Father and son Bill and Will Halle acknowledge that there are different chapters in life; now that Will is out of the United States Marine Corps, their current chapter is working together on a new gym facility for Butler.

Bill, 51, is the founder of the Grace Youth and Family Foundation in Butler, and his oldest son, Will, 32, is the co-founder of Halle Bros. Fitness and Nutrition.

But the duo are now embarking on a new project together, working side by side to create what Bill calls an elite athlete facility, at 420 S. McKean St.

“The idea is to make it a fitness and training facility like Butler’s never seen before,” Will said.

The facility, to be called The Battleground, will have a Divison I-style weightroom on the first floor. On the second level, there will be locker rooms, a chiropractor’s office, a trainer’s office, a child care office, and space for martial arts training, aerobics and other classes, Bill said.

While that project will be owned by the Grace foundation, the Halle Bros. will be contracted to run the programming at the gym, Will said.

Will, a former Marine, feels that he is perfectly suited to help people improve their lives through holistic fitness approaches, focusing on the mind, body and spirit rather than just the physical.

Of course, working together as “teammates,” as Bill calls them, has its own set of challenges. As the father, Bill said he often feels like he needs to be in the parent role.

At the Battleground’s soon-to-be location, the two are taking off the old roof to replace it. And Bill was hesitant to let Will take the reins on that project.

“To do the roof on the building ... this is where it’s difficult,” Bill conceded. “He’s a grown man. Obviously, he’s very physically capable and so forth, but he’s still my son. So if somebody is going to do something that would be more dangerous, or that might be a risk, I’m thinking in my brain, because I’m his dad, that I should do that. Because if somebody is going to get hurt or go down, it should be me.”

Yet, Will, who was in the Marine Corps for nine years from 2003 to 2012, said he is better trained in projects that involve climbing on roofs.

“Meanwhile, I’m younger and my physical capabilities and my experience climbing up stuff like that is more. That’s part of my job. I’m like, ‘Dad! You stay down there and I’ll go up here, and we’ll get it done faster this way, just trust me,’” Will said with a laugh.

Part of the problem may be that, as a Marine, Will spent those nine years growing up away from home, where his parents could not see all of the skills he developed.

“(Bill) didn’t see me grow up even like he would my other brothers and sisters that were local,” Will said, speaking of his two brothers and two sisters. “I left as a teenager and had a whole bunch of experiences that he has no clue. I came back a different person ... I fully know what I can do. He doesn’t. I know that I’m a grown man, and he’s kind of accepting that fact but a lot of times, he thinks I’m still that little kid that’s learning from him.”

But that’s a mind-set that many parents can have.

“I’m still trying to be overprotective, like a father,” Bill said. “If you talk to any parents or kids that have worked together, that’s a battle that they face.”

Now that the two are working together as equals, Bill said he has to handle the transition of no longer being in a purely parental role, especially since Will often trains with or does mixed martial arts to teach his father.

It’s a transition of life ... We always want to be the parent,” Bill said. “Part of the relationship is learning to learn from each other ... He was my student but now that role has reversed. Sometimes I’m his student, and with the concept of the Battleground, now we get to be teammates. It’s kind of full circle.”

Over the course of their relationship, there have been some rough times when they didn’t see eye to eye, Will said. His favorite memory with his father was seeing the look on his face when Will graduated from boot camp, made all the sweeter by the fact Will and his father had not left on the best terms, Will said.

“Growing up, being a teenager, you fight with your parents all the time, so before I left, I wouldn’t say we were exactly on the greatest terms,” Will said. “I was being young and dumb, that was my fault. But seeing the look on his face and have him tell me that (he) was that proud of me, that’s something I’ll remember forever.”

Perhaps the most telling anecdote of the relationship between the father and son is a memory from Will’s mother and Bill’s wife, Deborah Halle.

The family always had a rule when it came to football, a sport that Bill coached for many years: “The disrespect of throwing a helmet because you got angry or because something happened that you didn’t like, it was something that never would be tolerated in our family,” Deborah said. “(Bill) always said, ‘Don’t you ever throw your helmet because I don’t care who is your coach, I don’t care what game it is, I don’t care how important the game is, I don’t care where I am, if I’m announcing, I will come down on that field and I will take you off that field and you will sit on the bench.’”

It was rule many families in the area knew too from all of Bill’s years coaching.

“It’s (Will’s) very last game in high school, ever. It’s his birthday. He didn’t actually throw (the helmet),” Deborah said, telling the story after Will admits that he cannot remember.

“He got dinged, temporarily knocked out, and it was a concussion,” Deborah said. But Bill didn’t know Will was concussed. Neither did Will at the time.

“(Will) went to go back in (the game), and trainer tells one of the assistant coaches, ‘Get him off the field!’” Deborah said.

After being grabbed off the field, Will protested, unsure why he was being taken out of the game.

“Will’s like, ‘What are you doing, why am I off the field?’ And they’re like, ‘Will, do you know what day it is?’ And he’s like, ‘No, it’s a game!’”

At the bench, Will sat down on the bench and pushed his helmet from his lap to the ground.

As Deborah remembers it, “I looked over my shoulder, and everybody is watching my husband go down the steps ... (Bill) went across the track, around the cheerleaders, through the gate, and our daughter, who was one of the student trainers at the time, got a hold of the trainer and said, ‘Dad’s coming!’ They had to intercept (Bill) and say, ‘He has no idea why we just took him out of the game.’”

As Bill admits now, he had no idea Will had a concussion, and that’s why he reacted in such an unexpected way. Even Will didn’t realize he was concussed.

“I don’t remember. I was out,” Will said. “I remember up until the hit. It was the start of the second half and I was on the kickoff team, we kicked the ball, I come flying down the field, I go to make a tackle and the next thing you know, I don’t remember.”

But the best part of the entire situation: “(Bill) didn’t turn around and come back,” Deborah said. “He sat on that bench that whole game. You could see Will look at him, and he’d say something, and then they’d watch the game some more. We didn’t find out until later that Will kept asking, ‘Dad, how’d we get that score,’ ‘Dad, what day is it?’”

“To me, that was the perfect picture of grace, the grace that a dad extends to their son knowing this is how you’re going out from high school football,” she said.