Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Hustle and Pro. I'm your host, Kelly Walker, and today we're at Fieldhouse USA in Frisco because of our guest Gary Oliver. He is the CEO of Fieldhouse Frisco. So we're going to talk about his background, but also take a fun little tour of Fieldhouse and what's new, what's changed. As you can see behind me, this entire section of Fieldhouse is new. It's basketball. Like they didn't do basketball before. So let's see, just to kind of give an overview, fieldhouse has league play events, tournaments year round, right? Basketball, soccer, volleyball, lots of volleyball, and even more volleyball now, right?
Let's see baseball. There's cheer over there, some tumble, taekwondo. There was a chess room set up in there. So what did I miss? Did I miss anything else?
[00:00:52] Speaker B: So we have a chiropractor in the back. We used to have medical here, but now we have a chiropractor. We have martial arts with the NTA House of Dragons. We have exos who does our fitness, and we also have physical therapy.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: We turn the turf into more volleyball. So club volleyball. We have about 50 club volleyball teams here. And we also have the club director for tournaments for the Metroplex.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: And then we turned this space into our basketball academy. Like you said, we didn't have enough basketball. We have nine basketball courts, nine volleyball courts. We have 16,000 cheer and tumble.
We also have baseball. We have indoor soccer, still footsall.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: And then we've turned this 10,000 sqft into our shooting academy.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Shooting academy? Yes, ma'am. Okay.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: We have not only Frisco Fieldhouse, but we also have six locations now across the country. We're franchising in 2024.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Okay. And so this one, let's see. So going back to 2009 is when Frisco correct started. It was the first one, yes. So did I read this correctly, that you and your business partner, Terry Casey yes. Had kids playing sports together, and this idea was born?
[00:01:57] Speaker B: That's exactly right.
My background is I played football at Texas A and M for Coach Cheryl from 86 to 90. Graduated from that and got into college football coaching and coached for 16 years. And my wife, we have three children now. We've been married 33 years. Our children are 31, 28, and 25. She was taking them around to all these different facilities to play sports, as you have done and as all the Frisco residents have done.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: It's a full time job to cart your kids.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: So my business partner, I was actually coaching his son, along with my son, and he is a real estate developer. He actually owns the Cotton Mill in McKinney, which does it's a wedding venue.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: That old mill.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Look, Bill, he owns that. So he approached me and he said, have you ever thought about getting out of coaching and doing a sports facility and us doing like, a one stop shop for moms, to be quite honest, with you? I had not, but I looked into it. And so that's how the vision was born. We met in Starbucks. We drew it on a piece of paper.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: We met with Jim Cliche, but that's how it works.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Well, we met with Jim Gandhi here in Frisco, and literally, we bought this dirt in December of 2006, and this building was open in 2009. And it's been everything.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: It's a much needed segment for a market like this. Right. I mean, as you can tell from how drying it is and how many different sports and then the expansion in the different sports that you've added over the years, too, it's necessary. There could be another one of these sitting next door, and it would still be full all the time.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Probably.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: So one of the things, if you think back to 2009, so this is 14 and a half years ago, the tollway stopped at 121. So I have aerials of our facility being built, and we had the 61 acres around it and the tollway under construction. That's how far back we go.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: You were ahead of the time.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: Well, we were in the middle.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: You're ahead of the road.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: There were four high schools in Frisco.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: And now what are there twelve? There's twelve going to be 13. So we picked this city that we thought was going to that we saw growth, and that's really what we look for when we're looking for a city in doing a field House USA, and we could not have picked a more perfect city.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: Right. I mean, you did, you did whatever market research you did in that Starbucks and beyond worked. Right.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Well, Jim Gandhi, he was the EDC president. We give him a lot of credit, too. He really listened to us. He heard our vision. He had looked at the Frisco long term strategic plan, and he said, that's what Frisco needs. So he even solved this far out.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Right. Which is what the EDC is good at.
