Yesterday was Part 1: Erin, the front desk, and the personal side of the last fourteen years. I'm not going to tell that story twice. Today is about the other thing I started in the summer of 2012, and the people who built it with me.
I've told 99 stories in a row about the people inside this building. None of them were really about the gym. They were about a teenager coming back from a broken neck, a woman who walked through cancer treatment with a barbell in her hands, a guy who told his gym friends he was proposing before he told his in-laws. But if you read them back to back, the way I have, you start to notice that they're all describing the same room from different corners of it.
So this is the story of the room. How it got here, who built it, what almost ended it, and what I think it's for.
I said it a few weeks ago in Annie and Dennis's story and I can't say it better: I didn't know what I was building back then. I just knew I wanted a room where somebody could walk in and try something hard without being embarrassed about it.
A Workout, a Fight Club, and a Car Ride
You know from yesterday that I was a trainer at Boston Sports Club in Westborough. What I didn't tell you is how CrossFit found me there. The general manager, Jeremy, put me through my first CrossFit workout. It was competitive, it was hard, and it scratched an itch I'd been missing since I stopped playing sports. One workout and I was hooked, and when I get hooked on something I get obsessed. I started doing it myself, and then I started working the principles into how I trained my clients. I thought I could do it differently, with an exercise science background and a coach's eye on every person.
About six months into that job, one of my first clients, Tom, asked me if I ever thought I'd open my own gym. I told him no way. I loved what I was doing.
Two people changed that answer. The first was Brian Zancewicz. Brian and I were both Master Trainers at BSC, we thought about training the same way, and he also had a serious martial arts background. The second was Michael Scott. Mike and I met in 2011 through a group of local business owners that got together at Sapporo, the Korean BBQ restaurant on East Main Street. We called ourselves Team Soju, which we're not especially proud of, and later cleaned it up to Synergy Elite. Mike's background was Taekwondo and Hapkido, and his dream was to have a martial arts school of his own.
Brian, Mike and a couple of others used to get together for what Brian still cheerfully calls a fight club. Two hours at a time, gloves on: jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, wrestling. They invited me. I thought it would be an awesome workout. It was terrifying. I had no idea what I was doing, and I kept going back.
Driving home from one of those sessions that winter, I said it out loud to Mike: let's open a CrossFit and martial arts facility, a place where I can keep training people and you can have the school you've always wanted. Mike put up the money that made it possible to open the doors. We started business planning in January of 2012. I was 23. I knew nothing about budgets, leases, or occupancy permits.
Brian tells the next part better than I do. His phone rang while he was driving home:
"You guys both called me and were like, 'Hey, we're going to start a gym. Do you want to come over?' And I was like, 'Yeah.' And now we're here. That's pretty much it."
— BrianThe Track
Here's a part most people don't know. Brian and I were still working at Boston Sports Club while we planned a gym in the same town, and keeping that quiet ate at Brian until one day he cracked and told the manager. She found me in the middle of a training session and told me I had to leave. I asked if I could finish the session.
So that spring I had no building, no job at the club, and a gym that existed mostly on paper. What I had were people. I mentioned the free track workouts yesterday. What I didn't say is who showed up to them.
They came. Sandie Hanlon came. Jess Clancy came, and became something like member number two or three. Kathy Bridge, who I'd coached at the club, signed up the minute there was something to sign up for. Nicole Croteau, who'd trained with me since 2011, showed up to paint walls and unpack boxes. I've written in their stories that there is no Wodify record that goes back far enough to prove they were there, because we didn't even use Wodify until 2013. They were there. They bet on us before there was anything to bet on.
The Kids' Clothing Store
We signed the lease for 50 East Main Street, Unit 1 in July of 2012. We have never left. The space had been a children's clothing store. There was carpet, there were slat-walls, there were little changing rooms.
My stepdad Bob and his son pulled the wooden slats off the walls. Somebody took a sledgehammer to the changing rooms, which Erin remembers as the best part. Bob built our first plyo boxes and we painted them. Erin sat on the floor bolting squat racks together. Brian bounced between ten jobs at once, finishing none of them, until Bob finally turned and asked whether he had mental problems. "That's a core memory right there," Brian says. "And I'm like, yes, Bob."
Eric Rogers was next door at Sapporo getting sushi when he saw Brian and me dragging horse stall mats into an empty storefront, and he popped his head in to ask what was going on. He's been here ever since, and he'll happily tell you he was our first injury. Garret St. Onge heard we were opening and asked:
"Well, do you guys need a cleaner over there?"
