Ask a young business owner where they learned to manage people and most will name a first job or a first difficult boss.
AJ Abdelnour would point somewhere less obvious: a gym in Livonia, Michigan, full of kids who could not yet dribble with their off hand. He spent four summers there as a basketball trainer, working with players between the ages of five and sixteen on the parts of the game nobody applauds. He now runs two four-person crews at Above 10 Landscaping, the Plymouth-based company he co-founded in 2019 during his sophomore year of college.
The distance between a youth gym and a job site turns out to be short. Both ask one person to get a group to do something correctly, repeatedly, in conditions that are never quite the same twice. Both punish anyone who confuses enthusiasm with instruction.
AJ Abdelnour and Four Summers in a Livonia Gym
At Get Skillz Basketball, AJ Abdelnour worked across an eleven-year age span. A five-year-old and a sixteen-year-old do not absorb the same drill at the same speed, and pretending otherwise wastes a session. The younger group needs the movement made small enough to succeed at. The older group needs the reason behind it, or they stop trusting the trainer.
The curriculum stayed unglamorous: dribbling, shooting, footwork. Fundamentals get skipped because they are boring to teach and slow to show results. They are also the only things that survive contact with a real game, when the defense speeds up and there is no time to think.
Teaching a Skill Means Taking It Apart
A trainer cannot tell a player to shoot better. The instruction has to be decomposed into feet, balance, elbow, release, follow-through, then rebuilt in order. Training is mostly this work of disassembly, finding the one link in a chain that keeps failing and repairing it before anything else gets touched.
Trade work runs on the same logic. A mulch installation is not one task; it is edging, weeding, depth, coverage, and cleanup, and a crew that skips step two produces a bed that looks finished for about three weeks.
The crews at Above 10 Landscaping handle hedge trimming, leaf cleanup, stone and sod installation, sprinkler work, patio and terrace hardscape, material transport, and waste removal. Every one of those breaks into a sequence, and every sequence has a step that new hands rush.
There is a second habit buried in that method. A trainer who breaks a skill down has to decide what to fix first, because a nine-year-old can hold one correction in their head and not four. Choosing the single highest-leverage adjustment, and letting the rest wait until next week, is a triage skill that transfers directly to a crew halfway through a job with daylight running out.
Film Study Is Feedback Without the Sting
Part of the training work involved reviewing and analyzing film with athletes. Film changes the nature of a correction. Instead of a trainer asserting that a player drifted left on the drive, both people watch the player drift left. The disagreement disappears and what is left is a problem to solve.
Most feedback in working life fails for the opposite reason. It arrives as opinion, so it invites defense. Anything that turns a judgment into shared evidence– a photo of the finished bed, a walkthrough with the homeowner, a second look at the grade before topsoil goes down– does the same job the tape does in a gym.
Evidence also protects the person giving the correction. A crew lead who says the edge is uneven owns that judgment personally, and the conversation can turn into a contest of eyes. A crew lead who walks the line with the person who cut it is no longer the source of the criticism, just the one who noticed.
The gym version of this is a trainer sitting shoulder to shoulder with a player, both facing the screen rather than each other.
Accountability Runs Sideways, Not Only Down
That thinking carries into the volunteer side of training young athletes. Abdelnour volunteers at Hoopdrillz Basketball Academy, founded by his own former trainer as a place for players serious about improving. The academy describes its purpose as building a community of players, coaches, and program alums who motivate, mentor, support, and hold one another accountable.
That last clause is the hard one. Accountability handed down from a single authority scales badly, because the authority cannot be everywhere. Accountability held sideways, between peers who care whether the work is good, holds up on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody senior is watching the site.
Why the Habits Travel
Abdelnour graduated from Michigan State University in 2022 with a Bachelor of Science in neuroscience, having also studied entrepreneurship and innovation and earned a place on the dean’s list. He was a point guard and co-captain at Catholic Central High School in Novi before that. Neither credential teaches leadership in small teams directly, but both put him on the receiving end of instruction for years, which is its own education in how instruction lands.
The volunteer record has stayed steady since. He supervises children and coordinates outdoor activities at St. Mary’s Montessori in Livonia. For Focus Hope in Detroit, he designed and coordinated construction of a garden with a refurbished storage container used to distribute food and clothing and to give kids a safe place after school. He spent two years with the UNICEF chapter at Michigan State, and in March 2024 he joined roughly thirty volunteers for a week in an under-resourced part of Jamaica, where the group served around three hundred residents.
None of that reads like management training. It is, though. Four summers of explaining footwork to a seven-year-old builds a specific patience, the kind that assumes the failure is in the explanation rather than the listener. AJ Abdelnour brought that assumption from the gym to the job site, and it is still the most useful thing he carries onto either one.
