USIndoor's Official Magazine is a quarterly publication, dedicated to owners, managers, program administrators and other professionals, startups and providers involved with indoor recreational sports facilities.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/267127
14 CRITICAL HIRES Though she jokes around about why in the world she is in this business, the truth is Maxine Appenbrink loves her job. 10,000 people come through the facility every week, and they are rarely in a bad mood. Kids who have been at Players Indoor Sports for six seasons still shove their faces up against the window of her office to say hello. The facility works closely with the Park District and Chamber of Commerce, and was voted Best Small Business last year. In the beginning, however, it was rough, and a big reason was, ironically, some bad staffing decisions. Maxine entered the sports community of Naperville as a lacrosse mom. In the Midwest, the sport has grown remarkably, and Maxine was a part of it. She knew parents and coaches and players, and she had observed that lacrosse players weren't taken care of as well as soccer players were. When she opened Players Indoor Sports Center, she wanted to take care of the football players and baseball players and rugby players and ultimate Frisbee players–of all the players who, like lacrosse players, did not necessarily have someone looking out for their best interest. She set out to do just that, and she hired three people from the lacrosse community to help her, which ended up being a big mistake. "I was looking to do something with all these other sports and all these other activities and still have soccer. I hired three lacrosse guys. One of them was supposed to be a general manager and, well, manage. One was supposed to be in charge of lacrosse. The other was supposed to run all the other programs. A year and a half into it, I realized the three of them were doing nothing but lacrosse. I lost dog shows because my general manager was very rude. I lost soccer groups because nobody was paying attention to them. I had no adult soccer leagues–I had, like, four teams. And it was because these guys were doing nothing but lacrosse." Maxine had been talking to people about programs and special events, but no one had contacted any of her leads. She told the guys she hired that things were not working out and offered to sell them the lacrosse business. "You can still play here, you can still be the best of the best lacrosse guys, but I can't do this anymore with the rest of the business suffering," she recalls telling them. Instead of buying the lacrosse business, however, they downloaded her 16,000 contacts and went and did their own thing. They now operate a facility two miles away. "It was a tough year after that because of the way they did it, but, suddenly, I had every other lacrosse group in the world coming to me saying, 'Well, they're out now. Can we come in?' We had to be real careful how we rebuilt from there." Players Indoor Sports did not have a GM after that, because Maxine realized she did not need one. She hired a few different program people, mostly recent college graduates, whom she knew would not last long–who were having a hard time finding a job and thought an indoor sports facility would be a fun place to work (until they realized they had to work nights and every single weekend). Then she took a big risk and hired her daughter, whom she knew was a great candidate for the job because of her experience