The Story Library

In 2010, in a 2,000-square-foot warehouse that smelled like rubber mats and ambition, Ryan and Heidi Englebert started something that did not yet have a name for what it would become. The equipment was basic. The clients were local athletes who had heard through word of mouth that Ryan could do something most trainers could not: make you measurably faster, stronger, and more durable -- and prove it with data.

The founding idea was deceptively simple: give every athlete access to professional-level coaching. Not "elite" coaching dressed up in motivational posters and loud music. Actual professional-grade methodology -- evidence-based programming, progressive overload, deceleration mechanics -- adapted for young athletes and delivered by someone who would be there next season, and the season after that.

One of those early athletes was a wide receiver from a small college that nobody was watching. Ryan trained him the same way he trained everyone: with stubborn adherence to the process and the belief that development should be measured, not assumed. That wide receiver's name was Adam Thielen. He made the NFL as an undrafted free agent and became one of the most productive receivers in league history.

But this is not a story about Adam Thielen. This is a story about what Ryan and Heidi saw next.

The franchise model recruits investors. People with $300,000 to $600,000 in capital. People who may have never coached a session in their lives. The franchise hands them a binder, gives them three days of onboarding, and says: "Hire coaches." The investor manages. The coaches are employees. The employees earn $35,000 to $55,000. The employees leave. New employees are hired. The parent's experience resets. The product -- the coach-athlete relationship -- is the most unstable element in the entire system.

"The people most qualified to develop young athletes are systematically locked out of the industry designed to do it. The franchise model recruits investors. The athletes need coaches."

This is not a marketing line. It is the structural observation that launched ETS. Ryan and Heidi did not build a franchise. They built a model designed around a different question entirely: what if the person who coaches the athletes is also the person who owns the building?

No franchise fee. Revenue share instead. The director earns based on how well athletes develop and families stay. Three months of residential boot camp instead of three days of onboarding. Housing provided. Because if you are going to put someone in a building with other people's children, you should spend more than a weekend preparing them.

Early sessions were built around discipline, clarity, and measurable progress. Ryan trained professional athletes alongside youth athletes, proving the same methodology worked at every level. The warehouse grew. The word spread. And the model -- the one that everyone in the franchise industry would have called irrational -- began to work.

Jed Schmidt knew what he was walking into. He came from Anytime Fitness -- he had seen the franchise model from the inside, understood its mechanics, its revenue streams, its logic. When he joined ETS at 10 locations, he did not arrive with a polished franchise playbook. He arrived with a bet: take it from 10 to 100 in five years.

The bet was not merely about growth numbers. It was about proving that a fundamentally different franchise economics could work at scale. Every element of the ETS model contradicted franchise orthodoxy.

Every franchise executive would have called this approach irrational. You are giving up the franchise fee revenue that funds expansion. You are investing in housing and training directors for three months instead of collecting $50,000 from them. You are betting that product quality -- that a coach who stays on the floor -- will drive growth faster than capital acquisition.

The bet was not that the model could grow. The bet was that when the coach stays on the floor, the product is so much better that growth happens through retention and referral, not through franchise sales.

Three and a half years in, the results speak clearly. ETS will hit 80+ locations by summer 2026. Inc. 5000 recognition in 2024. Twelve professional athletes who did not endorse the brand -- they wrote checks. Kirk Cousins. Adam Thielen. Chad Greenway. CJ Ham. Harrison Phillips. They did not lend their names. They invested their money. The difference between a name on a billboard and a name on the cap table is the difference between marketing and conviction.

Ten thousand active members. Seventy-five percent annual retention. CEO-led hiring for every single director. And every single director still coaches every day.

The bet is paying off. Not because the market was ready for a better franchise. Because the market was desperate for a better coach -- and ETS built a system that produces them.

When ETS needed to scale faster than internal grooming allowed, their VP of Operations started looking for talent. And they found something no one else in the private sector was looking for. In CEO Jed Schmidt's words: "The primary pool that I think right now we're the only one fishing out of is the same place that other colleges are looking for their strength coach talent from. Private sector businesses are not targeting those guys to come into the private sector. We found that to be a honeypot."

The honeypot: hundreds of graduate assistants and associate strength and conditioning coaches at D2 and D3 programs, sitting one or two rungs below the head coach, watching their mentor earn $78,000 after fifteen years, realizing the ceiling is visible from the first paycheck. They love coaching. They are CSCS-certified. They have master's degrees. And no one in the private sector has thought to recruit them.