They're good to not follow trends, but to make them happen as they want to see the city develop.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: I have met Kelly, to be honest with you, I've met with probably 500 cities. Frisco was very lucky and very fortunate to have Jim Gany because he really saw the future. A lot of cities, they see the future as far as the roads and the infrastructure, but they don't see really what the residents need and will need in the future.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: And he did.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: I'm telling you, people don't realize, but we have access points in our facility, so when you come in, it pings your cell phone or it pings your iPad. So we see how many visitors we have, and we average here in Frisco, over 1.6 million visitors a year. 1.6 million, which is more than Target or Walmart. And people really don't know that. I mean, you may know it because.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: Your kids that's a big number but I also can see it. I mean, just the number of times we're in and out. I mean, there are weekends and days. There are single days when we're in here more than once for the same kid, even especially on tournament weekends for different things or postseason tournaments for league play. I mean, you see your community in here. You see your coworkers in here. You see old friends in here, friends that used to live in Frisco and that are in prosper now. We play our prosper friends, like kids that we used to play in this room for five year old indoor soccer, who now we're playing against on the basketball court because they've moved around to different parts of the Metroplex. So it is like a whole social thing you said for the moms. I know that you it's for the families part of it, but it really is a social thing here.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: So it's interesting you said that, because when Terry approached me I'm from Breckenridge, Texas, and in Breckenridge, I grew up it's a little small, three a town, and we had 6700 people inside our town. And what's amazing to me and you just met my two of my three.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: Children as well, which I love, that they're part of this.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: What's amazing to me is we literally I know this is a city inside itself because we built it with I tell this story all the time. I can remember as a third grader putting on my first basketball uniform and going into the YMC in Breckenridge, Texas, and opening up the door, and I can still smell that wood. And so when we were building this, I said, we want to create a place where families not just for moms, moms, dad's, kids, were grandparents, where these kids can develop memories of a lifetime. And 14 a half years later, we see them come back and go, wow, I played here when I was a fifth grader. Now they're a CEO of a company.
They're all over. That's very rewarding.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: Yeah, it's so rewarding.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: And it was my wife and I and Terry Casey and his family.
It was really just kind of two of us with a vision and a dream. We didn't know what we were doing, but, man, did it work out. And it's worked out even greater than what we thought.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: I love it. Okay, we're going to pause here because I want a quick tour from your own perspective of a couple of things, because I feel like I know this place. All right, but with some of the new changes, I want to hear in your own words, like what we should be looking for and all the exciting new stuff that's happening here. Okay, sounds good. All right, so we're going to start a tour here with Gary and his son Jake. Okay? So, you guys, I'm going to let you lead the way and show us what you want to show us. What we need to know about what's going on in here inside of Fieldhouse USA.
[00:07:34] Speaker C: Okay?
[00:07:34] Speaker B: So when you come inside Fieldhouse USA, we wanted it to be a one stop shop for moms and dads and families.
We bought our dirt in 2006. We opened up this facility in 2009.
You come to the food court. So we got 5000 square foot of food court. But also over to the left, we have martial arts. We have martial arts and Taekwondo. We also have, if you look so the bread and butter of Fill House. When we're doing an expansion facility, which we have six of, or when we're doing a franchise, the bread and butter really is our hardwood court. That's our people driver. And as you well know, Kelly, because your kids have participated here, we do league play for locals, which when we say locals, we draw from about 60 miles. So if you're playing basketball or volleyball or football or even some of our Dodgeball events, you're coming from a 60 miles radius. And we do winter sports, spring, summer, fall. It's an eight week season, so you play your games on weekends and then you get your practices during the week. One of the features, though, in 2009, it was really unheard of, but we brought in a company called Academic Specialist, and they did our basketball goals. You can see they go up and down from the ceiling. But what we can do is we can convert that court from a basketball court to volleyball court in two minutes. So within that five minute transition, boom, it becomes a volleyball facility.
[00:08:57] Speaker C: Whether it's a young kid, five year old, six year old that plays on eight foot basketball goals, or an adult league, we can change that however we need to. Or if on our back two courts, we'll have volleyball going and every other court will have basketball going. It's very simple for us. We just use a little dial pad to do that.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: This is 16,000 square foot. We brought Cheer athletics in in 2011. We were two years old. We opened in 2009. We had twelve basketball and volleyball courts in here. And as you can see underneath the cheer floor, it is still our hardwood courts. But on the cheer floor, we have four cheer floors. And Cheer Athletics has over 1000 cheerleaders, cheerleaders athletes, men and women that participate in here. All of our locations, I mean, all of our different spaces are divided off by glass dasher. So this can be a totally secure space. We did that for one, also for safety, and also during the COVID era. So when a spring season ends, that's an eight week season, it will end, and we'll have like two weeks off. So we will bring in outside, whether they be regional or national tournaments and events. So we run about 30 events out of here a year.
As I think I already said this earlier, but this facility drives about 1.6 million people visitors through here. But for our tournaments, we bring about 300,000 people in for events and tournaments during the summer. Okay, this is our fitness center, and I'm going to let Jake kind of explain what happens here after the college football season. College athletes look to go to the NFL, so they go to what they call the NFL Combine. They come here and they train, and so we train. How many athletes here?
