Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 816 is my conversation with Coach HP, a Miami-based mindset and baseball coach who works with kids and their parents to pull the lessons out of sport and apply them to life. We get into his own story — the years he spent working clubs in Las Vegas, the moment he decided the legend was not going to die in a nightclub, and the grind of teaching eight baseball lessons a day in the Miami sun while teaching himself to edit video until four in the morning. It is a conversation about mindset, honesty, and how to coach a young person without breaking them.
Coach HP is a Miami-based mindset and baseball coach who works with young athletes and their families. He came up in Miami, spent years working in the Las Vegas and Los Angeles nightclub world, and then turned back toward coaching — teaching baseball lessons in Miami and building an instructional presence he taught himself to produce. His focus is helping kids draw lessons from sport that carry into the rest of their lives so they can be happy and successful, not just better athletes.
Coach HP's core idea is to be the most positive person in the room, but in an honest way — using his own flaws and the places he messed up rather than pretending to be flawless. He believes analyzing why something worked and why something else did not, openly and in real time, is what opens doors. He tells parents the same thing he tells kids: the honest version of yourself is the one that gets you into the rooms you want to be in.
He is blunt about it. Coach HP says one of the biggest problems he sees is parents being pushed out of the process — asked to pay large amounts of money while being isolated and excluded from their own kids' development. He also calls out the opposite failure: parents, often fathers, who check out of the household and the sporting life or who cover up the problems their kids actually have. Both, he says, undermine the young athlete.
Coach HP says the landscape has changed completely. A senior in high school today has to think hard about where they are going if they want to play Division I, unless they are a complete standout. He cautions parents against forcing a path — if a kid is showing real talent in one direction, you cannot "hack" your way into a different one just because it is the sport you came from. He speaks from a baseball background but applies the same warning across sports.
By his fourth year in the Las Vegas nightclub world, Coach HP describes a moment of clarity — a sense that the version of himself he had become was not going to amount to anything walking around a club. He moved back toward coaching, taught eight baseball lessons a day in the Miami sun, and taught himself video editing on iMovie, working until three or four in the morning. He says doing that hard, unglamorous work put him in an incredible place of belief and empathy for himself.
Coach HP's take is that money without normal daily structure is a trap. When you have a huge amount of money and stop doing regular things — waking up, working out, a cold plunge, reading, writing — you end up living twenty-four-seven in your own head, fixated on what you do not have or what is missing. The everyday habits, he argues, are what keep a person grounded and grateful.
Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 816 with Coach HP is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and wherever you get your podcasts. Press play in the audio player on this page to hear the full conversation.
I am drawn to people who have lived a couple of completely different lives and come out the other side with something to teach. Coach HP is one of those. He has the Miami-to-Vegas-and-back story, but what got me was how he talks about coaching kids — not as a way to manufacture athletes, but as a way to hand them lessons they can carry into adulthood. As somebody who thinks a lot about how the disciplines of one pursuit transfer to another, I wanted to hear his version of that up close. Press play to hear the whole thing.
The first thing that stuck with me was his twist on positivity. A lot of coaches sell relentless optimism. Coach HP sells something harder — being the most positive person in the room while being honest about your own flaws and failures. He explains how openly analyzing what worked, what did not, and why has opened the biggest doors in his life, and why he pushes both kids and parents to do the same. Listen to him lay out that framework in his own words.
Coach HP does not soften this part. He has watched parents get isolated from their own kids' development — paying real money while being shut out — and he has watched the opposite, parents checking out or papering over problems their kids genuinely have. He gets specific about how both patterns sabotage a young athlete. If you have a kid in competitive sports, this is the section to slow down on. Hear his full breakdown in the episode.
The path to Division I is not what it was, and Coach HP says high schoolers and their families have to be far more deliberate about it now. He warns against forcing a kid down the sport you happen to know best — if a young athlete is showing real signs in one direction, you cannot hack them into another. Coming from a baseball background, he is candid about the temptation to do exactly that. Press play to hear how he counsels families through it.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation
The part of this conversation I keep replaying is his stretch in the Las Vegas and LA nightclub world — living with the number one club guy from Miami he had idolized in high school — and the realization in year four that the life was hollow. He is honest about what money does to you when you stop doing ordinary things, and how teaching baseball lessons in the Miami sun and editing video until 4 a.m. rebuilt his sense of self. Listen to that arc in the episode.
The day after talking with Coach HP, the line I kept coming back to was about money and daily habits — that the second you stop doing the small ordinary things, you start living entirely inside your own head, staring at what you are missing. That is true whether you have a lot or a little.
The deeper takeaway is that the work he is proudest of is the unglamorous work: eight lessons a day in the sun, editing until the early morning, being honest about his own failures so kids and parents can be honest about theirs.
Listen to the whole thing. It is a conversation about coaching, but it is really about how a person rebuilds.
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Coach HP is a Miami-based mindset and baseball coach who works with young athletes and their families to turn the lessons of sport into lessons for life. After coming up in Miami and spending years in the Las Vegas and Los Angeles nightclub world, he returned to coaching, teaching baseball lessons by day and teaching himself video production by night. His coaching centers on honest positivity, grounded daily habits, and helping kids and parents navigate the modern pressures of youth sports and college recruiting without losing themselves in the process.
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