Drawing from her background as a Division 1 basketball coach, Erin Carson leads the RallySport Boulder team to success.
“I was always from the school of thought that the harder you worked, the better you’d have a chance of being successful,” said Erin Carson, the co-owner of RallySport Health and Fitness Club in Boulder, Colorado.
Over the years, this mindset has served Carson well.
As a teenager, she was recognized as one of the best young basketball players in Canada, and joined the Canadian National Team, which grooms the country’s next Olympic athletes.
In her late teens, she landed a basketball scholarship to the University of Colorado, where she became one of the university’s top scorers of all time during her four-year tenure.
Most recently, she placed sixth in her age group in the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia.
Whatever Carson puts her mind to, she typically succeeds at. “I’ve always been known for my work ethic,” she said.
RallySport, which Carson co-owns with a private investor group, has benefited from this mindset. It has been recognized as one of the leading personal and group training clubs in the country.
But, Carson’s journey to RallySport had its ups and downs. .. And the journey begins with a basketball, a lightbulb and a hoop.
Climbing the Ladder at RallySport
At an early age, Carson fell in love with basketball. At 5 feet 11 inches tall and with natural athletic ability, she had the basic requirements to be good at the sport. But she didn’t want to just be good at it — she wanted to be great.
So she practiced. Day after day, night after night, she’d practice her shot. Eventually, her dad conceded to putting a light outside next to the basketball hoop so Carson could continue practicing once the sun went down.
Explaining her thought process, she said, “If I stay up later, if I shoot more than my competitor shoots, I’ll be better at it and then we’ll win — or at least we’ll have a better chance to win.”
But as Carson’s basketball career progressed beyond college and into a career on the sidelines as a coach, Carson realized that sometimes, there can be such a thing as working too hard.
“I got really sick,” recalled Carson. “I got ulcers and I had to take some time off, because you can just work 24 hours a day as a coach. You’re traveling and recruiting kids, you’re traveling and scouting games, and then you come back and have practices, and I just worked myself into a pretty good illness.”
Fortunately, in addition to having a passion for basketball, Carson had a deep love for health, fitness and performance. While playing at the University of Colorado she earned a degree in kinesiology and became a certified NSCA Strength and Conditioning Specialist. She also worked on and off at various health clubs in both membership sales, front desk management and as a personal trainer.
After leaving as assistant coach at the University of Nebraska, she leaned on those experiences in the health club industry and took a job at RallySport in Boulder, Colorado.
At first, Carson intended her break from coaching to be temporary. But the longer she was there, the less appealing coaching became. “I ended up really loving [RallySport] and became pretty disillusioned with the idea of having to travel so much with coaching and the politics of it all, and I was just happy,” explained Carson. “I was happy in Boulder and doing what I was doing. Working 12, 13 hour days was no big deal, because I loved it.”
Jeremy Steen, a personal trainer at RallySport who has been with the club for more than 13 years, said it was pretty clear Carson was in her element at the facility from the moment he met her.
“She just has unbelievable enthusiasm about her job, RallySport, the health and fitness industry and the people she works with,” said Steen. “She made it really easy for me to decide very quickly that this was the place I wanted to work. It was just like wow, how could I not want to go to this club, work in this environment and work for her?”
From the get-go at RallySport, Carson hit the ground running, bringing her signature work ethic to the club. This was a huge help during the mid 90s, when personal training was becoming a larger trend in the health and fitness industry. “We started to realize it was going to be part of the deal in the future, and since I was in the trenches doing it, I could see that the customers liked it,” recalled Carson.
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