Podcast: Texas Real Estate & Finance Podcast
Episode Title: TREFP #30 Kevin Lewis
Host(s): Mike Mills
Guest(s): Kevin Lewis
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Mike Mills (Host) | 00:00:12 to 00:00:23
Here we are, live and live. All right, so, today's a little different. That's why I'm wearing my hat. So if you scroll through your feed and you see me in a hat, that means we're not talking. I guess I should have a hat.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:00:23 to 00:00:59
Well, no, it's just for me, because we're not doing real estate and finance today, even though that's what it says in the very beginning. I don't know, maybe if you have any real estate questions, you can ask Kevin, but other than that, that's not my intent to discuss today. So, today, I want to talk about one of my personal passions, which is youth sports and youth athletics. And this is something I had a conversation with somebody not too long ago about and really wanted to bring Kevin in here, because if there's an expert here in Mansfield about this stuff, he's definitely somebody that I would put into that category. I've known Kevin for a little while now, but for anybody that doesn't know, this is Kevin Lewis.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:00:59 to 00:01:19
He is currently. The reason I'm having him in today is because he's the president of NYBA, which is a Mansfield Youth Baseball association. Here in Mansfield, where I live. He also does many other things, and we'll touch on a few of those, but his current business, actually, is. He does fundraisers with schools and whatnot.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:01:19 to 00:01:47
We'll get into that, because I think it's a really good move from what he's been doing with the league for so many years into something that he now has as a business. And then he also spent 15 years as a high level executive for Taco Bueno, and a lot of management and business development skills that he kind of picked up there. Definitely made the league that I participated in. My kids played in it. I served on the board for a number of years.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:01:47 to 00:02:38
Definitely made it something that I was proud to be a part of and wanted to chat with Kevin a little bit, because whenever you're in charge of anything, whatever that may be, the more people that you have involved in it, the more opportunity there is to maybe not be everybody's favorite person all the time. And for the most part, that's not the problem for Kevin, if anybody really knows him, but it's the complaining from the cheap seats mentality sometimes that people get into. I think if you get to know people and where their heart is on what they're doing, I think it really resonates, and you start to understand, really, what people's motivations are, and I've had that experience dealing with all kinds of people from all walks of life, especially with the youth sports stuff. So that's really what we're going to chat about today. But I kind of want to start with Kevin.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:02:38 to 00:02:48
You grew up in DFW, right? Correct. Okay, so tell me a little bit about where you went to high, know family, kind of how you got to what you're doing today. Yeah. So, I mean, we're rooted in the DFW area.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:02:48 to 00:03:00
I was born in Fort Worth. Where'd you go to high school? Went to Eastern Hills. Okay. Different experience than probably it is now, but grew up in Burleson.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:03:00 to 00:03:16
That's really where I spent my childhood and played baseball. Most of my baseball career was in Burleson. And when I was in middle school, we moved to Fort Worth and then kind of finished out there. And so I come from a big family, extended family. Very large extended family.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:03:16 to 00:03:30
My mom's dad had 23 brothers and sisters. Wow. Think about that for a minute. He wore the first wife out and she passed away after twelve kids. I think the first one had twelve and the second one had twelve.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:03:30 to 00:03:34
There were two sets of twins. This is your grandfather? My grandfather. Wow. My grandfather's dad.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:03:34 to 00:03:46
Okay, so a couple of generations. Yeah. So my mom's grandfather and then my dad's side of family is all kind of local. And anywhere from Granbury across, we have. We have a lot of family in the area.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:03:46 to 00:04:01
