Don't make my mistake

NEVER HIRE Mike Ricci from D3 MULTISPORT. Please make sure to read the update here. It's only fair that you read his own comments.

I hate to slam a small business, but when service is this bad, I want to get the word out.

In a way, a Coach is your employee. I fired Mike because he was not performing the minimum requirements of his job.

1.) When I stopped training, Mike Ricci cancelled my plan, didn't finish my month, never refunded my money and deleted some of my training history. When I tried to contact him, he would not respond to my email. (He also blocked me on Twitter and all social media, so that I could not use that method of contact either.)

2.) He is extremely controlling. I repeatedly tried to talk to him about my training and the problems I was having, only to be met with "I'm the coach. Do what I say". "LET ME DO MY JOB" (the caps were his). In addition to this, he demanded that I talk to him every week via a phone call. When I told him that I didn't have time to talk once a week, he went off on me. I told him I could talk once a month. When I set up the meeting to talk once a month, he ignored the meeting request and blew off the meeting.

3.) When I didn't follow his orders, or tried to question training methods, or understand the direction we were going, he got angry.....very angry.....
I once asked for a day off, and he said, "IF YOU KNOW YOUR BODY SO WELL TAKE A DAY OFF". All I was trying to do was request a day off. I hadn't had one in weeks. I wasn't sleeping. I was irritable. I was being "over trained". This is a coach's responsibility: to pay attention to energy levels of their athletes.

4.) He ignored my need to work around scheduling conflicts and said that I "wanted to do my own thing".

5.) When I tried to talk to him to clear the air, he called me a liar and STOPPED the conversation. Only wanting to blame me and was completely unwilling to look at the fact that his training approach wasn't working.

6.) He was overly critical of me. When I did a workout, he would get on me about how I did. The next time I tried to do it better. That next time, he was even more critical. No matter what I did, it wasn't good enough. The worst part was that he started pitting me against other athletes. We went to a race where his CU tri team was also racing. He kept telling another D3 Coach that I would beat certain CU athletes. WHO DOES THAT? That is HORRIBLE coaching. I was 46 years old. I was in really bad shape that day. I shouldn't even have started the race.  They were all in their early 20's. I was supposed to feel good about that? Hell no. It goes to show that he didn't even care about me or MY goals. I ended up getting a DNF. If he was even paying ANY attention to me as an athlete, he would have said, "Hey Tea, I think you need to sit this one out".

7.) The entire year of 2013, my times slowed. Instead of helping me get faster, he put increasing pressure on me to podium in an effort to avoid the issue of my slowing times. Who cares about placing if you aren't meeting your own goals? Who cares about WINNING if your times were some the of slowest you've had?

The saddest part is that I almost gave up on triathlon because of him. I felt like a failure. I hated triathlon. I hated racing. The fun was completely gone because of a Coach.

I have repeatedly admitted to handling the break up poorly and have talked about it openly here. (I was abrupt. No warning, but I never attacked him. I needed time away from him to clear my head). But I think everyone who reads this can understand what it's like to get to a point where you're just not going to take it anymore. I do not deserve to be attacked and called names like I was tonight.

Sadly, this is the short list. I have a 3 page letter that I typed to him earlier this year outlining all of reasons I quit. I never sent that letter.

If you want to know the particulars about my situation, please contact me. I was quiet about this for too long.