“There is no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs.”

That slogan, written in big, bold letters, will be the first thing people will see when they enter Athlete Farm Niagara’s indoor training facility.

Nate Mitton chose those words for his new business in St. Catharines because he has climbed a lot of stairs — and overcome just as many obstacles — since he decided as a youth that he wanted to be play hockey at the highest levels.

When Mitton, who was born in Hamilton but grew up in Kitchener, heard “no” the first seven times he tried out for triple-A, he was sure it was short for “not today.” So he kept coming back.

He finally made it on his eighth try.

“I don’t think there was a happier kid on the ice that day,” he recalled with an ear-to-ear grin almost 13 years later.

For Mitton, who is turning 29 next month and is also Athlete Farm Niagara’s chief instructor, making triple-A — “Being selected to play on a travel team!” — was a dream come true at the time.

“It was like scoring the winning goal in a championship game, that was the only way to possibly describe it.”

But there were more rungs to climb after that for Mitton, whose father is a Canadian of English and Irish descent and whose mother is from Jamaica. Two years in triple-A set the stage for one season in junior-C, two in junior-B, including one in the Greater Ontario Junior Hockey League with the Caledonia Corvairs, followed by four in Ontario University Athletics Conference (OUA) and then three more in the pros.

The pros?

Yes, the very same Nate Mitton, who was told by one teacher to play field hockey and by another to focus on football, silenced those detractors by playing half a season in the Southern Professional Hockey League with the Birmingham, Ala., Bulls and parts of three in the ECHL with the Utah Grizzlies and Cincinnati Cyclones.

“People always want to put people in boxes and say, ‘OK you’re this. OK, you’re a coach, you’re an athlete, we’ll put you in this bucket,’” he said. “I’ve been good at wanting to break that, you’re it’s appearance, what I look like or if I’m a coach or not.”

Except for trying out for the Jamaican national team, which is preparing to compete in its first-ever Olympic qualifying tournament in October, Mitton has put his hockey career “on hold” to concentrate on helping young up-and-coming athletes achieve their goals, “whether that be a scholarship or a spot on a major junior hockey roster.”

“Through my journey as an athlete, I was always looking for a place that could help me get better. I knew where I wanted to go, but I just didn’t know how to get there,” he said. “I was always looking for people to help me get to where I wanted to go because a high tide raises all ships, they say.”

Mitton, who began working with high-performance athletes while attending University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, was already offering on- and off-ice training under his own name when he got the idea for Athlete Farm Niagara.

He was receiving “incredible feedback from parents” but felt there was more to do.

“I want to help more athletes become better, unlock their purpose as athletes, unlock their greatness basically.”

Mitton doesn’t buy the argument that a pandemic was perhaps the worst time to open a business that caters to athletes when there is no sport.

“I say perspective drives performance, so how you view what you do always determines how you do what you do. For us, it was like this is the most needed time,” he said. “I feel it’s the perfect timing because all of us as athletes, myself included, have kind of been put on the shelf.