And other than really going off to college in Abilene, I've always been in the DFW area, mainly in Tarrant County. I know. I found out randomly. So somebody that I work with in the area's title office, Tiffany Williams. You probably know Tiffany.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:04:01 to 00:04:24
You know Sherry Lamont Fisher? Yes, that's my cousin. Sherry is. It's funny, I saw yesterday on Facebook, somebody posted some question for a realtor, and I commented in there, I don't think there's any realtors in this group because I think 90% of everybody on the Facebook Mansfield talk group is somehow related in real estate. Yes.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:04:24 to 00:04:31
Either it's the same way you are or an actual realtor. Yeah. So you have a big family? I do. And they're spread out all over the place.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:04:31 to 00:04:39
They're all over the place. And is it just one son, is that correct? I have one son, Zach. Yeah. He recently graduated college in aerospace engineering.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:04:39 to 00:04:53
He's known since he was like eight years old that he's wanted to do that. So he works for Lockheed now. Has a great job with them. He's a good guy, good kid. I raised him kind of a single dad.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:04:53 to 00:05:15
And he spent most of his time with me and running as many restaurants as I did. And Nyba took up a lot of my time, but he definitely made things easy on me. The kid never really got in trouble, ever. And to this day, I'm not aware of the kid ever lying in his life. He cannot not tell the truth to save his life, no matter what.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:05:15 to 00:05:30
It just fell over. Like, be careful what you ask him, because he's going to tell you the truth if he answers you, because he will not lie. And there was lots of. He actually made me less of a white liar because there's lots of times when he's growing up, and he'd say, well, that's not true. You're right.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:05:31 to 00:05:41
Why did I even lie? Because you lie about the dumbest stuff somebody says, hey, didn't I see in the grocery store today? That wasn't me, dad. It was. Yeah, you were there yesterday, and I saw him.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:05:42 to 00:05:50
Yeah. It's always an exaggeration. It's like, oh, I was working out again. I was been at the gym for, like, the last five days. Like, he went one day last week.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:05:52 to 00:06:12
You were picking me up. Right. Which he's really into working out now. He was a small guy growing up super fast, but small and about, I don't know, four or five years ago, he started getting into working out, and he's been very disciplined about it, and he transformed his body big time. He's really in good shape.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:06:12 to 00:06:15
That's great. He didn't get that part from me, obviously.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:06:18 to 00:06:47
I would assume that when your son was growing up, that was the reason you got into coaching and getting into baseball and kind of where you led to NYBA, is that right? My dad coached me and my brothers when we were little, and before I ever had a child, I thought, that's definitely what I want to do. So definitely, when he became three, four years old and started playing sports, I coached him from the get go. In fact, his very first experience. I had lived out in the Plano area for a short amount of time, and then we were moving back this way.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:06:47 to 00:07:05
In fact, I was building my house here in Plano, and it wasn't quite ready, and my house in the Plano area sold. So we moved in with my parents for about six months up in South Arlington, and he was old enough to start playing a sport. And so I was never a fan of soccer. Growing just. It's not my thing.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:07:05 to 00:07:14
It's still not my thing. It's just not exciting to me. But I didn't want to pigeonhole him. To baseball, figure out what he wants. To do, just like every parent does.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:07:14 to 00:07:26
Absolutely. So I signed him up for soccer with the YMCA in Arlington. Okay. And I'll never forget, on a Friday night, I got a phone call and they said, Mr. Lewis?
