Working With People Who Care: How Grit Garage Athletics Went From One Coach to Three with Baseline

A mound built in a garage and hauled to a soccer field

Garrett Egli filed the LLC in 2023 and called it Grit Baseball Development. At the time he had a construction management degree, a full-time job in construction management, and a side business teaching baseball lessons at someone else’s facility north of him. Between the day job, the lessons, and helping coach a team, the math on his week stopped working. Eight months in, he made the call to go full time on baseball while he still had the energy for it.

What followed was not a facility. It was a local soccer park. Garrett ran an offseason training program out of it in the fall, because he is not a believer in fall baseball and would rather see kids get bigger, faster and stronger and get on a throwing program. Workouts happened at a nearby gym. Throwing happened on the soccer field. He and his dad built a pitching mound in the garage, and Garrett hauled it out to that field to give lessons in 100 degree Texas heat.

He moved to a facility closer to home in New Braunfels and stayed about a year and a half. Then a family friend connection opened the door to a space of his own. Getting it ready took roughly a year of demolition and remodeling, most of it his own labor. It opened August 1 with a grand opening, two cages, an indoor workout and stretching area, and room for plyo work. The name changed to Grit Garage Athletics, because for the first time the business had a home.

One calendar was simple. Two cages and three coaches was not.

Garrett had been running scheduling through an off-the-shelf booking tool, with a website he had put together himself on Google Sites. When the business was one coach managing one calendar, that was enough. Setup was easy, and clients liked being able to see his hours and book a slot instead of the text-me-and-I’ll-pencil-you-in approach a lot of coaches still use.

The new building broke that model. Garrett needed to book himself into cage one for lessons while opening the other cage to rentals, so a dad and his son could come in and get work in on their own. He needed room for other trainers on the schedule. He needed all of it to happen without two people showing up for the same space at the same time. The tool he had was built for businesses in general, not for a facility with rooms to sell.

Support that could not answer the question

He tried asking. Garrett emailed two different platforms to find out whether what he needed was even possible. What he got back was a chatbot. When you are about to build your scheduling around a piece of software, an answer you cannot tell is real or automated is not much of an answer.

“It’s all an AI chatbot deal, so you don’t know what you get is real or fake or just a computer.”

Garrett Egli, Owner & Founder

Cost was the other problem. The option he seriously considered charged a flat monthly fee. Garrett was a year into a new location, absorbing the clients who did not want the longer drive, and doing his own demolition. A fixed monthly bill was the wrong shape for that moment.

Priced without a required subscription

Lucas came across Grit Garage on Instagram and reached out with a straightforward pitch: we probably offer something a little better than what you’re looking at. The part that landed was the pricing. Baseline uses transaction-based pricing and starts with a free Base plan instead of a required monthly subscription, which for a first-year facility owner changed the decision entirely. Garrett’s honest first reaction was that it sounded like a scam. It was not, and it turned out to be the right fit for where the business was.

Booking built around the building

Baseline let Garrett schedule against his spaces instead of against a single personal calendar. He takes cage one for lessons. His coaches split cage two, and the cages can be subdivided further into four bookable slots when he needs the capacity. Rentals sit alongside instruction on the same schedule. Nobody gets double booked.

The platform also gave each coach a profile with a real biography, so a parent looking at the schedule can read who they are booking with instead of just picking a name off a list.

A website that matched the building he had finished

The Google Sites page had done its job, but it did not look like the facility Garrett had spent a year building out. Baseline gave him a more professional site with the scheduling options built into it, so the first impression online finally lined up with the first impression in person.

Real people, on a real call

Garrett describes himself as a little tech savvy, not super tech savvy. What made the difference was that when he had a question, someone on the Baseline team got on a video call and walked him through it. Ryan has handled a lot of that setup work with him. The contrast with the chatbot he had been talking to a few months earlier was hard to miss.

“When you can talk to someone, even if it’s just a video call, it’s like, okay, I’m actually working with people who care about me and want to see my business grow.”

Garrett Egli, Owner & Founder

From one coach to three, and two of them are old teammates

Grit Garage now runs with three coaches, up from just Garrett. Both of the guys he added played with him in high school. By Garrett’s account, one recently finished playing pro ball and wants to move into training, and the other is heading into a local high school coaching job. Being able to put multiple trainers on the schedule, each with their own profile and their own cage time, is what made adding them practical.

For Garrett, the hire matters for a reason that has nothing to do with software. He wants coaches who care about the kids in front of them, which is the same thing he has been building the business on.

The system runs when he is not watching it

Garrett does not have an hours-saved figure, and he is upfront about that. What he has instead is the thing every owner running a facility alone actually wants. Set the system up correctly, get everyone’s availability in, and it runs without him standing over it. He still checks in. He is no longer worrying about the things he used to have to worry about.

Before Baseline, heading into the new facility, he did not know how he was going to block all of it off. That question is closed.

“I can let the system run and I don’t have to be there all the time checking up on it.”

Garrett Egli, Owner & Founder

A year in, with people driving an hour to get there

Grit Garage is coming up on its first full year in the building. Garrett lost a few clients to the move, as anyone does, but most of them followed him. Some families now drive more than an hour to train there. Growth has come almost entirely from word of mouth, which is what happens when the coaching is good and the experience around it is professional.

Garrett’s own read on why it works is simple. Ask the kid how school is going. Ask how the vacation was. Care about them growing up, not just about the lesson on the calendar. Baseline handles the calendar so he can keep doing that part.

“I think it goes a long way with people. There’s more to life than baseball training.”

Garrett Egli, Owner & Founder