Wheelhouse Training

Building Athletes from the Ground Up

As a high school student, Brandon Vega dreamed of playing professional baseball. The business plan he wrote back then, though, was for a baseball training facility of his own. He found that plan again in an old binder shortly after opening Wheelhouse Training, about a dozen years later.

The path in between had its detours. Brandon grew up in Jackson and played Division I baseball at Alcorn State University, graduating in 2015. By his own account, his playing career brought more setbacks than successes. Coaching had been his goal since he was young, and in the spring of 2016, while training for a career in law enforcement, he volunteered with the Jackson Memorial High School baseball program. When the JV coaching job opened, he took it and set the police career aside.

Coaching summer baseball showed Brandon that many players needed more development in strength, speed, and bat speed before games could do much for them. As more players sought him out, he formed Wheelhouse Training in January 2021, and it opened in Hillsborough in June 2022. Brandon knew little about the town at the time and was glad to find Hillsborough High School close enough for athletes to walk over.

At Wheelhouse, skill work and physical training run side by side in cycles, with the emphasis shifting through the year. Baseball and softball players come for hitting and throwing, and the strength and conditioning program also draws athletes from other sports including wrestlers, football players, and basketball players. Brandon built that program on the conjugate method he learned through Westside Barbell, and he holds certifications from HLP for hitting, Driveline Baseball for pitching, and NASM for training. Sometimes an athlete can’t do what a coach asks because the body isn’t strong enough yet, so Brandon builds that strength while teaching the skill at the same time. Athletes train in small groups, but every drill is built around the individual.

What Brandon hopes families notice most is the culture. As a young player, he kept quiet and deferred to authority, but he wants his athletes to know they can bring anything going on in their lives to their coaches. The coaches also put their own contacts to work helping players reach college baseball. He is building his coaching team from athletes he trained himself, and Wheelhouse has supported Hillsborough High School Baseball as a Grand Slam sponsor.

Away from the gym, Brandon DJs, a passion he shares with his father, and his coaches have joked about him setting up above the training floor one day to spin a set while they coach. Back on the training floor, every athlete hears his motto, “Hold the Vision, Trust the Process,” which grew out of the struggles of his own playing career.