— GarretHe volunteered on the build-out. He's now one of our coaches and one of the strongest lifters in the building. (Bob, it turned out, had been Garret's middle school teacher. Westborough is like that.)
Jay and Debbie Chung owned Sapporo, and for the next seven years our two businesses shared a wall, barbells rattling their dishes. Jay joined on literally day one and paid for their memberships in full, up front, because he knew how hard the early days are for a business and thought it might help. It's something I've never forgotten.
And then there was the turf. We got a free strip of field turf from the old Gillette Stadium surface and ran it down the middle of the gym. Free turf! What I didn't know is that field turf is full of little black rubber pellets, and that you can't vacuum it. If you did sit-ups on it you stood up wearing it. Pellets in your shoes, pellets in your car, pellets in your house. It lasted about a year. People who were here for it still bring it up like a war story.
CrossFit Prototype and Integrated Martial Arts soft-opened in August and officially opened in September of 2012. Around then a woman named Annie Powell stood outside looking in the window:
"I was like, oh man, that looks so cool. But I don't know if I could do it."
— AnnieShe called anyway. Brian picked up and told her to come in, that we'd make her comfortable. She's never forgotten that phone call. That was fourteen years ago.
Sixty-Three Classes a Week
That first year, Brian and I coached all 63 classes a week ourselves. I took all the early mornings and some of the afternoons. I'll tell you something the number doesn't: a lot of those classes were empty. You unlock the door at 5 a.m., you write the workout on the board, and nobody comes. You do it again the next day. There was no Wodify, just books to write workouts in and a board to write scores on. I'd mounted the pull-up bars so high on the wall you had to climb a box to reach them.
We got a lot wrong, and most of what we do well now started as something we did badly then. Up until late 2013 we ran so many classes back to back that we'd write a warm-up on the board and expect people to do it on their own, and then start coaching ten or fifteen minutes in. Honestly, the self warm-up existed to give the two of us a short break, because we were doing all of it. It taught us what a full hour should be: coached from the first minute to the last. Same with new people. We started with a group foundations class to on-ramp everyone together. It worked for some people and lost others. That eventually became Virtuosity, five one-on-one sessions before you ever step into a class, because the lesson was that you have to meet each person where they are, not where the group is.
Nicole became our first coach outside of Brian and me. My brother Jon started part-time that first year, asked Brian a million questions, and started our first kids program in 2013. While he was working his way to full-time he picked up shifts next door at Sapporo, and Jay and Debbie looked after him. Brendan Sheehan joined in January 2013, before the name was even on the wall, when the 6am crew was building itself from scratch and the playlist leaned heavy on Metallica. Todd Kinsman came that January and Peg in February.
And there was Lisa Zancewicz, who now has more classes than anyone in the history of this gym. The number I keep coming back to with Lisa isn't the total. It's the mornings when I'd unlock the door and it was just her. She says the gym and her daughter Macy are the same age.
I'll be honest about those years, because the members have been. We leaned harder into pure intensity back then than we coach for today. When we did our first CrossFit Open in 2014 we didn't have wall-ball targets, just lines of tape near the ceiling, and Jon got so mad at a no-rep that he threw the ball straight through the ceiling tiles. We had holiday parties in the gym with an ice luge. Lisa's assessment of people lining up at the pull-up bar after the ice luge: "I don't think that's going to end well for anybody."
Eric put it best, looking back:
"Consistency beats intensity has really become part of the culture here. There's been a better trajectory than the go-hards of the days of old."
— EricBrian says the same thing about us as coaches. Egos have lessened significantly. What's left is simple and not easy: helping people through exercise.
Growing Up
The gym grew the way the people in it needed it to. In 2014 Sally, Brent and Olivia Harwood, who I'd trained back at the club, came home from Toronto and became our first semi-private clients. In 2015 we started calling our one-on-one training "Prototype Training Systems," which is a name you'll want to remember. In April 2016 Kevin Grimes became our first-ever Individual Program Design client.
That same year my old college roommate Steve Cimino was transitioning out of his job as Director of Performance Coaching for the New England Revolution's academy. I told him I had a few athletes and asked if he wanted to coach them for some extra money. He figured it was a part-time gig. He's now our General Manager, he runs what is basically the athletic department of Prototype, and together we built the Prototype Academy soccer program so kids in this town can get the sport back.
In September 2016 we acquired Small Town CrossFit, another CrossFit gym here in Westborough, and brought their members over. I wrote at the time that it wasn't an acquisition as much as a combination of communities, and that turned out to be true. Alvin Wong's reaction when he heard, as he told it in his story: "Ok, cool." He's still here. So are Griffin Barriere, Priscilla Silva and Will Collins. Tony Potenti did his first-ever CrossFit workout at Small Town, and he's here now too.
