual so it has global reach potential.

“As we looked into the potential of other markets we got very excited and this acquisition became our primary target,” Benedix said.

For the time being, product development will remain in Oklahoma.

Support will be split between Oklahoma and Indiana.

“We’ll build our sales and marketing model to be Web, catalog and e-mail driven initially. We will also sign sports equipment distributors who call on coaches every day. And we will eventually do coaching clinics,” Benedix said.

Assessment will begin in the near future on software development requirements to reach new markets.

Benedix, a 1975 graduate of Dowagiac Union High School and a graduate of Southwestern Michigan College, also gives credit to DUHS classmate Jim Casey in making his final decision.

“Jim is the athletic director for 17 high schools in Florida,” Benedix said.

“He gave me tremendous insight on the right away to market to the more than 17,000 high schools in the U.S. I’m very grateful to Jim.”

Benedix is also a graduate of Western Michigan University and a former Cass County commissioner.

He is a partner of South Bend high-tech companies Syscon International and Microscreen, LLC.