Sax-playing ninja from Orange Park competes on NBC's 'American Ninja Warrior'

When Orange Park's Ridgeview High Panthers play this fall, one of the best athletes on the field will be playing saxophone, not safety.

Alex Romer, a 17-year-old Ridgeview senior, plays in the marching band. But he's also a highly trained ninja.

Romer appears Monday on the semi-finals of NBC's "American Ninja Warrior," a competition show on which contestants race through an obstacle course that tests their strength, speed, endurance and balance. They jump and run and climb and swing through a course that changes every week, hoping to avoid a fall into the mats or water below that means elimination.

Romer competed in Los Angeles and was good enough to advance to the series finals in Las Vegas. His performance will air at 8 p.m. Monday on NBC.

Season 15 of the series was taped earlier this year, but Romer isn't allowed to say how well he does on Monday's show. The top 24 finishers — out of 238 that started the season — will advance to Round 2, which airs on Sept. 4. The winner of the whole thing takes home a million bucks.

Romer, 17, said he got into the sport when he was around 10 years old. "I was spending a weekend at my grandmother’s house and she thought I would like the show and it would be something cool to watch with me," he said last week in a phone interview.

He was hooked, and he and his brothers each pitched in $50 to build a ninja-training course in their backyard. It's still there, but Romer said it doesn't get much use since his parents opened Mighty Orion Ninja Training in Orange Park, where anyone 6 or older can train on an obstacle course that includes a 21-foot Mega Wall — nearly three feet taller than anything used on "American Ninja Warriors." There are a few dumbbells in the corner, but they don't get used all that often, he said, because it's simply not that kind of gym; people don't come there to lose weight or cut their cholesterol, they come to learn ninja skills or train for other obstacle-course races.

Romer, the first person to come out of Mighty Orion and make it on the show, teaches classes to younger kids at the gym when he isn't in school or at band practice or training. He's solidly built but, with his long hair tied into a ponytail, doesn't look like a prototype jock (although he played last season on Ridgeview's soccer team). Being muscle-bound isn't necessarily a good thing in the "American Ninja Warriors" world, he said, because many of the obstacles require ninjas to hang by their arms.

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"This sport, you don’t want to get big and bulky because you have to hold all that weight," he said.

The course is designed to put a premium on upper-body strength and balance. "Balance is what takes out a lot of ninjas," Romer said. "If your foot hits the wrong spot, your foot spins out from under you."

Romer was younger than many of his competitors, but seeing teens on the show isn't all that unusual. When the show started, competitors had to be at least 19. For this season, the age limit was lowered to 15.

Ninja training has changed the way he moves, Romer said, but it also taught him important life lessons about perseverance and dedication. "When you're up on the obstacles, you want to let go, you want to drop down."

So is he planning to become a saxophone-playing ninja? Not exactly, he said. After graduating from high school in the spring, he hopes to follow his U.S. Navy veteran father's footsteps and join the military, ideally finding a spot in the Navy Band.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Orange Park, Fla., teen Alex Romer competes on American Ninja Warrior