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:07:26 to 00:07:33
Yeah. They said, well, this is the YMCA. They said, we got some good news and we got some bad news. And I said, OK, what's the good news? And they said, well, Zach's on the Orange Crush.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:07:33 to 00:07:40
Okay, I'll never forget the orange crush. I said, awesome. What's the bad news? And they said, we have no coach. And I said, okay.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:07:41 to 00:07:47
And they said, it gets worse. And I said, okay. They said, first game's tomorrow. I'm not even joking. Yes.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:07:47 to 00:07:55
And they said, can you coach? And I said, well, can I coach? Yes. Can I coach soccer? Give me the rulebook, send it to me now.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:07:55 to 00:08:14
And I guess I could coach anything. This is before YouTube, by the way. There was no Googling YouTube, so they sent me a rulebook or I got my hands on somehow and learned just enough to put kids out there and say, go put the ball down there. I didn't know anything about positions, forwards and all that. All I know is goalie.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:08:14 to 00:08:47
Yeah, every kid knows goalie. So anyway, that's how it started. Then I signed him up for baseball with the Y while we were there, also for that summer, I think, and started and was coaching there. And this is kind of how I got into NYBA, is we were playing with the Y and I think the Y sports programs serve a purpose, but you can quickly outgrow the YMCA's programs and we did very quickly. And I remember the first summer we were playing, there was a team out of Mansfield that had come down there to play because NYBA didn't play summer ball at all.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:08:47 to 00:09:03
And so they'd come down and play this little summer league at YMCA and go, uh, just destroyed everybody, basically. Well, they were destroying. Supposedly we're winning the leagues in, uh. And they came down to YMCA and of course we're destroying teams, but we beat them. Okay, my little YMCA team beat them.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:09:03 to 00:09:18
And so the coach came to me afterwards and said, hey, let's merge team. He wants to join forces. You don't want to be in the YMCA any longer. Come join forces with us. Let's take your top three or four and I'll keep my top six or whatever.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:09:18 to 00:09:46
They were just going into coach pitch, I think, at the time we played coach pitch at the Y, I believe, and then they were just starting coach pitch at NYBA. So anyway, we did that. We merged with them because I was moving to ManSl anyway and I could tell that's not where we need to be. And so we played with them for a season or two and then it's just very hard for me to be a follower. It's just something in me.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:09:46 to 00:10:19
I got to lead and it was just so hard, well, for me to be an assistant coach. I think what it is, because I have a little bit of that as well, is that when you get into a situation and you see improvement, that could happen in that situation and you know that you're like, well, they should be doing this and they should be doing this, whether it be a team or a league or it doesn't matter what's work, whatever. You have a tendency that's definitely hard for any assistant coach, I think, to sit on. But for me, I don't know. It's uncomfortable for me not to be in charge, right.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:10:19 to 00:10:38
And a lot of people are just the opposite. Leadership scares them, makes them uncomfortable and it doesn't me. I have always wanted. I remember there's a friend of mine, Jason. I don't know if he'll end up seeing this or not, but I ran into him after many years from when we were kids, and one of the first thing he said, he said one thing I remember about you, you were always the leader.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:10:38 to 00:10:50
We were five years old. He said no matter what we were doing, everybody did whatever Kevin did. And it wasn't that I had a bossy mentality or anything like just. There's something about me. I just gravitate towards leadership and it was hard for me to do that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:10:50 to 00:10:58
And it was a good team. We were playing with that. We came up here and played with. It wasn't so much that I saw things I wanted to do different. I just needed to be in charge.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:10:58 to 00:11:14
I wanted to be the head coach. So after, I think, two seasons, I went and moved on, started my own team, and then I think by the second season I had two teams. That wasn't long before. After that I had three teams and that's how I got to NYBA. Yeah.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:11:15 to 00:11:39
As far as getting onto the board, I remember the first meeting that I went to, the coaches meeting and it. Was just a mess. It was mad chaos. The coaches talked through the entire thing and I remember at 1.1 of the board members at the time screamed at everybody just to try to get control of the room. Right.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:11:39 to 00:12:15
The other side of that is only probably 30% of the coaches were there. And so there was just a lot of opportunity, let's put it that way, and the guy that was the president at the time had just taken over, and his son had played with us on that team we had played with. And so that's how I knew him. And it's funny, because I remember not long after, came to NYBA, me and my family, or my girlfriend and her son. At the time, we were sitting at a restaurant in South Arlington and just sat down to eat dinner, and all of a sudden I saw the NYBA board members coming in.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:12:15 to 00:12:36
They were having a board meeting. They were using a little extra room over there at that dickies on. I remember, I don't know what it was, but I felt a calling at that moment. I don't even know where it came from, but I told her at that moment, I said, I feel like I feel called to be a part of that. I feel called to be a part of the board, and I didn't do anything with it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:12:36 to 00:12:54
But I told her that that day. And then at the end of that season, the guy that I just mentioned that had taken over, he called me and he was just spent, right? He said, I just want you to be the first to know I'm resigning. I can't do it anymore. He said, there's some things that need to change.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:12:54 to 00:13:16
He said, Nyba really needs you to come be a part of this. And it was weird, because I'd never told anybody other than my girlfriend that I felt a calling to do that. And here he was calling me like he didn't even know me that well, except for being a fellow parent on another team. He said, you really need to be a part of think. I can't remember if they reached out to me.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:13:16 to 00:13:38
I think I may have reached out to them and just said, hey, I just learned that he's resigning. I'm interested in learning more about the board process and being on the board, whatever. So they invited me to the next meeting. Long story short, I got voted in that night to take over as the president and then voted in by the coaches later at the meeting. So, wait, so you had not served on the board?