Consider the math from the coach's perspective. You are 29 years old. CSCS-certified. Master's in kinesiology. Six years as an assistant S&C coach at a D2 university. You make $52,000. During football season, you work 70-hour weeks. Your apartment costs $1,100 a month. You have $8,200 in savings.

You open a franchise disclosure document at midnight. D1 Training: $49,750 franchise fee. $448,000 to $758,000 total investment. You read Item 19 and do the math: after royalties, rent, and two coaches' salaries, the owner takes home about what you make now. Except the owner is not coaching. The owner is managing payroll, posting on social media, and hoping the coaches care as much about the athletes as he does.

You close the laptop. The franchise model was not designed for you. It was designed for someone with capital. Someone who does not coach. Someone who will hire you and pay you $40,000.

Then you find a LinkedIn post. The opening line: "You already did the math." Revenue share, not franchise fees. Three months of residential training. Coach AND own -- both, every day. Directors earning $100K-$200K in their first 12-18 months.

The pipeline widens every time a college S&C coach realizes there is another option. And no competitor can replicate it, because no competitor built the receiving infrastructure -- the boot camp, the revenue share, the dual-role model -- that makes the transition possible.

Somewhere between location 4 and location 50, the culture crystallized into something nobody planned but everyone recognized. It did not arrive through a brand consultant's workshop or a values exercise. It arrived through repetition, conviction, and the compound effect of putting coaches who believe in something into buildings where those beliefs become visible.

Proverbs went on the walls. Not as decoration. As architecture. The faith-based foundation is ambient, not aggressive. The parent who shares these values walks in and recognizes the signals immediately. The secular family walks in and sees a disciplined, values-driven training environment. The faith foundation is inclusive by being authentic, not performative.

Chad Greenway -- former NFL linebacker, investor, business partner -- described the culture in words that became the ethos: "Faith, family, and always putting your best foot forward." This was not a marketing committee's output. It was a conviction stated plainly by someone who had invested his own money into making it real.

The culture manifests in moments that no training manual can produce. A sixteen-year-old girl adjusting a ten-year-old's stance on the force plate -- without anyone asking her to. A high school football player showing a nervous middle schooler how to land properly. These are not isolated incidents. They are the culture working as designed.

"Faith, family, and always putting your best foot forward."

This is not a franchise with values painted on the wall. This is a network of communities where the person in the building is the person who built it, the phones are in the bucket, and iron sharpens iron. When a parent tells another parent about ETS, they do not lead with "VALD force plates" or "revenue share." They say: "They put their phones in a bucket." And then they say: "My kid started doing the dishes."

Dr. Rachel Nguyen is a physical therapist. She sees 2-3 youth athletes per week in her clinic with sports injuries. On average, one ACL case per month. She watches 12-year-old girls doing depth jumps off 24-inch boxes with no asymmetry assessment, no landing mechanics evaluation, no deceleration protocol. She has evaluated six training facilities for her 12-year-old daughter. Every one says "data-driven." None can produce a force plate reading.

She asked one front desk person about force plates and was told: "I think we have something like that in the back."

This is the gap ETS fills. Not with a claim. With equipment, methodology, and a director trained for three months to read the output and explain it in clinical terms.

The technology matters. But the technology is not the story. The story is who reads it. At ETS, the person who walks a parent through their child's force plate data -- bilateral asymmetry, rate of force development, deceleration metrics -- is the same person who coaches every session. Not a technician handing off a printout. Not a front desk person shrugging. The director. The person in the building. The person who was trained for three months on how to read this data and translate it into programming changes.

ETS does not say "data-driven." ETS shows the data and says: "The data says so." That is a receipt, not a tagline.

The six-week re-test is where data becomes relationship. Every six weeks, the cycle repeats. The athlete is retested. The director sits with the parent. The numbers are compared. Bilateral asymmetry: 23% down to 14%. Rate of force development: improved. Deceleration metrics: trending in the right direction. Progress is visible -- or it is not, and the director explains why and adjusts the programming. This rhythm creates a cadence of trust that deepens every cycle.

At scale, ETS is building the largest dataset of youth athletic development in the country. VALD force plates across 50+ locations, measuring thousands of athletes every six weeks. A Mayo Clinic research partnership that is not a logo on a wall but a pipeline of longitudinal data. The kind of data that changes how youth sports training is understood.

Not "data-driven" as a marketing claim. Data as a living, growing body of evidence. The data says so.