Building the Brewery Ep. 3
Aged on Hardwood
I can already feel your finger hovering over the “who gives a shit” button.
You opened an article about building a craft brewery from scratch, and here I am, pulling up a chair to talk about high school basketball. Confused yet?
Stay with me.
Right as I was finishing up my degree at Grand Valley State, pulling double duty with Penn State’s turf program, I took on another job that would fill the gap of the golf course off-season. It was a job that paid next to nothing, consumed well over a thousand hours of my life every single year, and became an accidental, fourteen-year executive training program.
I got into coaching high school basketball.
Up to that point in my life, basketball was the single solitary thing I had ever truly applied myself to. I loved it. I played a lot of sports growing up, but basketball was my first love, and it always will be. The truth is, I massively underachieved as a player. I had potential, but I lacked the work ethic to actually unlock it—a classic theme of my early life. In my sixteen-year-old mind, I was working hard. In reality, I had no clue what that actually meant. But I still loved the game at twenty-one, and I harbored this quiet, persistent belief that I had some insights that could help kids avoid making the same mistakes I did.
So, with zero experience other than playing and a healthy dose of unearned confidence, I fired off a stack of resumes to athletic directors all over West Michigan.
Most of them went straight into the trash. But I received one response that changed everything, from a guy named Brett Lambert at Wyoming Lee High School. Brett pulled double duty as both the athletic director and the head varsity basketball coach.
He took a flyer on me. And I walked right into a massive, necessary culture shock.
We’re Not in East Jordan Anymore
To understand Wyoming Lee, you have to understand the geography. It is the smallest public school district by land area in the State of Michigan—just over one square mile in size—wedged tightly between several massive, inner-city districts in the Grand Rapids area. Because of its tiny footprint and high density, the student population has an incredible amount of turnover, and it is phenomenally diverse.
For a kid like me who grew up in the deep monoculture of Northern Michigan—where the most diverse thing you’re going to find is someone with a killer tan in the middle of August—walking into the Lee gymnasium was different.
Our roster that first year consisted of African-American kids, Dominicans, Mexican kids, Puerto Ricans, and exactly two white kids (who happened to be brothers). It was a proud, lower-income neighborhood where a vast majority of the players came from single-parent households.
It was exactly the eye-opening experience I needed. When you go to college, your natural instinct is to self-segregate into a comfortable lump of people who look, talk, and think exactly like you do. Lee blew that comfort zone to pieces. It forced me to realize that there are entirely different cultures, experiences, and ways of processing the world operating right outside my doorstep. If you want to lead people, you have to learn how to communicate across those lines.
The beautiful part of the setup was that Brett Lambert was, and still is, an absolute hardass with a heart of gold.
Brett believed fiercely that when you are coaching kids who come from tough, chaotic, or unpredictable upbringings, the greatest gift you can give them is radical discipline and unshakeable structure. It might be incredibly painful and frustrating for them in the moment, but a predictable, high-standard framework is the bedrock of growth—albeit incredibly difficult to execute. Looking back on it now, his philosophy was dead on.
Brett was intensely passionate, intensely driven, and we clicked instantly. He brought me on that first year as a “we will see” assistant. Every day, I’d attend practice, but once games rolled around, I would go scout our next opponent. He wasn’t just taking some clown off the street to game nights.
This is where my high-horsepower work ethic met a bottomless pit to throw itself into.
I didn’t just write scouting reports; I wrote manifestos. I spent hours breaking down player tendencies, scribbling baseline out-of-bounds sets, and looking for any weakness we could exploit.
My scouting career lasted exactly three games.
After reading my third report that I had put together for film and practice, Brett said, “All right, this is stupid. You are way too valuable to be out in the wild. I need you sitting right next to me on the bench.”
The Unhinged Sideline
Coaching suited my personality perfectly because it is an activity where success is often a function of out-preparing the other guy. It is a bottomless pit of effort. If you want to put in eighty hours a week watching film and practice planning, the game will happily let you do it.
But I had more than one flaw back then. When I was younger, I had an incredibly difficult time controlling my emotions. I had a short fuse—both in school and in sports. It’s something that has taken a lifetime to control. But learning how to compartmentalize frustration in certain situations was a vital skill that started here.
