Luke Carrell is building a business through baseball

Baseball has been America’s favorite pastime for more than 200 years. It has been an integral part of Luke Carrell’s life for the past 17. Now, the Ohio State pitcher is bringing his talent and passion for the game to kids across the country.

Luke, a second-year MBA student, co-created Side Coach Sports, a website and app that brings sports training and lessons to kids at the touch of a button.

The idea for the business grew out of individual baseball lessons Luke gave while pitching for the University of Oklahoma and as NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) opportunities opened up for college athletes. It continued to take shape after Luke started hosting training camps for travel baseball teams. When individual families began requesting private lessons from Luke, he saw the prospect of scaling these opportunities.

“Baseball's taken me all over the country and has probably been the best experience I could have had,” said Luke. “But I know there's life outside of baseball, and I also have a passion for business.”

That passion for business is what brought Luke to Ohio State and Fisher to pursue his MBA, deepen his entrepreneurial foundation and help fine-tune his company’s business plan.

“Fisher is a highly ranked MBA program,” Luke said. “When the Ohio State baseball coaching staff came to Louisiana to see me pitch and offered me a scholarship, I always say the stars perfectly aligned for me to end up here at Fisher. There couldn’t have been a better opportunity for academics and athletics.”

One of those opportunities found Luke as a featured student entrepreneur at the 2025 Bert L. and Iris S. Wolstein Entrepreneurial Leadership Summit which brings together students, alumni and industry leaders to explore new ideas and partnerships.

At the event, Luke said Ohio State instructors and mentors have provided both business and moral support to help him launch his company.

“There’s no better university with entrepreneurship programs,” he said. “There are tons of people who really helped me get myself out there, gave me confidence to go out and do it and also raise funds through business pitch competitions.”

Building a business

Luke and his brother, Zach, both pitched for Oklahoma’s baseball team when they launched Side Coach Sports in 2022. The site works like this: college athletes sign up as coaches on the site to provide private lessons for youth. Parents and young athletes find a coach in their area they’d like to work with, register on the site, check the athlete’s availability and sign up for lessons.

The platform and initial marketing strategies were the experimental start of their company thanks to $24,500 Luke won during several undergraduate business pitch competitions: Rice Business Plan Competition, e-Fest Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Competition and SEC Start Up: A Student-Athlete Pitch Competition, as well as the Texas Hall of Fame Foundation Future Texas Business Legend Award presented to Zach.

What’s made him more and more successful during these competitions, he said, is learning from each mistake he made.

“I would always stick around and watch the finalists to see what the other business plans had that I didn’t,” said Luke. “Each competition has been an evolution of learning from my failures and building my presentation to create a better sales pitch and funding information section.”

His presentation style has evolved ever since, leading to even more competition wins at Ohio State.

Most recently in November, Luke earned second place and $10,000 in the 2025 Best of Student Startups (BOSS) competition through the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship. Part of the university’s broader entrepreneurial platform, the competition guides students through the creation of new ventures while focusing on customer discovery. He also took home $10,000 at the 2024 BOSS competition and $5,000 in the BOSS student athlete competition in summer 2025.

Luke plans to use the earnings to expand Side Coach Sports’ technology suite beyond a mobile app and website, to include a new camp management software designed to support both athletes and families.

The competitions, Luke said, have given him the opportunity to refine his business model.

“The last six months I’ve been putting together a business plan in order to be able to take a leap of faith to go full-time after graduation,” Luke said.

He currently has over 250 baseball and softball athlete coaches from Baylor University, the University of Oklahoma and Ohio State on the Side Coach Sports site, with the goal of eventually incorporating every collegiate sport.

“Side Coach Sports is beneficial to me as an athlete because the scheduling is flexible and completely up to the athlete's ability to incorporate hectic school and practice schedules,” said Emma Tolley, a third-year psychology student and catcher on Ohio State’s softball team. “It has set me up with athletes in Columbus and has grown my connections with parents and teams for future sessions.”

Ryan Butler, an Ohio State baseball pitcher and graduate student in health care leadership, agreed.

“It’s a great avenue for me to get into coaching, establish relationships as a mentor and have a better understanding of different age groups,” Ryan said. “It’s given me the experience and knowledge to be able to continue coaching professionally.”

Mentoring kids

“Growing up, I always had a private coach,” Luke said. “When I look back at the coaching my brother and I had with a college athlete, we found him to be more relatable like a friend,” Luke said. “A lot of kids dream of becoming professional athletes. When they see we are teaching them the same skills we do, kids see their goal of turning pro is not that far away.”

Luke said parents have even seen a change in their kids’ behavior when working with collegiate athletes.

“High school kids look up to collegiate athletes; they realize these coaches were in their shoes not very long ago,” said Jim Pipo, a parent of two high school students receiving pitching lessons from Luke. “Luke seems to relate well with my kids and listens to our concerns. Both my kids have improved in their consistency and focus and have increased confidence and control. In addition, they are much better mentally when there are base runners.”

Jim also likes Luke’s personalized approach of evaluating lessons, building on previous skills and reviewing video images of his kids’ mechanics. He also appreciates Luke’s focus on the importance of stretching and training outside of practices and games.

“I've seen it first-hand,” Luke said. “I worked with an eight-year-old who was usually in a bad mood and not very respectful. With me, when he stepped into the cage, he was locked in for an hour straight, with 100% of his attention focused on baseball.”

For Ryan, he’s noticed how the sessions have positively affected young athletes’ state of mind.

“We work on the mechanical, performance and mental state of being a pitcher,” Ryan said. “We talk about the impact that every single throw has on every single play of the game. I tell them, ‘You can’t let one pitch affect you — you can’t dwell on it, you need to think of the next pitch; you can only control what you can control.’”

And for Luke, he feels that he has pretty good control over how he’s building his business model.

“With this endeavor, I really understand being the youth athlete, being the college athlete and now being the owner of the business,” said Luke. “I've been in athletics my entire life. The more I do it, the more I see the joy kids get out of these opportunities that they wouldn't have had before. It’s a win-win.”