The Journey · Day 4

The Building That Became Our Baseball Home

Journey Marker: Shawnee, Oklahoma | Oklahoma Braves — Around the Turn of the 2000s

By the time the Oklahoma Braves started becoming a serious competitive team, I had learned something simple: if you want kids to improve, they need a place to work.

Not just when the weather cooperates. Not just when a public field happens to be open. They need repetitions. They need somewhere they can fail, adjust and try again.

Around that time, a friend and I became involved with an old building in downtown Shawnee that I remember as the old Roundhouse building. We originally had business ideas involving the Internet and a coffee shop.

Instead, that building ended up becoming something I never could have planned.

My recollection is that smaller downtown properties we looked at were considerably more expensive and still needed substantial work. This building came available for about $45,000. It was three stories with a basement, and the first floor already had tenants.

We each borrowed money from our retirement accounts to make the purchase happen.

Those details come from my memory of that period. I'm not presenting them today as a financial reconstruction of the property.

And somewhere along the way, I started looking at those upper floors and seeing baseball.

A Place to Work

We put batting cages upstairs.

We built three indoor dirt pitching mounds.

There was an office we could use for meetings and another area where we stored equipment.

The Oklahoma Braves could practice there, and so could Brian's Oklahoma Wolfpack team.

Brian's coaches, Mike Blocker and Mike Tennell, were coaches I respected. I watched things they did with Brian's team and incorporated some of those ideas into my own coaching.

That's another part of my coaching story that matters.

I didn't learn everything on my own.

I watched other coaches.

I borrowed ideas.

I experimented.

Sometimes something worked. Sometimes it didn't.

For our kids, the building became something close to having our own little recreation center.

We could practice almost whenever we needed to.

That was a tremendous advantage.

But it wasn't fancy.

Owning an old building also meant discovering all the things that come with owning an old building.

I remember learning very quickly what it cost to heat the place. I remember worrying about pipes and sprinklers freezing.

At one point, during a practice I wasn't attending, a sprinkler head was damaged. The water was stopped initially, but my recollection is that the system wasn't completely shut down. Pressure eventually built back up, and by the next morning the first floor had flooded.

Those aren't the stories people usually tell when they talk about competitive youth baseball.

But they're part of it.

Teaching With What We Had

What I remember most is how much we experimented.

I had seen a pitching drill using a two-by-four to help pitchers feel whether they were landing in proper alignment. If their foot placement was wrong, they got immediate feedback.

So we used it.

We had a pitching machine.

I set up a video camera and recorded our young pitchers. Then I went through the video frame by frame, looking at their eyes, body angles and mechanics.

We even used the building itself for conditioning—up one staircase, across the floor and down the other side.

There wasn't an app measuring everything.

There wasn't sophisticated technology telling me exactly what to fix.

We observed.

We experimented.

We taught.

And the kids worked.

Looking Back