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:13:38 to 00:13:49
Not at all. One time, I had not been a commissioner. I had not been on the board. I had not served in any capacity except to be a head coach for, I think, one or two seasons. So you coached one or two seasons.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:13:49 to 00:14:02
You knew the former president just via. Playing on the team. He was there for one season, the president before him. I'm aware of who he is. I really wasn't friends with him or anything.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:14:02 to 00:14:17
And then the board members. There wasn't a board member that wanted to be president, not that that matters or doesn't matter, but really went in the first day and they were like, hey, we're going to make you president, even though you. No, it wasn't that easy. They were going to run without a president, basically. Okay.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:14:17 to 00:14:31
And like I said, I felt something in me calling me to do this, so I reached out to them and said, hey, I know that he's resigning. I'm trying not to name names, but he's resigning. And I'm interested in the position. Maybe I don't even know if I was or not. I want to learn more about it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:14:32 to 00:14:57
Learn about it. Yeah, I'm not doing that. But they said, sure, why don't you come on in and we'll talk? And we went into the meeting, and after talking for a little while, they voted me in because honestly, at the time, the president, to be honest with you, the president was really just a figurehead piece. Whatever it was, it was the mouth of the association, basically, and everybody else was running it.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:14:57 to 00:15:18
Yeah. You know, about how many kids you'll have. Pretty easy for them to say, yeah, let's let this guy handle all the phone calls and the emails, because I'll be honest with you. One of the things that the outgoing president told me, he said, I'm going to tell you right now, if you take this, be prepared, it will overwhelm your life with phone calls and emails. And he goes, that's part of the reason why I'm leaving.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:15:18 to 00:15:34
It's just too much. And he was right. The minute I got voted in and was a part of it, I got swamped and I came from a business background and immediately things started jumping out to me that it doesn't have to be like this. Right? There can be a better process.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:15:34 to 00:15:46
Yeah, 80% to 90% of everything everybody was asking me was the same questions. And none of it was on the website. Right? None of it. And so I'm like, let's answer these questions on the website and cut down.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:15:46 to 00:16:08
So immediately I found out who's the webmaster and I got added as an admin. I immediately started going in there and reshaping the website to answer a lot of these questions. And immediately that stuff started toning down because we were pushing people to the website and they were getting the information they needed. So there just needed to be some organization and some things like that. But, yeah, that's how I ended up on the board.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:16:08 to 00:16:52
Well, like I said when I came in, started working with you guys on the board and then doing the football organization stuff, I've come across a lot of leagues and a lot of organizations and people that run organizations. And what you tend to find out, especially, and this happens a lot in baseball, I think, specifically because you get guys that. And when I say organization, it doesn't even have to be a league. It could be a club, it could be a group that has four or five teams, different age groups, but you get a lot of dads that have a passion for baseball or for whatever. Maybe they like to be in charge of stuff or whatever the case may be, and they get involved, but they run it like they kind of run their lives, which it's chaotic.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:16:52 to 00:17:17
There's very little communication. There's not a lot of interaction with, we'll call them the customers, your parents, the people that are paying you or being involved in your group or whatever. And so when you actually have somebody that has a business background like you did, that steps into an organization and goes, okay, wait a minute, we need to run this. This isn't the Backyard association, especially because we're growing. We need to operate this like a business.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:17:17 to 00:17:31
There needs to be accountability. There needs to be financials. All those things need to occur. Those are the ones that you tend to see have much greater success because it's approached that way and it's not approached just like as a hobby. Yeah, honestly, I think that's what really took us to the next level.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:17:31 to 00:18:00
And when you have people volunteering their time to do things like be on the board or be a commissioner or whatever, there's different types of people. You kind of mentioned hinted at somebody like me who just is gravitated to leadership positions, but you have also, people just want to work, do it for selfish reasons. I want to get my kid into. The best, got you on the best. Team, or I want to be able to get the best players, and then you have those volunteers that it just sounds cool and they have zero qualification whatsoever.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:18:00 to 00:18:45