Ironically, pairing up with Brett Lambert was the perfect cure for my irrationality. On the sidelines during a game, Brett was an absolute madman. He was completely, wonderfully unhinged at times—screaming, stomping, pouring every ounce of his soul into motivating the kids and working the officials. (The ultimate irony, of course, is that after Brett retired from coaching, he became a fantastic basketball official, spending years taking the exact same lyrical abuse he used to hand out).
Because Brett had the “unhinged motivator” role completely covered on our bench, it forced me to do something I had not done around the game before: relax. I got to be the good cop, which was pretty easy when you are twenty-one coaching guys that are only three years younger than you.
I couldn’t be the screaming maniac because we already had one. It forced me to sit back, keep my heart rate down, and focus on the quiet, mechanical details of the game. I became the calm counterweight to his storm.
And the extra fun part? We were pretty damn good. In my four years as the varsity assistant at Lee, we were 63-17 in the regular seasons. We built something sustainable out of that one-square-mile district.
Importantly, during my entire tenure at Lee, we had basically zero parent issues. These families had actual, real-world struggles to navigate. They had things to worry about like putting food on the table, working three jobs, paying rent, and keeping the lights on. They didn’t have the luxury of time or energy to complain to the athletic director about their kid’s playing time on a Tuesday night. We spent more time working with parents to alleviate those issues than talking about playing time.
Change of Scenery
Right before my final season at Lee, I took the day job managing the athletic turf at West Ottawa Schools down on the lakeshore (the toxic trap we talked about in Chapter 2).
For an entire winter, my life was a frantic, white-knuckle sprint. I would work my full shift at West Ottawa from 6:00 to 2:30, drop my stuff, hop in the car, and drive forty-five minutes in a blind hurry to get to Lee in time for practices and games. It was exhausting, unsustainable, and I loved every second of it.
Eventually, the geography had to give. I made some incredible friends while working at West Ottawa, and every summer I played on the staff softball league. One of my teammates on the diamond happened to be Doug Ammeraal, the head varsity basketball coach for West Ottawa.
Doug knew I was a basketball junkie. He saw me driving all over Hill and Dale just to coach at Lee, and ahead of the next season, he offered me a spot on his bench at West Ottawa. It was a massive relief for my schedule, not to mention getting flexibility from work.
Cue culture shock number two.
West Ottawa was a completely different animal than Wyoming Lee. While it had its own pockets of diversity, it was a district defined by lakeshore affluence, wealth, and a heavy dose of parental entitlement.
Unlike Lee, we had plenty of parent meetings at West Ottawa. Our coaching staff was relatively young, which apparently made us prime targets for the local rumor mill. You could look up into the stands during any given game and see clusters of parents actively gossiping, analyzing every substitution, and critiquing the young varsity staff. If a kid sat on the bench for two minutes too long, it became an existential crisis that required administrative intervention. We ran headlong into that toxic entitlement wall during my first year, and by the end of that season, Doug was out as head coach.
Jeff Van Fossan, who had been running the freshman squad, was promoted to the varsity head coaching seat, and he immediately backfilled his old position with me.
I would spend the next seven years as the head freshman basketball coach at West Ottawa.
Let me tell you something about head coaching any of the three teams at the high school level: it is a full-time job disguised as a stipend. The work never actually stops. Your summers are entirely consumed by youth camps, team camps, and open gyms. During the season, in addition to running my own freshman team, I spent every free window watching varsity film, breaking down tape, and sitting on the bench for all of their games.
It was easily well over a thousand hours a year of pure, concentrated basketball operations, stacked squarely on top of my forty-to-fifty-hour day job.
For over fourteen years, I essentially ran a full-time job and most of a second one simultaneously. It didn’t make me any real money—high school coaching stipends break down to about four cents an hour if you do the math—but it gave me a brotherhood. The men I coached with over those fourteen years became my mentors, my anchors, and my best friends.
They say your five closest friends are a direct reflection of who you are. The men on those benches made me a hell of a lot better. As a young coach at West Ottawa, I had to have the whole program in mind. I had to be the face of the program for those freshman kids. I had to introduce them to how we do things. Often that meant a bit too much intensity. I was, and still am, working on having some chill.
Eventually, the wheel turned again. At the end of my twelfth season, the administration let Jeff go as the head coach. I had zero interest in coaching under a brand-new regime, so I hung up my whistle. I was done.
Our retirement from the game lasted about three weeks.
