The qualities that make athletes successful on the field—teamwork, discipline, resilience, and a drive to achieve—are the same traits that play a role in a successful hardscaping career.
Just as athletes rely on their teammates to execute plays and adapt to challenges, hardscaping projects require collaboration and trust among crew members to transform a concept into a finished product.
Frank Gandora, President of Creative Hardscape Company in Lakewood, Colorado, said this is why he likes to ask job seekers for positions with his company if they ever played team sports.
Frank Gandora, President of Creative Hardscape Company
“You ever play soccer? You ever play basketball? You ever play baseball or football? Did you ever play volleyball?” Gandora said. “The reason I ask is that you work as a team in hardscaping. You have to anticipate what the next step is going to be and you have to work together congruently. I found people that have played sports in high school or college understand how it is to work with somebody else and not take all the glory. That’s very, very important.”
Rob Goossens, Vice President of Precise Paving, Inc. in West Palm Beach, Florida, echoed this sentiment, noting that team dynamics play a big role in the success of a project.
Rob Goossens, Vice President of Precise Paving, Inc.
“Skill set is great, but the person and the attitude make a bigger difference. We’ve had a lot of really skilled guys come in, but with a bad attitude, it’s detrimental to the whole crew,” Goossens said.
Goossens has played a number of team sports, but soccer is where he really excelled. He played all through his schooling, including at the collegiate level, playing on the team at Flagler College.
“I think that attitude correlates a lot with my soccer teams. Most of my teams that did well, we got along. We were positive. The teams that had a divide and would fight, they underperformed.”
Team sports can also prepare you to work well with people from different backgrounds, a critical skill in today’s diverse workforce.
“When I went to Flagler, we had people from all different countries and backgrounds and ethnicities on the team,” Goossens said. “…At our company, we have a lot of people from different backgrounds. Being able to get along even though we have differences is a skill set that carried over from my sports career.”
Goossens said there is an element of competition in hardscaping that appeals to an athlete’s determination and drive.
“With soccer, there’s a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes with training your skill sets – physical abilities, mental abilities. That definitely helped me as a person and as a business person. The routines and the disciplines that helped out with soccer is definitely correlated and related exactly to what I do with hardscape and construction,” Goossens said.
Knowing that the behind-the-scenes training is what gets you to winning on the field also plays a role in understanding the industry. And like scoring the game-winning goal, there’s nothing quite like standing back at the end of a project and saying, “We built that.”
“It’s tough because sometimes you’re grinding and you’re working hard and a lot of the fruits of our labor, you don’t see until six months, a year, two years down the road. In my earlier days, I would get frustrated. It may take some time to see all the extra hours, the early hours pay off,” Goossens said. “…But making a mark in your community and its development, it’s pretty cool.”
For former athletes, hardscaping offers the perfect career path to take your skills off the field and build something tangible and lasting.