And that's where you tend to get a lot of chaos and being unorganized and someone that doesn't really have the skill sets to get things organized. And so I think we were very fortunate over the years to get a collection of people together. Like, know Mike served on the board with us for several years and was a commissioner before that. It takes what really is important about running an organization like this, and probably most any organization, to have great success for the organization and for the organization to really thrive and be healthy. And strong is you have to be able to separate your own personal gains, your own personal benefits.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:18:45 to 00:19:05
It benefits anything like that. Because there's been several times where I personally had to make decisions that didn't benefit my team. It benefited the organization. It was to the negative, to my team, but it was good for the organization. Maybe it was better for the rec divisions because my team's always played in the select divisions.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:19:05 to 00:19:16
But it's very hard to separate yourself from that. And a lot of people can't because in the back of their mind, they're. Thinking, I'm giving my time. How does this impact me? Yeah, how does this impact me?
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:19:18 to 00:19:46
It's very similar in business, especially restaurants. Right. I always would associate the restaurants are always really hard to run because you have a lot of theft, because you have items that sit in your fridge, you have food and you have cash, and whenever you have food and cash and you have a bunch of employees, theft is always a concern. Right. And so what happens is, even well intended people will put themselves in a bad position and be involved in something like that in a restaurant because they feel like they deserve it.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:19:46 to 00:19:53
You know what I mean? Well, in the restaurant business, I think there's a couple of different kinds of thieves. Really? Sure. They are thieves.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:19:54 to 00:20:01
There's one thief that, like you said, thinks they deserve it. I work here. I deal with this stuff every day. I can take food home. I can take cash home.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:20:01 to 00:20:36
I'm not doing anything wrong. They program themselves to believe that's okay because they're part of the system, basically. But then there's also thieves that just need opportunity. And one of the things I used to spend quite a bit of time coaching our managers on was reducing the window of opportunity because, and I used to describe it like this, I would say, look, let me tell you this right now. If you were to put $100 bill on your front counter of the restaurant, but you stood there like this and you watched it, you could probably make sure to be there the rest of the day.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:20:36 to 00:20:59
Yeah, if you put it on the counter and turned your back for the rest of the day and only glanced at it every once in a while, you still might be there the end of the day. Maybe if you decided to go work in the back of the restaurant and came back at the end of the day to see if it was there, probably won't be there. Right. So those are windows of opportunity. And so what we always try to do is make that window small, as small as we can.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:20:59 to 00:21:16
Because if it gets big enough, people jump through it even. Honestly, what normally would be good people? It's like, holy cow, I'm in the middle of a desert and there's a bag of money sitting right there. No one's been here for a year. Well, the way I.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:21:16 to 00:21:30
Would you take it? Yeah, well, the way I. But if you're in the same scenario where you're driving through the desert and traffic's going and you see a bag of money on the road, you might try to get to the rifle owner, but you probably wouldn't take it. No. Well, that's the same thing.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:21:30 to 00:21:47
Windows of opportunity. It's like if the opportunity exists, and I think there's really no way anyone else is ever even going to know about this, some people that normally would not have will now take that opportunity. Well, I don't even think sometimes. It's always malicious. It gets that way, but I don't think that's where it starts exactly.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:21:47 to 00:22:23
What I used to Say was, it was very funny. I'd use the same analogy to some extent, about $100, but I would put it in twenty s. And I would say if you had $520 bills sitting on a table and you have somebody running your restaurant for you, and you leave and it could be your brother, your best friend, it doesn't matter who it is and something, you run out of milk, you run out of cheese, you run out of whatever, and that person's got to take that money and go purchase it because you're not there or you're not able to do it or whatever, and then they come back and it gets busy or whatever, and they forget to put it back again. No malice, no nothing. It was just the course of the day occurred where they weren't able to put that money back because they were like, I'll put it back later, once I get it.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:22:23 to 00:22:36