The other half of the building was growing up at the same time. The martial arts side started out as Prototype MMA. Mike Scott's vision was a separate brand with real affiliations to different martial arts, and that became Integrated Martial Arts. The first affiliation was Daniel Gracie Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, led by Frankie Passos, a BJJ black belt who later left to open his own Daniel Gracie academy in Northborough. Then came Luis Rodriguez, who led the training under Marcelo Garcia BJJ and Sityodtong Muay Thai, under the well-known Mark DellaGrotte. Years later Luis left to start Gorilla Martial Arts School in Marlborough. For eight years there was a jiu-jitsu class on one side of the wall and a barbell class on the other.
By our fifth anniversary in 2017 a local magazine wrote us up: 14 trainers and coaches, a nutrition program, kids from age four, a martial arts school under the same roof, and six core values on the wall. I told them "we want to be the best part of your day." I'll come back to that line, because I don't believe it anymore.
What the People Did
At some point, and I can't tell you exactly when, this stopped being a gym I ran and became a place people did things for each other in. I didn't plan that. I just got to watch it.
In 2014 Jean Hanks, who'd joined the month we opened, was diagnosed with cancer. It turned into the year she trained more than any other year of her life, and she asked us to coach her exactly the same. That November there was a head-shaving party at her house. A lot of us shaved our heads. Kathy Bridge remembers one in particular:
"When Jean shaved her head, Jon shaved his head as well. For a young guy to shave his head in solidarity spoke volumes about Jon's character and the character of the gym."
— KathyJean's word for this place, years later: "This was my strong place."
When Annie was going through treatment, Dennis says, "You'd open the door and there's like three casseroles out there, and this went on for weeks and weeks." Nobody organized it. Nobody asked anybody to. That's not a gym thing. That's a people thing, and it's the part I'm proudest of.
When Tony Pittman was in the ICU, he joined the 9am class virtually on day two with a set of bands, and members brought food and drove him to the gym when he couldn't drive himself. When Coreen Williamson goes missing for a week she gets, in her words, "caring texts from Brian, Abhi, Anne L., or Maria swearing at me and wondering where I've been," and then she says the thing that might be the truest sentence in all 99 stories: "There's nothing better than feeling missed."
Two different members, in two different interviews, reached for the same word without knowing the other had. Abhi Das: "This is a place where I feel like I finally belong. Dare I say, you built a church and everyone showed up." Jen Mogensen: "Prototype is what church should be — a place of community, growth, reflection, and challenge." Liz Nasser put it her own way: "People are just happy to see me, for no reason other than that I walked in the door. The only other being in my life that gives me that reaction is my dog."
And Maria Maynard, who has been getting up before dawn for this since the beginning, gave me the most honest review we'll ever get: "There's no stinking way I'd get up at 4:15 a.m. if the people sucked."
2020
At the end of 2019 Michael Scott and I ended our business partnership. Integrated Martial Arts stayed in the building for several months and then moved to a home of its own. Mike is part of how this place came to exist, and I've said so above because it's true. I also learned a lot through that experience, more than I understood at the time, about partnership and about what true leadership looks like. Most of what I learned was about me.
Three months later the state shut us down. We'd started running classes on Zoom two weeks before the order came. Nicole Croteau, who had painted the walls in 2012, was the last person in the building, alone on the floor in the middle of a workout called "Annie" when word came that everything was closing. We lent out nearly every piece of equipment we owned. Coach Leah and Erin led the first virtual workout. We posted more than 300 home workouts. We ran Quarantine Games and an Amazing Race and a cooking show. Jess Clancy did Zoom class in a leopard bathrobe. When we were allowed outside, we ran classes in the parking lot with nine people at a time, and at 5 a.m. we lit it with a spotlight. When we were allowed inside, it was eight to twelve people per class, measured by square footage.
What I remember is that people didn't leave. 2020 was Shana Doiron's biggest training year ever. Keivan Russo told his Zoom crew he was going to propose before he told most of his family: "Those Zoom sessions became my therapy. Probably still are."
I told my side of that year yesterday: the driveway, the burnout, the conversation with Erin about whether to keep going. I won't repeat it. What matters for this story is what came out of it.