[00:10:37] Speaker C: They set aside about 50 spots here in this facility alone. Their main headquarters is in Phoenix, Arizona. But as of last year, what they have, I think seven first round draft picks train here.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Seven first round draft choice, and over 40 athletes were drafted out of this facility alone. You can go in here. So there's a lounge in here, so they feed them breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There's an outdoor movement space. They have a three lane lap pool, hot and cold plunge, yoga and workout area.
[00:11:09] Speaker C: They have full time physical therapists and trainers, so they're here year round. So when players come for the combine, they work out here. They eat every meal here, three meals a day. They're pretty much here from 07:00 A.m to 05:00 P.m.. It's their job to work out and be fed and make sure they're all healthy and ready to go for the combine because that's where they're going to make their money.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Their national headquarters was in Phoenix, and so in 2009, we brought them in to be the fitness component and the PT component for fieldhouse. What we've really done in our new facilities is we have turned this into more like a fitness, like a Lifetime Fitness or an La fitness. Because when our moms and dads come here for that 1 hour practice during the week, which you did, how cool is it to go get on elliptical and just get your 55 minutes workout in as well? So that's really what it is in our new facilities.
[00:12:06] Speaker C: Or physical therapy, rehab, injury management, all that type of stuff is very useful when your child is practicing.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Exactly. So here to the left, we took a storage room and we turned it into our corporate offices because we have six locations now. We have our corporate office in Frisco. So when we build a new facility, which our new facilities are in Grapevine, Texas mansfield, Texas denver, Colorado. Seattle, Washington and Columbus, Ohio, we bring those staffs here and train them here. So we bring them to Frisco and they stay and train. This is our PT area here with exos. And as we talked about a little bit earlier, we have converted our turf into we've left our glass dasher and we've converted into more volleyball courts because we didn't really do club volleyball previously. For the first 14 years, it was just league play. And now really, Frisco has exploded in the club world. And Andy Ridinger, he's the director for the Metroplex for the volleyball tournaments around the region. He wanted to have a location in Frisco and there was no other location other than Philhouse USA that he wanted to be in. So we accommodated him and he's now a partner of ours. So we also converted the turf in. So this is 10,000 sqft. We also converted the turf into our basketball academy because we average about 450 basketball teams, local basketball teams. Here a league season which is about 6000 kids. So we were running out of court space to do the academy and training on. So what we did was we took 10,000 turf and we brought in this technology and it's all app based. So you can download the app, you can get as many shots as you want to.
You're basically on a 30 minutes window and it tracks your trajectory, how many shots you get up.
So it's got all the technology. And on your app it keeps your information from the time you start until the time you graduate and move on to whatever world you're going to. Whether it be college world or to the focus here.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Technical improvement.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. Because what this does is if you go to a basketball practice out there and you're out there for an hour, and you're with ten other kids, you may get 30, 40, 50 shots up.
You can get about 500 shots up here in about 30 minutes.
[00:14:30] Speaker C: It completely tracks everything from everywhere. You're shooting around the three point line, you can get shorter shots in longer shots. It obviously has the technology with the net where it helps you with the arc of your shot. All types of mechanics. You can see yourself up on the screen up there.
Not only shooting, but over there on their boards right there. There's passing drills where it's all touch screen, everything. So you throw the ball into that screen. They'll have targets and dribbling exercises. It's amazing technology that it tracks everything that you do and you can access it on the app.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: So what we'll do is we'll come back here and give you demonstration. But you can start at the beginning. You can go middle or you can go in. But they do dribble where you go in and out, in and out. And then they have targets there where you pass it either right hand, left hand, or two hands to the targets and it tracks everything. And then also it has games that you can play. We live in a Star Wars world where you've got to compete. So these things are trying to penetrate the basketball and you have to knock them out before they get the basketball and your game is over. Everything is competition. You try to make it interactive for the kids. So that's a tour of Philhouse USA. And Kelly, we really appreciate you giving your time and showing the city of Frisco what we're about. We've been here for 14 and a half years. So for all the new people in Frisco, come see us. But we really want to be that. We were designed and developed, and the vision was to be that one stop shop for moms and families. As I told you earlier, we're really built on faith, family and field house. Those are our three F's in our family.
Come see us. We have martial arts. We've got basketball, volleyball, football, dodgeball. We've got the fitness, we've got the volleyball, we've got the baseball, we've got the cheer and tumble, we've got the chiropractic, we've got PT, and we've got the academy and chess. It is all here.
[00:16:28] Speaker A: Awesome.
That's it for today's episode of Hustle and Pro. Thanks for watching on YouTube and listening on your favorite podcast platform. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at hustle, underscore and underscore Pro for updates and the latest. We'll see you next time.