And then maybe nobody notices or it comes up short a little bit, but nobody says anything about it or whatever. I forgot to bring that back. You're like, oh, I totally forgot about that. And then you go back again the next time and again, no intent, but this time they're like, yeah. Oh, well, I got to go get this.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:22:36 to 00:23:19
That's why I say there's different kinds of thieves. Because one thief just looks for opportunity, and then another thief, the opportunity just gets so blatant that it makes it really hard for some people to still do the right thing. They say, you do the right thing when nobody's looking. Some people, like, if they just really think nobody's ever going to be looking at this good people will do bad things sometimes in those situations. Well, in that same, I don't know if you want to call it trade or behavior or whatever bleeds over into what we were talking about, about when you bring people into organizations, larger organizations that have a lot of moving parts and a lot of things happening, that same feeling of either they deserve it or they have mallet or whatever, that happens there, too.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:23:19 to 00:23:49
And so it's okay. Well, I'm going to make sure that my team gets this uniform or I'm going to make sure that we change the rule in this division. So my team, it's not always malicious. It's just that it's so hard to watch out for that because it is a pretty common human behavior, and it's hard to find people to get involved in organizations where there's money coming through that you can trust and make sure that they're going to be taken care of, because it's just there and you have to be aware of it. And that's why it's hard to find really good people to do so.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:23:49 to 00:24:23
It's human nature to think about yourself or think about. But I think that's what really has not only strengthened, you know, NYBA is one of the few organizations that's really standing the test of time right now. Yes, a lot of organizations are shrinking big time, and I think NYBA is positioned in a good place. And the reason we've been kind of immune to that shrinkage is for a couple of reasons. One, I think people appreciate what we do.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:24:24 to 00:24:43
The hardest part about making people understand is that it's not just about their child. And so over all my 15 years of being here, every once in a while I usually just get lots of positive vibes from people constantly. Thank you. You guys are doing great, all these great things. Yeah, I very rarely come across bad stuff.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:24:43 to 00:25:02
Every once in a while, I'll have somebody say something to me about like, oh, I work with so and so that used to play with NYBA. Well, she really doesn't like you. And I'm like, I can remember somebody saying this to me one time, and it's happened two or three times. I'm like, what do you mean, they don't like that? Not that everybody has to like me, but it makes me wonder what happened about baseball that made them not like me.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:25:02 to 00:25:10
And they're like, I don't know. I don't know what happened. They just have a sour taste in their mouth. They mentioned you by name, and I'm like, okay, so I'll go home and I'll Google that person's name. Not Google.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:25:10 to 00:25:42
I'll look them up in my email search because I have every email ever, and I'll find their name. And sure enough, every single time, it's because that person wanted me to treat their player different than every other player in the league. Right. And the a number one complaint is someone gets on a team, everything's great, but then all of a sudden, they don't agree with how much playtime their son's getting or where he bets in the order. Or they brought something up to the coach and they didn't like the way the coach responded.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:25:42 to 00:25:57
Now what they do is they reach us. I want to be on a different team. Yeah, that's the A number one, it doesn't happen a whole lot. Like every season, it's about five people, five to six people. But those five or six people make such a big deal about it, and they don't understand why they can't move to another team.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:25:57 to 00:26:05
Now, if we didn't have the rules and the policies in place that we do, it'd be way more than five or six. Right. Because here's what would happen. They want me to say, oh, you know what? That's not working out.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:26:05 to 00:26:14
Let's just move you over to this team that could take on another player. No big deal. Finish the season with them. Here's the problem. If you let one person do that, you have to let everybody do that.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:26:14 to 00:26:31
Yes. And so now every time, there's so many different situations, you and I are on one team together, and our kids are walking out. We just had a great game. But then another coach comes up and says, hey, I noticed your kids play left field and center field on the Padres over there. How would you like to play shortstop and third?