I got help. That stretch is what pushed me into real leadership work through Next Jump, and the hardest lesson in it was personal accountability: I'd spent a lot of energy on whose fault things were, and none of that energy ever fixed anything. It changed how I lead, and how we develop the people who work here. Finding, keeping and growing good people is the hardest thing in this business. I won't say we've figured it out, but the team we have today is the best team we've ever had, and I think anyone who trains here would say the same.
Somewhere in there we also became, officially, what we'd already been for years. We changed the name on the door and on the paperwork from CrossFit Prototype to Prototype Training Systems. We're still a CrossFit affiliate and proud of it. But by then we were kids' programs and athletes and personal training and nutrition and individual design, and the name we'd given our one-on-one program back in 2015 had quietly become the truest description of the whole place.
Ten Years, and the Wall of Jackets
On January 28, 2023, about 125 of you came to our 10-year anniversary party. I put together a slideshow with a photo collage for every year, starting with an empty carpeted store. And we introduced the Prototype Hall of Fame. The first class was twelve people: Jess Clancy, Abhi Das, Helene Desjardins, Jean Hanks, Peg Kinsman, Todd Kinsman, Maria Maynard, Liz Nasser, Annie Powell, Brendan Sheehan, Rebecca Welch and Lisa Zancewicz. If you've read this far, you've already met most of them in this story. That's not a coincidence.
Rebecca, by the way, joined in 2012 after someone told her CrossFit wasn't for her age demographic. "Well, now I really want to try it," she said. "You just laid down the gauntlet." She has since trained here alongside her son Timmy and her mother Callie. Three generations, same floor, same hour.
That's the thing I care most about now. Lily Hanks started in our kids' classes at twelve and wrote a school paper about Coach Jon. Sam Kaplan grew up inside this gym and became a coach. Caroline Queenan is a Junior Coach. Gianni DiRienzo, Day 1 of this whole series, is the son of two people who've been here since 2014. I watched Jen and Lucas Mogensen and their kids work out together, judging each other's reps and cheering each other on, a whole family in the arena at the same time. Usually it's parents in the bleachers cheering for kids. Here the kids get to cheer for their parents too. I never had that growing up. When I get stuck, that's the picture I go back to.
It's also why we do Row for Westborough. In 2019 Coreen Williamson knew somebody and said something, and we ran our first rowathon, which we called Row For Crows. Since then this community has raised nearly $150,000 for youth athletics in this town, and Prototype doesn't take a dime of it. I believe businesses have more power to do good than they use, and that writing a check isn't the same as building something. The seventh one is October 18.
The Ones Who Left to Build
There's one more group of people who belong in this story, and they aren't in the building anymore. Matt and Jeannette Naimoli were members here starting in 2012, our very first year, and left to open CrossFit Framingham. Nate Kuffrey coached here in our first few years and wrote our competitors' programming, and went on to be head coach and owner at CrossFit Crag in Marlborough. Joe Black coached here for years and led our Prototype Barbell club, and is now head coach and co-owner of Wormtown Weightlifting in Shrewsbury. Tommy Flynn coached and trained people on this floor until 2024, and is now the owner and head coach of TeamLift in Boylston. Leah Hantman coached here and started Empowered as a program inside these walls. I co-founded it with her and helped launch it here, and today she runs that business fully on her own. And I already told you about Frankie and Luis on the martial arts side.
I'll be honest: in the moment, that's hard. You've poured into someone, they're great, and they're leaving. Erin is the one who made me see it differently. She told me the thing I should also be proud of is the people who came through here and left to build their own communities. She's right. Those gyms are theirs. They built them, and they get the credit for them. But I'm glad a piece of their path ran through this room, and I'm rooting for every one of them.
What If It Never Opened
When Devon and Ed told their story, I mentioned that they're not the first couple to meet and get married out of this gym, and it sent me down a road I go down a lot. What if this place never opened? They never meet. Eric doesn't have what he calls his "first intergenerational friends," and my daughter doesn't wake up smiling because she saw Eric. Jon doesn't have a career. Steve doesn't either, at least not this one. Graham Pettengill doesn't check the app at night to see, in his words, "who's going to the gym." The casseroles don't show up on Annie and Dennis's porch.
Maybe all of that finds some other way to happen. But when I actually sit with the idea of taking it away, it's gut-wrenching. I think less about what this place did for me and more about the friendships, the marriages, the careers, and the hard seasons people got through because there was a room to walk into at 5 a.m. where somebody noticed if they didn't.
What We're Building
Erin says she's reminded that this place will keep changing every time she takes a shower, because the wall of our shower is covered in waterproof sticky notes with my ideas for the gym. There are about thirty of them up there right now. Our cleaning team must think we're crazy people. This whole 100 in 100 project started as one of those notes. It wasn't a marketing plan. I just thought the person on the rower next to you probably has a story you'd want to know, and that real stories about real people are worth more than the perfect ones on the internet.
