You Don’t Need to Be First- You Just Need to Be Better

Gene Williams didn’t invent private coaching for youth sports.

He just knew it could be better.

In college, he made extra money offering basketball lessons to local kids. His wife did the same with soccer. They were both former college athletes—Gene played at Johns Hopkins, she played D1—and coaching was a way to stay close to the game while paying the bills.

At first, they used an online platform to manage bookings and payments.

“It worked okay, but then they started raising the commission. First it was an 80/20 split, which felt fair. Then it went to 60/40. And support dropped off a cliff. It was clear they had raised a ton of money and lost their way.”

So they left the platform. Kept coaching. And started wondering: what if they just built the thing they actually wanted?

That was the beginning of Athletes Untapped, a platform that connects parents and young athletes with private coaches in 16 different sports—all for in-person, hyper-local training.

Gene’s not a typical founder. He didn’t grow up around entrepreneurs. His parents worked stable jobs—one in nonprofit, the other at a children’s hospital. Startups weren’t part of the dinner table conversation.

He studied economics at Hopkins, fully expecting to follow the safe path into consulting or finance. In fact, he had an offer from Booz Allen lined up and ready to go after graduation. But right before he accepted it, another opportunity came up: a chance to play pro basketball in Ireland.

He took it.

That one decision—choosing uncertainty over comfort—ended up shaping everything that came after.

While overseas, he started researching startups in Philadelphia and stumbled onto Venture for America, a fellowship program that placed young grads into early-stage companies. He got accepted, moved home, and joined a startup called VeryApt.

The job didn’t last.

About a year in, the founders pulled the team into a room and said they were out of money. Couldn’t raise a Series B. Had $30,000 left in the bank. Everyone was told to find a new job.

Except Gene and one other teammate.

The founders offered them the chance to take over the company—no handoff, no training, no parachute. Just the keys and a “good luck.”

Gene was 24.

He said yes.

What happened next could have gone in a hundred different directions. But Gene and his co-operator picked a lane, doubled down, and did what they knew how to do: focus. They cut everything that wasn’t working. Restructured the business. And leaned hard into the scalable side of the platform—partnerships and tech sales.

Over the next few years, they grew revenue 40x and brought the company back to life.

But by the end, Gene knew it was time to go.

The tech stack hadn’t been touched in a decade. The product was starting to show its age. And more importantly, Gene had already started working on something new in the background.

Athletes Untapped had been a side hustle for two years. He knew how the market worked. He knew the pain points—because he’d felt them. And he had real conviction that this business could be better than what existed.

So in 2023, he went full-time.

Back then, the platform had about 200 coaches and only covered two sports: basketball and soccer. Since going all-in, it’s grown to 3,000 coaches across all 50 states, offering lessons in 16 different sports. The company is fully bootstrapped, growing 5x year-over-year in bookings, and just hired its first in-house CTO to scale the tech platform.

But none of this came fast.

“I didn’t want to be the founder chasing 1,000 VC calls, booking 10, closing one, burning the money, and losing the business, I saw how that played out at my last company. I didn’t want that path.”

Instead, he focused on slow, sustainable growth. Coach by coach. City by city. He and his team used job boards, Facebook groups, community flyers—whatever it took to get traction without blowing cash.

Then they went all-in on SEO.

“We built 180,000 geo-targeted pages,” he says. “Every sport, every city, every zip code. It took months, but now we rank in the top five search results in most major cities.”

The result? A reliable stream of organic traffic from parents searching for exactly what Athletes Untapped offers: local, trustworthy coaching that fits into their kid’s schedule.

But the most impressive part isn’t the numbers. It’s how aligned the growth is with the mission.

“We’re all athletes or coaches,” Gene says. “We actually care about helping kids get better—not just in their sport, but in their confidence, their discipline, their mindset. That’s what drives us.”

Long term, Gene wants to expand beyond sports.

The vision is simple: a platform that helps kids grow through one-on-one instruction—whether that’s a basketball lesson, piano class, or math tutoring. It’s all about pairing trusted coaches and teachers with families who want to invest in their kids.

But he’s not rushing it.

“Eventually we’ll drop the ‘Athletes’ and just become Untapped,” he says. “But not yet. We’re still building the foundation. Still proving we can do it the right way.”

And he means right. Not fast. Not flashy. Not investor-chasing.

Just real.

Want to hear more stories about founders like you? Subscribe to our newsletter