Building a Club Team with BBL's Andrew Hubschmann

"Devitte Developmental Lacrosse" sounds good, right?

If you go back in the archives of LacroCity, you’ll find a few entries on how negative coaching has rankled me, and also the irony of why that is the case. I’m a reformed screamer in the sense that now I just yell names and tell people to get on and off the field with a volume so insane that it has made me pass out during games.

I’ve come to realize that my favorite thing about coaching is developing players. The mistake I made as a young coach was thinking that I could do that at the college level. Nowadays, it is basic knowledge that players are developed at a much younger age. And a lot of the players that make it to the college level are brought along by the club team system.

So, how do you start a club team? How do you run it the right way? What are the biggest challenges? Andrew Hubschmann from Building Block Lacrosse reached out to me about this process. BBL has been developing players in the New Jersey area for almost two decades now, so who better to ask about the entire process than a successful club team in one of the biggest markets in the country? This is how our shockingly synergistic conversation went.

Kyle Devitte: What was your background with lacrosse that made you want to create a club team?

Andrew Hubschmann: My brother Greg is kind of the key in my whole story because he was a self-made player. I was introduced to lacrosse for the first time when my brother started attending the Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey. The program was still in its infancy and kind of growing into what it became. I'd watch him practice for hours at a time because he just loved it. My father defected from [then] communist Czechoslovakia. So, when he and my mother came to America they didn't have a background in American team sports. Lacrosse was one of the sports that we came to later than most.

He wasn't particularly athletic - just like myself. But we both fell in love with practicing in the backyard and all the training that went into becoming good at lacrosse. My brother started getting playing time, but he wasn't getting recruited. He got into Georgetown on his just academic profile and tried to walk on as a freshman, but he got cut. That summer he came home and told my dad, “It's my dream to make this team. I'll do whatever it takes.”

This was in the mid-90s before there were any specific training tools for lacrosse. My father MacGyvered together these training tools out of stuff he found in the garage. He took a backpack and tied some string to a sled. He would have my younger siblings and me sit on the sled while my brother would do sprints up the hill. He took a fishing vest and put all these two to five-pound weights in the pockets. I got to see my brother working and training with my father using innovative ways to become a dramatically better player.

He walked on at Georgetown as a sophomore. Coach Rick Sowell, who recruited me to Georgetown, took my brother under his wing and basically trained him all year. In the last game of the season, my brother got playing time in a relatively insignificant game, but he scored three goals. He came back the next year, bigger, faster, and stronger. He became a two-time All-American. That is what I love about lacrosse. I think anybody with the right amount of time, dedication, and effort can be a self-made player that goes on to be very successful. I also am a big believer in training smarter not harder.

In my sophomore year of high school, I remember distinctly my coach telling me that I ran like a pregnant yak. That's how unathletic I was. I was very much a player that overcame his athletic deficits by having better stick skills. Then I started to learn about athletic training and that you could actually make yourself a better athlete with the right program. Eventually, I put those two things together.

I started getting playing time as a junior, but I wasn't getting recruited. Then, over a two-month period, it all clicked and I played the best lacrosse of my career. I started getting calls from places like Cornell, Notre Dame, Georgetown, and Brown. I remember Peter Lasagna told me that the reason he picked Brown was that it was the one school he'd want to go to if he couldn't play lacrosse; that’s where wanted to be. I’ve repeated that advice countless times.

I picked Georgetown. I was going to have an awesome senior year. But then I tore my ACL and I didn't play. I was the last guy on the bench; part of the practice squad. I worked hard all year. At the end of the season, I met with Coach Urick and he said, “If you don't come back bigger, faster, and stronger, you're not making this team next year.” I did double sessions. I was at the peak of my game that spring. The coaches told me that I was going to get some time with the first unit. I ran out of the box and within 10 minutes I tore my ACL again. That was the end of my playing career.

So, I never really had fulfillment in terms of reaching a pinnacle of success with lacrosse. I ended up being drawn to coaching. I wanted to help other people achieve things that I couldn't achieve myself. Wanting to help others achieve their dreams and seeing what happened with my brother - his story - that's the inspiration behind the Building Blocks Lacrosse Club.

KD: Do you think that a kid can make a Division One team without playing club lacrosse in 2022?

AH: I think there are certain players that are either exceptional athletes or multi-sport athletes or maybe their guys are focused in other sports that can do it. They either hit a tremendous growth spurt or they just come to lacrosse later than most.

Those guys could just be getting into lacrosse through their high school programs and then discover later on that they're great lacrosse players and ultimately get recruited. There are guys that have been able to have a successful career because their overall development as an athlete allowed them to adapt to lacrosse.

KD: Well, let's flip that around then - can you make a high-level lacrosse roster without being a high-level athlete?

AH: I would say you have to have something exceptional about your game. There might be some box lacrosse players that grew up in a very unique environment so they have a very specific skill set, like finishing around the goal. Maybe they're not, on paper, these amazing athletes in terms of strength or speed or agility but they might have another skill set like amazing hand-eye coordination.

I think there are different stories for different types of players. But if you’re not that type of special case, I don't think you can be a high-level contributor. Not without being a tremendous athlete or a well-rounded player. I don't ever see a guy going into a top team without having some sort of exceptional attribute that's going to get them on the field.

KD: How does that conversation go? If there's a kid on your club team that just wants to play at a high level, but you know, that athletically and skill-wise he probably can't - what do you tell that kid? How do you frame that?

AH: We feel like the greatest good is to keep our integrity as a program and not mislead anybody. We think for the players, telling them exactly how things are, the reality of the situation, and about who they are as a player and where they fit - that’s the key to success. We're not reaching out to schools and promoting kids that aren't going to be good fits at those schools. Losing our credibility with the schools or setting a kid up where he's in the wrong place and wants to transfer later on…I feel like a lot of clubs are really focused on the accumulation of where all their kids are going. They’re promoting that versus placing a kid in the right school. Whether it be going to an amazing academic institution like a Williams or an Amherst or just a great experience at a different school. Integrity is key.

There are ways that you can make a career out of playing lacrosse, but obviously, those are the best people in the sport and they have to hustle to make a full-time career in lacrosse. Ninety-nine percent of the lacrosse world is not going to go play professional lacrosse, let alone be able to figure out how to make a career from it. We are honest with the kids. We tell them their strengths and weaknesses. We tell them what the right range of schools should be, and we give them all the tools we can give them. At the same time, we are guiding them towards being placed in the best academic and lacrosse fit so that they have a great four years in college. That puts them in a position to go on to have a great career.

KD: What is the best part about your journey and running a club team from the start to now?

AH: I'd say the best part is that this whole time, we've been able to mold the company in real-time and not be stagnant. We've been able to pivot at various points during the evolution of the club and make the best decision for the kids. What are the best tournaments to attend? What are the best training offerings? We can provide for the best coaches. We can hire the right people. If something's not as good as it could be, let's make a change. We can do that pretty immediately.

We have the ability and the inclination to pivot when whenever it makes sense. I think Innovation is the key to success. Evolving with the times is our north star for doing what's best for the player, the team, and the club. As I mentioned earlier, maintaining our integrity means trying to treat everyone as a family. To that end, we get to call the shots on how we run things. I think there's a give-and-take with that. The interactive experience of running a club and being able to make decisions that you think are in the best interest of the club happens because you get feedback from both the players and the parents. You also get that from the results that you see so you can keep modifying. I love the competitive aspect of that.

There are people like me, and like our club, across the country who are able to dictate what they do with their own clubs. When you step on the field against them, it's your system, your process, and your club versus their club. It is a true expression of the game on the field. It's the true reflection of the work that everyone put in.

KD: To your previous point - a lot of people ask me how I’ve been able to make a living doing what I do. And I just tell them not to do it because there were so many sacrifices. So much blood, time, and sweat were lost doing maddeningly mundane things that I had to do to make ends meet. I basically got used to being poor (or frugal if you want to say that) right away, which now in hindsight - I didn't have to do that. I could have left [lacrosse] done something else and come back. But in my mind, I was single track. I can't ever leave. I have to do this. I have to stick it out. Eventually, it will work out and it did. But at the same time, I don't think I did it in a smart way. Do you know what I mean?

AH: I feel the exact same way. When I got into this I didn't have a master plan. I wasn’t like, “I'm going to start a lacrosse club and it will grow to be this certain size. Then I'm going to have boys and girls teams and multiple regions of the state of New Jersey.” I started off by coaching a different club lacrosse team and then those players asked me to start giving them private lessons. No one gave me a blueprint for how to teach lacrosse, both as a team or through individual lessons. It was trial and error and studying what other people did. Through ten thousand plus hours on the field and documenting my process and continuing to tweak it. That's been great.

You know, it’s been about 18 years going through this whole process and it has been a long journey. Whereas some of my friends jumped into other careers and had success really quickly, I had to learn a lot of lessons. It's been a process to get here, but I have learned so much. No one handed me anything. Because there was no grand design at the beginning of the process, I'm still involved with everything. That means people can email me or text message me at any given time.

I am really driven to do the best I can for the families that decide to play for us. I put a lot of pressure on myself and the people I work with to do the best we can. It's an ongoing process of always seeking to do better than you did yesterday. It's not necessarily a market where you can sit back and relax for too long. You've always got more competition to push you - which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

KD: This is a loaded question. Why is club lacrosse so expensive?

AH: Why is the process expensive? That's a good question. I mean, we've been looking at our pricing structure. I'd say that our aim for the upcoming years is to have even more transparency so people know what they're paying for. At the very least, people can make educated decisions when they're choosing between different clubs. I know in our market, we're at the high end, but we're still less expensive than at least one other boy’s program and one other girl’s program. There is what the market bears in terms of what people are charging, and then there is what things realistically cost.

The other aspect is supplementary programming, which we believe helps them become better outside of just playing on a team. It could be more training, practice, and specialization than the other programs year-round. That's one reason for costs in our area. The cost of living is dramatically more expensive because we're a suburb of New York City. The housing is more expensive, and renting fields is more expensive. It's hard to actually get on a field. You have to pay a premium for the field time.

We seek to retain our coaches long-term, so a lot of our coaches have been with us for five to ten years - if not longer. If you want to retain a really high-quality person, they deserve what they ask for. We want them to feel good about what they're doing and they're rewarded for their hard work. I guess I would say those are the reasons why club lacrosse is expensive in general, but I think our situation Is a little bit unique, just because of the area of New Jersey that we live in right outside of New York. I think it's comparable with places like Connecticut, Westchester, and Long Island because we're all suburbs around New York with the same challenges.

KD: What are some of the most recent adjustments you have made to the club?

AH: What we're seeing are some major trends in the sport with regional clubs and with national team programs. In the last two years, I studied with one of the top two soccer clubs in New Jersey. They described their model to me of how they incorporate regional club soccer teams. At a certain age, they pull together the most talented players and they bring them to play on their nationally-ranked soccer teams. That's when the kids get really serious about soccer and getting recruited. We've moved more towards a model like that.

If you're not a blue-chip recruit for our national team, we still deliver a really great experience for our players. I think it's a proof of concept that our focus on player development - putting in hard work to get better - is really what leads to success.

What we tell the players is that, at the end of the day, you’re the one in charge of your process. What matters most is for you to pick the best situation. Even if you don’t make the national team, you can still have a big impact on your high school team and get recruited.