So here's what's on the wall, more or less.
What we're actually for. Back in 2017 I told that magazine we wanted to be the best part of your day. I meant it, but I've changed my mind. It isn't a mission, and if I'm honest it's a little arrogant. The best part of your day should be your kids, your spouse, your work, the thing you're building. Our job is to help you show up for those. Read the 99 stories again and count how many people talk about mindset: lessons they learned under a barbell that carried into their marriage, their job, a diagnosis, a hard season. That's the point. Prototype is the place you come to reset. It's where you build the routine, the habits and the consistency, physical and mental, to handle what life is going to throw at you and become the best version of yourself. We're not the best part of your day. We're here to help you have better days.
Technology is going to change a lot of things, and I use plenty of it to run this place better. But you can't replace human connection, and you can't replace a coach standing next to you. What we do is coach. That's the part we'll keep doubling down on.
Families in the same arena. This is the one I care about most. I want this to be a place where a five-year-old, a high school athlete, a parent and a grandparent can all do hard things under one roof, and cheer for each other. That's why we've built out our youth programs from the first kids class Jon started in 2013 to what they are now. It's why I want my own three girls to grow up proud of this place.
The athletic department. That's what I call what Steve is building. Performance coaching that goes past sets and reps into mindset, recruiting and how to handle a hard season. And the Prototype Academy, which we built with Westborough Youth Soccer so kids in this town can develop as whole athletes, stay in their community, and keep loving the sport instead of burning out in the club rat race. Soccer is where we've started. It won't be where we stop.
More for this town. Row for Westborough on October 18 is the seventh one. I want Prototype to keep being proof that a small business can build something for its community and not just sponsor it.
More room. One way or another. Whether that's physical space, or reaching people who will never walk through this particular door, Prototype is going to keep growing. I don't have all of that figured out yet, and I've made my peace with that.
A line kept showing up in these stories, written a few different ways: nobody comes here for what they actually find. People came for a deadlift, or ten pounds, or a kid who needed confidence. What they found was each other. That's what Prototype is. It was never the building, and it was never me. It's Brian picking up the phone. It's Sandie at the track. It's Jay paying up front. It's Jon with a shaved head. It's Nicole alone on the floor finishing her workout while the world shut down, and then coming back.
If You're Not One of the Hundred
I want to end with the people who aren't in this series.
There are close to 400 people training at Prototype right now. Choosing a hundred stories out of that was one of the hardest parts of this whole thing. And to be honest, we cheated: with the couples and families, we actually told more than 110 people's stories across these 100 days. It still wasn't close to everyone.
This project is the best example I have of what I've been trying to say this whole time. People used to ask me if opening a gym at 23 was scary, and I said no, it's awesome, I know it's going to work. I look back at that kid and think: you had no idea. If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have been a lot more scared. I'm glad I didn't know. A vision works like that. You have an idea. You need the drive to chase it, and you need enough confidence to sit in the uncertainty and believe you'll figure it out. When I put Day 1 out on May 1, I did not know who all hundred stories were going to be. I didn't know how I'd produce one every weekday on top of running a gym. I figured it out by building the system while I was using it.
A big part of that system was AI, and this project is how I really learned to work with it. Not asking a chatbot a question, but building things. In the last three months alone, that has turned into a new operating dashboard that tells us every morning who we haven't seen in a while so a coach can reach out; live scoring for our Wet Hot Summer Throwdown; an engagement board for our youth athletes built around streaks and showing up; performance reports that show an athlete their own progress over years; sign-up and family portals for our clinics and workshops; and the tools we use to run Row for Westborough. None of it replaces a coach. All of it buys our coaches more time to be one.
I tell you that because it's the same lesson as the track workouts and the empty 5 a.m. classes and the turf. You don't need it all figured out before you start. If you're going to commit to something difficult, go all in, believe you'll figure it out, and then find the right people to figure it out with. That's what I'd want my daughters to take from this, and anyone else reading it.
So if you're reading this and you weren't one of the hundred: that was never the intent. You're here. You are what makes Prototype, Prototype, exactly as much as anyone I wrote about. Your story matters to me, and it's going to get told. This project is ending today, but the next ones I take on will be built with you in mind.
I found my people. A hundred stories' worth, and a few hundred more who haven't told theirs yet.
Thank you for walking in.
— Mike Collette
Founder & CEO, Prototype Training Systems
