As I told you in my second post, I never liked selling. I was terrible at it and I didn’t like the idea of having to convince people to sign up for training for me. I want to train people that want to be there and want my services. If I have to plead for your business, it’s not going to work out for either of us.
When you’re training people who are a pain in the ass and aren’t invested, it sucks. It turns a passion into a job. Running my business on my own allowed me the chance to make it what I wanted it to be. I have the luxury of having a full-time teaching job, which means I’m not dependent upon coaching to pay my bills. I don’t have to sell people on my training and I don’t try to either. You either want to be here or don’t. I’ll get into it more in a later post, but I just want to train a group of athletes at all levels who want to get better and will bring it every session. I don’t want to be overwhelmed with clients because I don’t have enough time and I want to be able to really get to know the ones I train.
To keep this business going, I had to expand my reach. Fortunately, Gabe Pimenta, who I’ve said has always been in my corner, put me in touch with Marc Goldberg. Marc, who I can’t remember everything he does, so I’ll just say he’s very involved in the sports scene on Staten Island, let me train his daughter, Annalise. Annalise is a stand-out flag football player and just one of those kids who gets it. She was in fourth grade at the time, but had the maturity of a high-school kid. I really had to be on my game training her because she listened intently to everything I said and made training observations that kids her age don’t make. Three years later, Marc sent me he son Brylan to train, too.
Marc was another guy that was always looking out for me and supported what I did. He made training his kids easy because he was always accommodating. He also sent so many kids my way when parents reached out to him about speed and agility training. The biggest reason I’ve been able to expand my reach has been because of Marc. Any coach will tell you working with quality parents is just as important as the kids and that’s a trend you’re going to see throughout this post.
Marc always sent me good people and the first good one came in August of 2021 with Taylor Morton. Taylor was a soccer player and reminded me of Juliana Carrara. Those girls soccer players are just built different and can make a case for being the toughest athletes. I still remember our first session and it was hot at the Bloomingdale Park turf and Taylor was running through every drill without taking a break. It got to the point where I had to force her to take a break. I also remember she didn’t really talk much for the first six months. I’d have to get all my information from her parents, Jimmy and Theresa. Jimmy, who was a wide receiver at St. John’s, was always somebody good to talk to when I was having a bad day because he’s on the same page with me when it comes to the Giants and Yankees. Theresa, from her many soccer travels, helped fill me in on what off-sides meant and we would count down the days to summer as fellow teachers. They told me Taylor’s silence wasn’t the case at home and now I get everything from her when she comes for her lifts. I get good lifts and all the gossip. Watching her grow up and make it into her dream school, St. Joseph by the Sea, has been so much fun to see.
The summer of 2021 also gave me my first opportunity to run a large group session on my own thanks to Anthony Hillery. Anthony was the varsity baseball coach at Petrides and ran a sports camp over the summer at the high school. He posted online that he was looking for recommendations from friends on coaches who would volunteer to help for a day. Steve Hemmes and Patrick Murphy both knew Anthony and were both nice enough to throw my name into the hat. Anthony gave me the opportunity to take a large group of high school athletes through a morning speed and agility session. I’ll never forget that day. Anthony is a great person who was just so good to me that day and made sure everything ran smoothly for me. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not a morning person. I went into that day pretty tired, but left ready to conquer the day because it was exhilarating being the head person in charge of a group session that large. I did get flashbacks to my first speed session at SSI in 2016, but this one ran smoothly thanks to things Kav taught me since then.
Right before 2021 ended, I picked up an old friend from Intoxx Fitness in John Schulman. When I trained John at the gym, he was playing flag football and his dad, Bryan, was telling me how he was going to get him into tackle. When John came back to me a few years later, I was worried my gym wasn’t big enough because the young flag football player turned into a 6-foot-4 monster offensive lineman. I only had him for a few months because he was moving to South Carolina, but he went hard outdoors on the turf and in the gym to get himself ready for playing football down south.
My first big addition of 2022 came when Morton’s delivered the Carlson’s. The Carlson’s are your prototypical sports family, in addition to just being all-around great people. The father, John, is a football-guy through-and-through and somebody that would do whatever it took to help his sons succeed. Jeanine is a sports mom who not only racks up the miles driving to her kids sports games, but goes across the country taking her kids to see all the pro stadiums. The training started with Justin in 2022 and a couple of years later Jack joined in. Justin is a football player entering his junior year at Manalapan High School, but we still got plenty of baseball talk mixed in there as he would tell me about all of the baseball stadiums he visited. Unfortunately, he’s known as the “baseball fraud” because he would bring both teams hats to a game to try and get balls during batting practice. Jack, if you couldn’t tell from the face in the picture, is a linebacker who doesn’t shy away from contact. He’ll also crack you up with one of his one-liners when you least expect it. The fact that this family travels from New Jersey to come train with me makes me grateful for every session we have together.
The Goldberg tree of referrals continued into the summer of 2022 when he sent over the prodigy, A.J. Galli. My favorite A.J. story happened during our second session together. For our first session, his dad, Steve, who was another parent that just treated me fantastic, gave me five kids to run a group session the first time I met him. A.J. was one of the five and this was the first time he’d ever been with me. The next time we met for a one-on-one session, he remembered every exercise all the way from the first warm-up and the order they were run in. He actually told me when we ran one exercise out of order. He was 7 at the time. A.J. was a star in the classroom, on the baseball field, when he played flag football and, especially when he played golf, where he traveled all over for tournaments. He was so mature about training at 7 years old that you couldn’t talk to him like a regular kid. His demeanor and processing made it where I treated him like he was in high school. Iy took me a while to adjust. He honestly did not mind training in any condition and we did. His last session with me was in July of 2023 because he moved to Florida and you can see it started raining when we took our picture. I actually had to tell him the session was over because he was ready to go for another half-hour. A.J. and Steve were just so great to work with and I miss them everyday.
What you notice throughout the writing of all my athletes is how great they are to work with and the great families they come from. When you’re working with kids, the families are just as important as the athletes you’re training and these people, along with the ones I’ll talk about in my final post are all tremendous people. The hardest part when writing all these is figuring out different adjectives to use instead of great and awesome.