My top 5 best moves as a private facility owner.

The 5 Best Decisions I’ve Made as a Private Facility Owner

I recently went back and read an old article I wrote about the five biggest mistakes I’ve made as a coach and private facility owner.

So it only seems fair to do the other side.

EAP has been around since 2010. Over that time, I’ve made plenty of decisions I’d love to have back. But I’ve also stumbled into a few things that ended up having a huge impact on our business, our culture, and ultimately the athletes we work with.

Some of these were intentional. Some were lessons I had to learn the hard way.

Here are five of the best decisions I’ve made.

1. I Stopped Trying to Prove How Much I Knew

Young coaches have a tendency to want everyone to know they’re the smartest person in the room.

I definitely did.

If a parent asked about something I thought was stupid, I wanted to explain why it was stupid. If another coach trained differently than I did, I wanted to explain why our way made more sense.

Eventually I figured something out:

Being right and being effective aren’t always the same thing.

That doesn’t mean compromising what you believe in. We’re not going to do something I think is harmful or completely useless just because somebody asks for it.

But you can listen.

You can meet people where they are.

You can explain things without making someone feel stupid for asking the question.

Most parents aren’t interested in a lecture on exercise physiology. They want to know that you listened to them, that you care about their kid, and that there is a reason behind what you’re doing.

You can educate people without beating them over the head with your education.

That realization made me a much better coach — and probably a much easier person to deal with.

2. I Realized I’m Not Their School Coach

This was a big one.

A private training facility is a completely different environment from a school sports program.

These athletes aren’t assigned to us. Nobody has to come to EAP.

And I think that’s a good thing.

Our responsibility is to create an environment athletes want to be part of while still holding them to a high standard.

Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

I don’t believe kids need another adult constantly looking for an opportunity to punish them. They already have teachers, coaches, parents and plenty of other people telling them what they’re doing wrong.

We can coach them hard.

We can correct them.

We can have expectations.

We can tell them when something isn’t acceptable.

But we don’t need to manufacture authority just to remind everybody who’s in charge.

If there’s a problem, talk to the athlete. If it continues, deal with it.

That’s usually enough.

I want athletes to respect our coaches because we’ve earned their respect — not because they’re afraid of what happens if they don’t.

3. I Let EAP Become a Place Kids Actually Enjoy Being

This may be the most important one.

I never wanted EAP to feel like another obligation.

We work hard here. The expectations are high. There is a lot of structure behind what we do.

But it should also be fun.

Music is playing. Kids joke around. Coaches joke around. Older athletes help younger athletes. Somebody is usually talking trash about something.

And then it’s time to work.

I think adults sometimes have this strange idea that an environment has to be miserable in order to be productive.

It doesn’t.

In fact, I think the opposite is usually true.

If an athlete enjoys being somewhere, they come more often.

If they come more often, they get more repetitions.

If they get more repetitions, they improve.

And once they begin improving, they become even more invested in the process.

That cycle is incredibly powerful.

The culture at EAP wasn’t created by making everything serious.

It was created by taking development seriously while remembering that these are still kids playing a game.

4. I Made Training Fit Families Instead of Making Families Fit Training

This was probably one of the biggest business decisions I ever made.

Kids can’t drive.

That sounds ridiculously obvious, but a lot of youth sports businesses operate as if they can.

Parents have jobs. Kids have school. Brothers and sisters have practices, dance, church, tutoring, games and a hundred other things going on.

If your program says:

“Your athlete trains at exactly this time on exactly these days, and if you can’t make it, too bad.”

you’ve just made yourself another problem the family has to solve.

We eventually moved toward giving our athletes much larger windows to train.

Come when it works.

Get your work done.

Leave when you’re finished.

That flexibility became part of the value of the program.

Is that always the absolute perfect scenario from a programming standpoint?

Probably not.

But here’s something I’ve learned after years of doing this:

The perfect program an athlete can’t consistently attend isn’t a very good program.

Consistency wins.

Our job is to build the best development system we can while acknowledging that our athletes have lives outside our building.

Once I understood that, EAP became better for the athletes, better for the parents and better as a business.

5. I Stopped Separating Everyone So Much

Early on, I thought athletes needed to be separated into neat little groups.

This age trains here.

That age trains there.

Advanced athletes over here.

Younger athletes over there.

It looks great on paper.

Real life doesn’t work that way.

Over time, I started allowing more overlap between ages and experience levels while scaling the work appropriately for each athlete.

And something happened that I didn’t fully anticipate:

It helped create the culture.

A 12-year-old gets to watch a college player train.

A younger hitter sees what an older hitter’s routine looks like.

A high school player watches a college pitcher go through his arm care without anyone having to give a speech about why arm care matters.

The younger athletes see where they’re trying to go.

The older athletes learn that somebody is watching how they work.

That’s valuable.

Obviously, you have to coach appropriately. A 12-year-old beginner shouldn’t be doing the same thing as a 20-year-old college athlete simply because they’re standing in the same building.

The program has to meet each athlete where they are.

But they don’t necessarily need to be separated from one another to accomplish that.

Some of the best learning that happens inside EAP doesn’t come from a coach saying anything.

It comes from athletes watching other athletes.

The Biggest Lesson

If I had to boil all five of these down into one lesson, it would probably be this:

Build the program around the people you’re actually serving — not around what you think a training facility is supposed to look like.

Early in my career, I had a much more rigid picture of what a “serious” training environment should be.

I’ve changed my mind about a lot of it.

The standards haven’t gotten lower.

If anything, they’re higher.

But I’ve learned that you can have high standards without making kids miserable.

You can run an organized program without making families organize their entire lives around you.

You can coach athletes without constantly reminding them you’re the authority figure.

And you can build an environment where serious athletes train alongside younger athletes who are still figuring all of this out.

Nearly every good decision we’ve made at EAP has moved us in that direction.

Make it easier for athletes to show up.

Give them good work when they get there.

Create an environment they enjoy being in.

Hold them to a standard.

Then give the process enough time to work.

That’s a much better business model.

It’s also a much better way to coach.