The JB Story.
In 2009, I was done playing, just another college athlete who underachieved and allowed a shoulder injury to be a scapegoat as an exit to my playing career.
The story is not uncommon, lots of guys “blame injuries” but we all know that the reality of that is actually probably more rare than actually just feeling defeated by it, the realization that you weren’t that good to begin with and coming back from an injury certainly wasn’t going to make you better and it might be time to hang it up. I don’t think I stop playing so early without the injury and maybe at some point I would have figured it out but I never gave myself the chance to find out. But I wasn’t done with the game yet….
In early 2010, I transferred from University of Pittsburgh – Greensburg “back home” to Northern Illinois University where I worked for a few weeks with the coaching staff in a sudo-manager role, where I mainly helped out with charts and some basic administrative tasks between classes and during the practice times. Yes I skipped Biology to make it to practice, this would turn out to be a poor choice (but maybe not given what I do today). It amazes me how far we’ve come with development and training, only 8 years ago and the things they were doing then would be considered archaic by today’s standards.
I was fortunate enough to land a job with a local coaching agency where I was able to travel to different park districts and work with mostly very young athletes in different sports. I think what I learned most in that time was how to effectively break things down in a way that even the youngest of players could understand. To be honest it was a weird job, where I had a ton of responsibility very quickly and I think that definitely helped shaped me into the entrepreneur I am today so while it was chaotic at the time, I’m very grateful for that opportunity.
That led me into my next role at a new training facility in St. Charles IL, Home Plate Batting and Pitching where I started as the instructional program director and that is really where this story starts.
At Home Plate, I was in charge of running camps and essentially putting development programs together. This slowly turned into more of a private lesson business mostly by luck, the camps rarely filled up but we honored the registrations and would give one-on-one sessions instead. Once the referrals started coming it was off the races, I was essentially giving lessons with all of my free time. During this time, I was also an assistant coach at Aurora University, and would later work with the staff at Judson University the following year, while also coaching a Summer team with Top Tier Baseball LLC. For two seasons.
I saw what was happening at various college levels, my playing career still fresh in my head and what I wish I could have done/known about, and I had this vision where players could have this environment to train, lift, and throw where things could be tracked and quality programming could be put in place. Unfortunately due to the rental space and tying up too many tunnels/sections of Home Plate I needed to move on.
Athlete Farm was born, my first “brand” and “company” that I started where we ran measurable training programs, VELO-city (play on words to velocity, which would eventually turn into “Velo-Nation”) including strength and conditioning programs. I spent way too much on the buildout which wasn’t very impressive but we were starting to measure things and were able to set our schedule autonomously. We not only were meticulous in the weight room but we were using a stalker radar gun to measure exit velocity and throwing velocity, as early as the fall of 2013. Believe or not we had a ‘non-throwing’ velocity program that was very successful. Here are a few images below from what used to be a conference room until I gutted it, put in indoor/outdoor carpeting, threw up a net and purchased our squat rack and other weight equipment on Craigslist.
What I perceived was happening, and I probably could have changed the narrative without re-branding our entire company, but I felt that I was all of a sudden Ryan Johansen “the workout guy” which is not who I wanted to be, I wanted to build a baseball training business and not specifically a strength and conditioning business.
I took some brief time off from running programs and went back to giving lessons, I actually packed up “The Farm” as we often called it, and moved back to Home Plate. This time I was able to bring much of my equipment and have a little more dedicated space. I was also working with NCSA as a Baseball Head Recruiting Coach guiding families through the college recruiting process.
A few months letter Home Plate announced they were closing and I needed to move again. Fortunately, a mutual friend of another coach of mine had a warehouse and was interested in converting it into something sports related. We were able to help facilitate the sale of Home Plates turf, nets, and other equipment into Bring It Sports where we stayed for almost exactly a year where I gave lessons and started our Velo-Nation program newly branded as Johansen Baseball Inc.
In the fall of 2016 I met Nate Pearson who has been a key component to our success not only as coaches but as a business. Nate spent three or more weeks just shadowing me (without pay) because he was interested in what we were doing and I was excited for the opportunity of where that could lead or the information that would be passed on either way.
As we continued to grow we knew we needed more technology that we could protect, and more autonomous space.
In the Fall of 2017 we opened our now corporate location in South Elgin IL that is now complete with two HitTrax machines, Rapsodo Pitching Monitor, Blast Motion sensors, 4-D Motion Sensors, Spinball Machine, Hack Attack Jr. and more.
In 2018, we traveled to North Carolina twice to give presentations and were hosted to run satellite camps as well as started a remote coaching program. Even bigger than that, this November, we will be opening our Second Facility in DeKalb IL also complete with HitTrax baseball, Blast Motion, and other technology where we will run our Velo-Nation programming and continue to provide quality assessments, programming, and help players become the best possible versions of themselves.
Thank you to all that have believed in us along the way and have been a client at any point in time that allows us to literally coach baseball and be “kids” ourselves all day.
A special thanks to Tom Murawski who was a great mentor to me in College and in life, Rich Benjamin for teaching me how to learn in this game, Justin Stone for openly sharing so much information on social media that inspired me, Natalie and Lynn Nesbit for creating Home Plate, Eric Larson for giving us a place to go, Kyle Boddy for starting Driveline and all of the content that goes with it, Mike Rathwell for talking business models with me, Chad Longworth for helping so many players and coaches, being a good leader in this game, and challenging us to start a really fun podcast, Dan Kopitzke for talking with me at the ABCA and again in North Carolina with some great ideas and explanations, Taylor Gardner for building a great product in the Backspin Tee introducing us to a few people and all the support on social media, Nelson Gord who is as I like to call him a ‘Baseball Genius’ and a great human being who just wants to help others and advance the game, and last but certainly not least, thank you to my parents, everybody in my family who’s been along on this journey and put up with my obsessive work habits, being lost in my own world, and essentially seemingly disappearing for a while. As well as specifically, to my wonderful wife Delani Johansen who had a way more impressive playing career than I did and runs our Softball program when she’s not raising our two great kids.
I’m sure I forgot some people and I apologize, at some point I’ve prayed and been grateful for all you’ve done for us, our athletes, and any success we’ve had that you’ve contributed to.
There is still so much more to learn in so many areas of the game, in business and in life and I hope that I can document more along the way, I certainly plan to try.