How the Sandals Resorts Founder Can Help Turn Your Program's Obstacles Into Selling Points
You control the story, Coach...you just may not realize the important questions you need to answer in order to do it effectively. Let the owner of Sandals Resorts teach you...
See this guy here? He’s a resort owner named Butch Stewart, and he’s about to teach you how to turn an obstacle into a selling point for your prospects. If you’re a college coach with some less than wonderful aspects of your program that you tend to shy away from in recruiting, it’s going to be a lesson worth paying attention to.
You may not know Stewart’s name, but you know what he built. He spent decades turning Sandals Resorts into a brand people associated with dream vacations. But early on, he had the kind of problem most people would have complained about forever instead of solving.
His resort was located too close to the airport. The planes were loud, guests complained, and critics assumed it would hurt the business.
Of course, there was nothing Stewart could really do about it. So, instead of apologizing for it, Stewart reframed it. He made it part of the entire experience at Sandals Resort. He had guests wave at departing planes, effectively turning the noise and disruption into a memorable little ritual for his guests. Then, when the Concorde started flying into Jamaica once a week and rattling the buildings, he did something even smarter, and leaned into the whole spectacle: He turned the beach chairs toward the runway and made the takeoff an event. People who could have complained in months past actually started looking forward to it.
That lesson matters for coaches today, because you’re recruiting in a world that feels more crowded, even faster, and much less forgiving than ever. Prospects are evaluating schools while also hearing about NIL offers, keeping track of athletes you’re picking up at their position in the Transfer Portal, looking at social media and listening to their parents as they try to make quick judgments about whether a coach feels genuine and worth trusting. All of that means the obstacle in front of your program may still be your size, your location, your facilities, your budget, or your history…but what I have been telling coaches more and more in recent years is that the bigger problem is often not the obstacle itself. It is the way that obstacle is being explained, framed, and communicated.
That is why the first lesson from Butch Stewart still holds up:
No complaining.
Recruits can feel it when a coach is defensive, insecure, or quietly embarrassed about a weakness in the program. If you spend your recruiting time explaining away what you do not have, you are teaching the prospect how to view you. Once that happens, you have already given away leverage in the conversation you’re having with this year’s class, as well as future classes.
The better approach is to decide what your reality means and then communicate it with confidence. For example, smaller campus can mean a place where athletes are known and developed in a more personalized setting. A new D1 coaching staff with a light history may be getting more attention and a bigger budget to establish themselves while you are there with them. A tougher climate can mean preparation for an athlete that needs to be pushed to compete outside his or her comfort zone. Those examples are just a few of the ways Butch Stewart would have faced a recruiting challenge if he had been recruiting college prospects like you are.
Another lesson here is something I talk to coaches about all the time: You have to believe your own story before a recruit ever will.
Too many coaching staffs want prospects to get excited about a program story that the staff itself cannot tell with any consistency or personal passion. One assistant says one thing, the head coach says something slightly different. The social media message points in another direction…and, the visit experience leaves a different impression altogether. That kind of disconnect weakens trust fast with this generation. And in a lot of cases, “the obstacle is not really the obstacle”. The bigger issue is that the staff has never built a believable message around it.
Which leads to the next lesson: Do the unthinkable. Stewart didn’t hide the noisy plane he had no control over. Instead, he built part of the guest experience around it. Coaches need that same mindset…if your school is in a cold-weather location, stop acting like it is something to apologize for and start showing the kind of toughness, discipline, and year-round commitment it can produce. If your college town is small, stop treating that like a defect and start explaining the value of focus, community, safety, and fewer distractions. If you aren’t the biggest brand in your conference, stop trying to sound like the biggest brand in your conference. Sell responsiveness, development, opportunity, relationships and (maybe) the chance to matter right away.
And, of course, one of the biggest changes in recruiting today is that your obstacles have to be explained to more than just the recruit. Parents are heavily involved in the decision process, which means your story has to hold up under a second layer of scrutiny. Mom and Dad are not just evaluating whether their son or daughter likes the school…they are evaluating trust, communication, fit, development, and whether your staff seems steady enough to guide their child through a major life decision. If your explanation of a challenge only works on the athlete but falls apart the second a parent asks harder questions from their perspective, then your message isn’t going to connect nearly as well as it could.
What this really all comes down to is perception. Stewart changed the way his guests interpreted what they were experiencing. Coaches have to do the same thing. Your job is not to pretend an obstacle does not exist - your job is to frame it so clearly, confidently, and consistently that the recruit starts seeing it through your eyes instead of through a default lens of doubt. That takes preparation. That takes better messaging. That takes alignment across your staff, and it takes more thought than most programs are giving it.
So if you are facing a recruiting challenge at your school, stop waiting for it to magically become less of a problem. Ask better questions, Coach:
What does this obstacle force us to be good at?
What kind of athlete would actually value this environment?
What proof do we have that this challenge has become somebody else’s advantage?
How are we explaining it to recruits?
How are we explaining it to parents?
How are we reinforcing it on social media, during visits, on phone calls, and in follow-up communication?
All of that is the real takeaway from Butch Stewart, and how he overcame the negatives he really couldn’t change at Sandals. He didn’t build his business by removing every weakness, he built it by controlling and defining the story around the weakness. Coaches who learn how to do that put themselves in a much stronger recruiting position year in and year out, no matter how tough and unforgiving their environment is.
So, take a page from Stewart’s story and get busy redefining the obstacles in your program. In today’s recruiting world, the staffs that win are often the ones that know how to tell their story better than everybody else, rather than complain that they aren’t being given the money or opportunity to solve it right away.