Mobile Equipment Storage Equals More Time Coaching

{Sponsored} Students shuffle into the gear room one at a time to grab their bulky pads and helmets. The equipment assistant sighs. At this rate, it’ll be at least 20 minutes until everyone has gear and heads out to the football field. Then they’ll have to do it all over again after practice.

Sound familiar?

The athletic staff at St. Peter High School in Minnesota was sick of watching kids get gear one at a time. When the time came to build a new facility for their students, they knew they had to do something different. The sports programs were bigger than when the old facility was built, and more sports were available — meaning more coaches and more gear.

Steve Alger, activities director at St. Peter, remembers seeing heavy-duty wall-mounted grid panels and rolling storage carts at an athletic director conference. When he returned home from the conference, he made some calls to see what company would best suit his new facilities.

At the former high school building, gear cabinets were hand-made and wooden. Besides being hard to see through, the cabinets were placed in specific areas around the building and were not mobile. The coaches had to go back and forth between the area where their sports practiced and the storage rooms. It was a huge waste of time for everyone, even when students didn’t have to come get equipment one at a time from a small equipment room.

At the new high school, Alger picked a different type of solution.

Each coach now has several heavy-duty rolling storage carts. They’re metal grid material, see-through and lockable. The coaches have ready access to what they need and can bring it along to the court or field. They don’t have to practically climb into the storage to find things, and the carts fit neatly along the wall of a storage area.

Not only that, football players now gather their equipment out in a large hallway, which saves time during practices and games in addition to saving space. The equipment rooms just need to be big enough for the carts and one person, instead of a sweaty football player with bulky pads. Helmets hang neatly via hooks attached to wall mounted grid panels. Storage tubs and totes are well organized on wall mount shelving. All of this storage equipment comes from the same company: GearGrid.

St. Peter offers volleyball, basketball, soccer, track and field, tennis, gymnastics, baseball and golf. Each sport has storage near the practice area the coaches and players use or in the middle school if the coaches teach at that building. The best part is that if things needed to be reconfigured due to staffing changes, all of the carts are the same, so there will not be issues with space being inadequate for a different coach’s carts.

“We looked at some other semi mobile units on tracked systems, but they didn’t have the flexibility to pull the whole cage into a gym or hallway so 50 kids aren’t cycling through a gear room,” Alger said. The school offers more sports than any of the area schools, so it was important that they did it right when setting up gear storage for all of the coaches.

Alger also appreciated the care GearGrid showed during the sales process. “They were more than willing to come down, measure for us, and give us ideas of things we might need or want. It was a great process.”

The Suffolk rolling storage carts, wall mount grid panels, wall mount shelving and mobile workstations that GearGrid recommended have been a hit with the coaches. They love being able to see exactly where equipment is in the carts — a stark contrast from those wooden cabinets they used to use, peering through them with flashlights to search for the long-lost item they needed right away. The carts also lock, protecting expensive equipment from theft.

The extra time the coaches save searching for or replacing or handing out gear is time they can spend doing something much more valuable: developing student-athletes.

GearGrid has been manufacturing well-engineered, durable products in the USA since 1921. Its athletic equipment storage systems are designed for modularity, flexibility and maximum utilization of space.

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