Mike Boyle: Foreword to Coaching Rules
Michael Boyle
When Brendon asked me to write the foreword to his book, I have to admit I was excited to help tell his story.
Brendon Rearick did not start at Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning with a bang. In fact, he was a friend of another employee, Kevin Carr, and just always seemed to be hanging around the gym. Brendon had interned at another local performance business, but seemed to gravitate to MBSC. He “gravitated” to MBSC so much that my partner, Bob Hanson, thought he was spying. Bob would always ask, “Why is that kid here again?”
And…Brendon was a kid—a young, excited recent grad who just wanted to talk about strength and conditioning.
Another thing he really wanted was to work at MBSC.
I admit we took advantage of his desire and offered him the worst possible hours. Not surprisingly, he jumped at the chance.
Fast forward five years and Brendon was a key employee, a partner with Bob and me in our Certified Functional Strength Coach project, and a partner with Kevin Carr in a fledging combination exercise and soft tissue business they dubbed “Movement As Medicine.”
This is where the story gets interesting.
Brendon was on the fast track. He was a young coach with incredible ambition, incredible potential and incredible drive. However, the plot twists a bit when real life suddenly intervenes.
In 2014, Brendon asks to meet with Bob and me and tells us his former girlfriend is pregnant. The word “former” is key here, as they were no longer together. However, Brendon says, “She’s moving back to California to have the baby and I’m moving too.” What’s important to understand is that he didn’t say he was moving with her or that they were going to try to work things out. He knows full well that he’s moving to California solely to be a dad.
On the respect meter of life, Brendon Rearick rockets to a 10 in that moment. I’m sitting in the office, not surprised but astounded that one of our best young coaches has just made the decision that being a dad trumps everything. With his career on the fast track, this guy is going to move across the country—with no job—to follow a pregnant former girlfriend.
This is the definition of a stand-up guy. This is what a real man does.
It would be so easy to make excuses, to blame the relationship, to spout some platitudes about trying to “be in his daughter’s life” as he stays comfortably on the east coast.
But Brendon is determined not to be that absentee dad. Brendon is determined not to do what probably millions of other men have done. I’m getting a bit emotional as I write this. I think of the song What I Did for Love and realize that this young man did this for the love of a yet unborn child. Every kid should be this lucky.
What does any of this have to do with this book? Maybe nothing…maybe everything.
I’m not sure if there’s a young person I respect more than Brendon Rearick. There are not many men who would make the sacrifices he made for a child he hadn’t yet met. The happy ending is that Rayne is awesome—gifted, intelligent, precocious, and blessed with a step mom who loves her as her own. In our modern-day world of single parents and divorces, this is as beautiful a fairy tale ending as she could get.
Read this book. Learn from a man for whom I have great respect.
Michael Boyle
Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning