Joe Espinosa currently coaches infielders at Yale University, and has coached championship teams at Amherst College, and at Eastern Conn. State where they won a DIII National title with a 49-3 record. He has also coached thousands of players in private training over many decades.

In Part Three of a wide ranging interview (See Issues 10 & 11), he discusses how he switched his facility training model and the impact it can have for other training facilities.

A private training center is a different training center model.

The usual structure is individual lessons or six or 12 packs of lessons. And I did that for many, many years but I saw that kids would get out of it less than what they deserved. And as a business owner, I was always grinding out, grinding to the next lesson, grinding to the next six pack. Not that I try to think that way, but I had the rent to pay.

The big shift came when my friend came to me and he’s in the car wash industry and he was doing the same thing, grinding out the single car. And when he went to the membership model and said, “I’m not going to have thousands of people at the car wash, but I’m going to have a group of people who really value this and will pay on a monthly basis and want to have their cars clean all the time. We’re going to make this a great customer experience for them.” And my head was going to explode to change my whole model.

So I went to a year-round membership model instead of having thousands of kids come through in the off-season and then they go to their teams and I don’t see them again until the next year. And now I have them. I take 25 in-person players – I have some online as well – but I have twenty five players maximum that I work with year round. And within that year, the first year, I saw the benefit of that financially as a business owner. It took me maybe to the end of the first year where I realized what a value it was to the players.

During the season, the parents videotape at-bats or pitching or fielding, And we use the On-Form video sharing system, which is a great product, by the way. And I can look at them and either do a video review and send it to them, or when we have the next lesson, we put it right up on the screen. And now the time that we spend is very productive because it’s so focused.

So the model is you don’t need 50 million people to sign up, you just need a core group. I think you can find with this model, the experience for the players is not even close to the old model. They have someone that they can go to when they’re struggling or even when they’re doing well. They have a friend that they can come to and help them through it with specific training.

It used to be all I could do was swing development. If I had your son for 10 lessons in the winter, I’m not getting much past that. Now I can do all the situational things, all the different parts of becoming a player. I can work on those. And this is profound, not only for the coach, but for the client, for the players. I love that so much.