Our Developmental Vision: The Future of Prototype Training Systems
Mike Collette • January 13, 2025
Our Developmental Vision: The Future of Prototype Training Systems
As we move into 2025, we’ve taken the time to reflect on 2024… the lessons learned, where we want to go and more importantly, the problems that we are seeing pop up all over the place.
BLUF: My vision for Prototype is to grow into a coaching community… Where adults are coaching adults, kids coaching kids, adults coaching kids and even kids coaching adults. Coaching to me in the new hospitality industry… it’s an essential part of our development and the skills transfer beyond your physical health.
In 2024, we ran several workshops in our Performance and Recovery Space… from a full day Wellness Academy where we talked about the problems and challenges we are seeing in health and wellness across the board, to a workshops on Youth Resiliency, Mental Fitness and many more.
Over the 13 years we’ve been in business, Prototype has evolved from a coaching and training facility that primarily focused on CrossFit to looking at Health and fitness across the 5 pillars (Physical fitness, Mental Fitness, Nutrition, Recovery and Community).
This past year we’ve put a big emphasis on the importance of Recovery, the mental side of fitness, Longevity (increasing the healthspan-lifespan gap) and have reignited a more inclusive kids program with the growth of our LTAD (long term athletic development) classes & our AAT (advanced athletic training) program that gives kids more autonomy to train and learn.
In other words, we’re evolving into more than just a facility that you can improve your physical health, but a delierate learning environment. As we’ve dug more into the problems around adults and kids on both the mental and physical health side, I’ve been thinking of how can we make a bigger impact and difference in people’s lives?
When I was growing up, my dad taught culinary arts at the high school level. When I was really young, I always thought that I may work in that field in some way. When I got to High School (like many kids i assume), my parents wanted me to get a job… not that school and sports wasn’t enough or anything 😀 but I also wanted to make my own money, so I got a job at a restaurant. At the time I remember my dad saying “everyone should work in the hospitality business at some point in their life”. I worked there for a year and a half before quitting and getting a job umpiring for little league baseball and refereeing for rec soccer games.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hate working at the restaurant… I worked in the back of the kitchen prepping food. I was the youngest person who worked there and when I got hired, I thought I’d be a host, but I guess I wasn’t the right fit for that role. But now that I’m older, I’ve given the same advice that everyone should work at some point in their life in the hospitality industry because of the transferable skills you develop. You learn how to work in a high pace and stressful environment, but on top of that you learn communication, you make a lot of mistakes and your judgement is tested.
Being in the health and coaching industry for the past 15+ years, my thinking has evolved a bit into this mindset that everyone should be a coach at some point in their life. Naturally as parents, we get put in this role. And like many parents we’ve interacted with, you may even be forced to “coach” your kids sports teams… even if you’ve never played that sport.
But when I think about coaching, I think about teaching and to me, teaching is the highest form of learning. There is a plethora of research out there on the oldest siblings being the “smartest” because of the disproportionate amount of opportunities to teach their younger siblings. In other words, the best way to learn something is to teach it… this may not be new for some of you reading this but it’s something we’ve been more deliberate about at Prototype than I would say most coaching and training facilities.
Where we are experimenting with this the MOST is through the leadership and development lessons with our LTAD and fundamentals programs. In 2024, we’ve implemented a weekly lesson that has built on each other each week. From coaching up the importance of getting outside your comfort zone to strategies to dial down anxiety and dial up creativity. In addition, what we see our youth programs continuing to iterate and evolve into, is a “training arena” where kids come to deliberately better themselves on and off the field.
What we’ve been continuing to experiment on is around this idea of proximal zone coaching, where older kids are learning to coach younger kids as part of their own skill development. As part of our close working relationship with the TOP leadership and development company (Next Jump), their 20 years of experience learning the best of the best and breaking down elite teams, they’ve been able to boil down these 4 Core Metrics, which are:
1/ Self Awareness
2/ Speaking up
3/ Peer Sharpening
4/ High Expectations
We’re aware that the majority of the kids in our programs play a sport or multiple sports. We look at what we do at Prototype is only additive. But we are also realistic in the sense that the majority of kids will discontinue sports before they finish high school, and a far greater amount of kids will end their athletic career once they get to the next level of education (or post high school). What we want to do is develop a system for upgrading kids. To help them dial down anxiety and dial up confidence. Help them develop the transferable skills that apply to being a better student, a better son/daugher, a better employee, a better leader.
This is our mission at Prototype and we are excited to continue to chip away at this in 2025. To end, I want to share a really cool text we received from one of the parents who’s son is in one of our youth programs…
“Mateusz led a 30 minute soccer class this morning before school started with the english language learns in the 4th and 6th grade. He is working SO HARD in all aspects of his life. And he keps raising the bar. I feel like taking on leadership roles and building confidnece has all been part of the last couple of months. I think part of it is Prototype and how being a leader there and seeing how you coaches work and talk with the kids…”
-Mike Collette
CEO/Founder of Prototype Training Systems
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