Mickey Cochran, a legendary local coaching icon with nearly forty years of experience over at Zeeland East, needed someone to run his JV program. Jeff and I jumped at the chance to join his staff, and it was a great decision on many levels.
Closing out the final two years of my coaching career under Mickey was a masterclass in leadership. This was a man who had forgotten more basketball than I will ever know in my entire life, yet when we sat down to game-plan, he still genuinely valued, considered, and implemented the entire staff’s opinions and solutions. He didn’t let his ego or his legendary status get in the way of finding the best path forward. Mickey taught me how to lead by absolute example, how to be the quiet center of gravity in a high-stress environment, and how to implicitly trust the people you put in place to do the jobs you don’t have the personal bandwidth to handle.
Fourteen years on those sidelines rewrote my mental wiring. It was the ultimate, high-stress incubator. Dealing with an entitled, red-faced parent in the hallway on a Tuesday night because their kid sat out the fourth quarter taught me more about conflict resolution than any HR seminar ever could. You learn how to speak different emotional languages to different people. You figure out when a kid needs a sharp kick in the pants to find their motor, and when they need an arm over the shoulder. Motivation isn’t a stock locker-room speech; it’s a highly customized, rapid-fire negotiation. It’s the exact same muscle you use when an angry taproom customer is complaining about a late pour, or when an employee needs to be steered back on track.
But more than anything, coaching taught me how to have a massive plan and execute it . Building a basketball squad year after year requires a massive, overarching plan. You have to coordinate youth clinics, schedule summer camps, budget for gear, manage parent issues, and align a staff—all while constantly rebuilding the talent pipeline as seniors graduate. It is an annual cycle of setting a vision, aligning a hundred moving parts, and delivering on it when November rolls around. If you can handle the logistics and the emotional gravity of a massive athletic program for hardly any money, running a physical business starts to look a lot less like a mystery and a lot more like a familiar playbook.
Basketball to Brewing
All of this brings us back to the ultimate question: Who gives a shit? How does fourteen years of riding school buses, drawing up 2-3 zones, and managing hormonal teenagers connect to a craft brewery?
During my stretch as the head freshman coach at West Ottawa, I needed a new assistant coach. I ended up hiring a guy named John Cash. (A few times through this series, I am going to use pseudonyms for folks that I know don’t really want to be mentioned—obviously, this is one.) I had coached both of John’s sons years prior, and John—who had a deep coaching background himself—had always been incredibly complimentary of how I managed my teams and handled the benches. He was a natural fit, and we spent years running those squads together.
On the sidelines, we developed a perfect good cop, bad cop dynamic.
I was unequivocally the bad cop. I was super intense, demanding, and relentless about execution. I pushed those kids right to their limit. But John was the crucial counterweight. He was the one who would pick them up right after I got on them. He’d dust them off, translate my high-volume feedback into constructive instruction, and make sure they understood the “why” behind the intensity. We kept the ship perfectly balanced.
But John didn’t just know basketball.
In his day job, John is a finance guy. He ran his own business consulting and equity firm—buying, selling, restructuring, and flipping businesses. He was a guy who looked at balance sheets, capital allocations, and market risks for breakfast.
For years, John Cash sat on the bench next to me. He watched how I handled problems. He watched how I organized chaotic systems. He watched how I motivated people, how I managed stress, and how I poured psychotic amounts of preparation into a goal. He saw somebody who could lead.
More importantly, through those years on the bench, I was learning lessons that would form the cultural foundation of our future business. I learned the delicate art of human management—specifically, when to push for more out of people, and when to back off (including backing off myself). I also spent those fourteen years trying to teach young players a simple, unshakeable truth: doing the right thing is always the right thing. We drummed it into their heads on the court, in the classroom, and in the community. Over a decade of repeating that sermon eventually engrained it so deeply in my own head that it became our organizational compass. It’s the exact reason why, years later, the brewery would become known for throwing its weight behind constant charity events and community outreach. We weren’t just selling liquid; we were trying to act as stewards.
At the end of the day, it wasn’t really my idea to open a brewery.
It was John’s.
I had started playing around in the industry and was getting closer to the beer industry.
But there was still one massive, glaring problem with John’s grand idea.
I had never run a business. I was a homebrewer who had some friends in the industry. Not exactly a slam dunk. Why did this idea make any sense at all?
That requires a whole separate set of stories, mostly involving my wife, Erin, and a hobby that completely consumed our household.
We’ll get into that in Episode 4.