My top 5 biggest screw ups as a coach and private facility owner.

My 5 Biggest Screw-Ups as a Coach and Facility Owner

I’ve been doing this long enough now to have made a lot of mistakes.

Some were small. Some cost me money. Some probably slowed down the development of EAP by a few years. And a few of them seemed like really good ideas at the time.

That’s usually how the good mistakes work.

Looking back, though, there are five that stand out—not necessarily because they were catastrophic, but because each one changed the way I coach or operate EAP today.

1. I Tried to Be Eric Cressey

More accurately, I tried to turn EAP into Cressey Sports Performance.

Years ago, I attended the Elite Baseball Mentorship at Cressey Sports Performance in Massachusetts. I came home with a ridiculous amount of information and immediately did almost exactly what Eric Cressey had warned us not to do.

He told us to treat the information like a buffet.

Take what fits. Take what you can actually implement. Leave the rest.

Instead, I came home and tried to overhaul everything.

It was a disaster.

The funniest—and probably most embarrassing—part was that our athletes were happier when I finally abandoned some of the changes.

But eventually I realized the problem wasn’t the information. The information was excellent.

The problem was that I was trying to copy someone else’s system instead of using what I had learned to improve our system.

Cressey Sports Performance had different coaches, different athletes, different resources, different systems and a different environment.

EAP needed to be EAP.

That lesson has stuck with me ever since.

Learn from everybody.

Steal good ideas.

Change your mind when better information becomes available.

But eventually you have to understand your own athletes, your own environment and your own strengths well enough to build something that actually belongs to you.

2. I Was the Irritated Know-It-All Coach

This one is probably my favorite because I still have to fight it.

When you spend your life studying something, you’re eventually going to see things in your industry that drive you absolutely insane.

Bad training.

Pointless drills.

Sensationalized exercises designed for social media.

Things that look difficult but accomplish very little.

And when you know enough to recognize those things, it becomes incredibly tempting to tell everybody about it.

I did.

The problem was that I often sounded less like someone trying to educate people and more like a pissed-off know-it-all.

There’s an important distinction between the two.

Most parents aren’t strength coaches or baseball-development professionals. They shouldn’t be expected to know the difference between something that looks like good training and something that actually produces results.

That’s our job.

If a parent sees an impressive-looking drill on Instagram and thinks, “My kid needs to do that,” that doesn’t make the parent stupid.

It makes them a parent trying to help their kid.

I eventually realized that if I truly believed I knew a better way, then my responsibility was to explain the better way, not ridicule people for not already knowing it.

That completely changed the way I try to communicate.

I still disagree with plenty of things.

I’m still probably going to tell you when I think something is nonsense.

But hopefully I’m better at explaining why.

3. I Let an Earlier Failure Scare Me

My failed attempt to completely overhaul EAP bothered me for a long time.

Probably much longer than anyone around me realized.

One of the things I wanted EAP to become was a true semi-private training environment—athletes capable of working independently inside a structured system while coaches moved throughout the facility teaching, correcting and managing the process.

But every time I started moving toward it, there was a voice in the back of my head reminding me:

You already tried this.

It didn’t work.

What I failed to recognize was that the first attempt hadn’t proven the idea wouldn’t work.

It had proven that I wasn’t ready to execute it yet.

Those are two very different things.

We didn’t have the right systems.

I didn’t have the right staff.

I wasn’t particularly good at training coaches to operate the way I wanted them to operate.

And I was trying to change too much too quickly.

Failure is useful information.

But if you aren’t careful, you’ll turn information into identity.

“This didn’t work” slowly becomes “I can’t make this work.”

Ironically, that’s exactly the kind of thinking I’ve spent years trying to coach out of athletes.

Eventually I had to take my own advice.

4. I Kept Athletes Who Were Bad for Our Culture

This was much harder early in the life of EAP.

When you’re trying to keep the lights on, every athlete represents revenue.

That makes it very difficult to tell someone:

This probably isn’t the right place for you.

But sometimes it isn’t.

My coaching style requires a certain amount of ownership from the athlete.

I’ll teach you.

I’ll give you the tools.

I’ll explain why we’re doing what we’re doing.

I’ll coach you when something needs to change.

But I’m not interested in following an athlete around the facility begging him to work.

That’s not how EAP is designed.

And over the years I’ve learned something important:

Not every athlete needs to fit EAP, and EAP doesn’t need to fit every athlete.

That’s okay.

The bigger mistake is keeping someone around who consistently works against the culture you’re trying to create.

Because culture compounds.

Hard-working athletes attract other hard-working athletes.

Players who take ownership make it normal for younger players to take ownership.

High standards eventually become simply “what we do here.”

Unfortunately, the opposite compounds too.

I used to think removing the wrong athlete meant losing a customer.

Now I understand that keeping the wrong athlete can eventually cost you ten of the right ones.

Protect the environment.

5. I Used Discounts to Get People Through the Door

This one took me a while to understand.

When business slows down, the easiest lever to pull is price.

Run a special.

Discount a month.

Offer a deal.

Get some bodies through the door.

And it works.

That’s the problem.

It works just well enough to convince you to do it again.

But if the primary reason someone chooses you is because you’re cheaper today, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll choose somebody else when they’re cheaper tomorrow.

I don’t want EAP to compete on price.

I want us to compete on value.

Are athletes getting better?

Are we giving them an environment they want to be in?

Do parents trust us?

Do our athletes know we genuinely care about their development?

Do former players come back?

Do current players tell other players they need to train here?

Those things take longer to build than a 25%-off promotion.

But they’re also much harder for somebody else to copy.

Over time I’ve become much more comfortable with the idea that EAP isn’t supposed to be the cheapest option, the biggest facility or the right fit for everybody.

We’re supposed to be exceptionally good at what we do.

The Bigger Lesson

Most of these mistakes came from the same place.

I was trying too hard.

Trying to copy someone who was successful.

Trying to prove how much I knew.

Trying to avoid failing twice.

Trying to keep every customer.

Trying to create business instead of building something people valued.

Experience has mostly taught me to simplify.

Know what you believe.

Keep learning.

Be willing to change your mind.

Surround yourself with good people.

Protect your culture.

Treat athletes well.

Produce results.

And don’t panic every time something doesn’t work.

I’m sure I’ve got another five screw-ups coming.

Hopefully I’m getting better at recognizing them a little sooner.