Ep 378 What Does It Actually Take to Build a Twenty Six Team Club? ( part 2)

Interview: Joey Fuca, Lake Show Links mentioned in this episode ⁠TeachHoops.com⁠ ⁠LakeShowHoops.com⁠ — Joey's club in the Bay Area. Contact info is on the About Us page ⁠CoachingYouthHoops.com⁠ Beyond Pulse — the wearable band Coach Bill is testing with his team ⁠NukeHydration.com ⁠— the fifteen second voice note evaluation app Coach Bill is also testing What Does It Actually Take to Build a Twenty Six Team Club? Gym time, good coaches, and the myth of arriving. Coach Bill sits down with Joey Fuca, who runs Lake Show in the Bay Area and is also, as Coach Bill puts it, his boss. Two years in the making. Joey has coached everywhere from his third grade son's team to the college and pro level, and Lake Show now runs about twenty six teams and roughly two hundred forty boys. Strip away the uniforms, the tournaments, and the Instagram posts, and Joey's answer is simple: helping kids. Ages seven and eight through the teens, and then staying connected to those families for decades. Over the last four or five years he has hired coaches who played in the program. He has coached multiple sets of brothers. He had Lake Show guys in his wedding party as groomsmen. He calls it a lineage of players. The club started in 2005 as a family project. His dad, Joe Fuca, a tech CEO who worked at DocuSign through its IPO and now coaches at a small school in Dublin, put it together for Joey and his buddies. Nothing more ambitious than that. Joey's advice to players is the same thing he did himself: take one or two good things from every coach you have. John Raynor, his high school coach at San Ramon Valley for over thirty years, taught him toughness, grit, and how to grow up as a young man and be a leader in the community. He and Mark Madsen, now the head coach at Cal, recently went up to visit him. Chuck Martin, his college coach at The Master's College and a former Liberty coach, was a great leader of men and modeled spiritual values off the court. Eric Musselman, whose kids came up through Lake Show, brought Joey on as a grad assistant at Nevada after Joey finished playing professionally in Germany. That opened up the business side, right at the front edge of the transfer portal era, which Musselman helped spearhead. What carries over to youth coaching is smaller and more ordinary than you would expect: getting to practice fifteen minutes early, how you communicate during practice, how you actually run a team. Coach Bill asks what that coach is thinking about wrong. Joey's answer is that the premise itself is off. People want the end state, the twenty or thirty or fifty teams, without the part that gets you there. Build a product you can be proud of. If that is two teams, it is two teams. Growth follows quality. The non negotiables: A good director. The leader of the program is what families actually see. Good coaches. They are the ones interacting with the athletes every week. Gym time. Everything else is theoretical without it. Community roots. You do not start a program where you have no influence. Joey's is in Danville, where his son goes to school and has his friends. Coach Bill adds the part that catches most coaches off guard: at twenty five teams you are running a business. Books, payments, scheduling, conflicts. "I'm a coach, therefore I can coach a team" turns into "I have to learn how to run a business." Hiring gets more delicate. Lake Show keeps it close to home, drawing from former players in the program or warm referrals from coaches Joey trusts. Gym time becomes a hard ceiling. If you are in a district with a fixed allotment, that allotment is your program size. Basketball is an indoor sport and the season is fall and winter, so there is no workaround. Joey's advice to a new director: treat gym time as your business. Go to every district, every church, every space that might give you a relationship. And you need help. Lake Show's director of operations, Jeff Maw, wears every hat: coaching, registrations, promotion. Coach Bill's version of the same point is to hire people smarter than you with strengths you do not have, which is hard for coaches who are used to believing they know everything. For most of its life, it did not. The program was high school only, one or two teams, built around the goal of getting kids into college, D1, D2, or junior college. Joey's mom used to give them a hard time because they never ran it like a business. They poured their own time, money, and resources into it. Joey started looking at it as a business about ten years ago. The youth program is only eight or nine years old. They added middle school because families had been asking for years, all those high school players had younger siblings, and the Fuca family wanted a way to keep the thing in the family while still serving the area. It started as one sixth, seventh, and eighth grade team. Once you have one team, you start creating more. They set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2017