Will Bartholomew - From Peyton Manning's Teammate to D1 Training Founder
About this episode
Will Bartholomew shares his journey from being a walk-on at the University of Tennessee to founding D1 Training, discussing the challenges and lessons learned along the way.
Before he built one of the biggest names in youth sports training, Will Bartholomew was a walk-on at the University of Tennessee trying to survive fall camp with a quarterback named Peyton Manning. In this episode, the D1 Training founder sits down with Eric Malzone to trace the whole arc — training athletes in an open field back in 2002, opening a patio-carpet-and-turf gym with racks he screwed together himself, and slowly turning that into a franchise system now closing in on 220 locations nationwide. Will gets honest about the messy middle: no point-of-sale system at location two, why D1 doesn't open on Sundays, selling off 27 real estate properties and a physical therapy business to go all-in on the gym he actually loved, and the advice from his father that changed everything — "never scale anything until you've scaled it yourself." He also digs into what makes a great youth strength coach today, how D1 uses radical transparency and scorecards to keep coaches bought in, why he thinks the $115 billion youth sports market is still in its first inning, and the balance every sports parent is chasing between competing hard and keeping the game fun. Whether you're a gym owner…
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