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:26:31 to 00:26:37
Right? Because I need one. I need shortstop, third. I had two kids quit. So that coach is going to now try to take us from the team we're on.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:26:37 to 00:26:45
And if we say yes now, the team we came from is shorthanded. Right. And it snowballs. Snowballs. And that kind of stuff happens.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:26:45 to 00:26:52
You take your kid to the batting cage because that's a lot of times how coaches network. Sure. Hey, kid's looking pretty good. Does he play? Oh, yeah, he plays for the red.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:26:52 to 00:27:04
If you guys are looking for another team next season, hit us up. We're having tries. That's how that happens. Well, that happens at the park, too, or even at the hitting facility. And that literally, I'Ve had parents tell me, oh, me and two other parents from the team we ran into.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:27:05 to 00:27:11
Who? The coach of the Da Da Da last night at the batting cages. And he really would like for our kids to come play for him. So we want to switch teams. Right?
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:27:11 to 00:27:33
So they think that I should be able to take those three kids off of the team they're on, put them on another one. And what I've had to explain to them, I'm like, look, you don't want to agree with the fact that we won't let you switch teams, but I guarantee you, if I allowed this to happen and you were on a team that you were happy with, but four players were now leaving to go to another team, and you all were going to be shorthanded. Now you're going to be things. You'd still be complaining to me about why we allowed that. Yeah.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:27:33 to 00:28:15
So my point is, it's really hard to find people that can think about the big picture, not just think about themselves, because, like I said, I had to be a part of making decisions in the past that wasn't necessarily in my team or even my son's best interest, but it was what's in the best interest of the association. And those are the people that can really do a great job on a board, or at least having that. It's necessary, because if you don't, the wrong decisions get made. And I think some of that was happening before I was at NYBA. I don't think people had ill will or ill intentions, but they were misguided because of their own personal gains that were behind the decisions they were making.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:28:15 to 00:28:35
And we really had to start pulling ourselves out of it and making sure that we weren't making decisions that were in our best interest because some of that was happening. I remember the guy that was the secretary at the time when I took over. He really was just a follower. He worked really hard. Super nice guy.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:28:35 to 00:28:55
And I remember we had a different system for running the draft back then. All the kids went into a program that a former board member had built that was amazing. And it. I was scrolling through all the kids registrations, and I saw in the notes column, I would see things like, make sure they end up on this team. Make sure they end up on this team.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:28:55 to 00:29:00
Make sure they end up this team. I'm like, what is this? This is a random draft. How do you have. Make sure they're on this team.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:29:00 to 00:29:14
Make sure on that team. So I called him and I said, hey, man, what are these notes? I don't understand. He goes, well, those are where certain coaches have asked for these certain players or that player. And I said, well, this is a random draft.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:29:14 to 00:29:30
It's no longer random if you're doing that. He really got distraught by it because he felt like he was stuck in the maze, like, look, I'm just doing what I'm told by other people. And I said, we can't do it. I went and I deleted them. I said, absolutely, we're not doing this.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:29:30 to 00:29:56
There's a way for people to influence or pick which team they're going to be on, but if you sign up for the draft, you don't get to say, I only want to play on this team. That's not a draft. And so it's things like that that give the league major integrity because we don't. We do not influence the draft. If you're not on a team, you go into a pool and the computer randomly assigns you to a team, it's a random draft.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:29:56 to 00:30:07
And as soon as we start having people saying, well, just make sure I don't play for this coach. I want to make sure we're on this team. Our coaches will send. Even now, it still happens. Occasionally somebody will say, hey, I protected my max.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:30:07 to 00:30:20
I can't add any more players, but I really want this kid who played for me last year. You need to move up and play in a select division because that's what those are. That would be a select team if I let you do that. And so you signed up for a non select division. You select for a draft league.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:30:20 to 00:30:47
So it's stuff like that that everybody likes to think about me and how it influenced, when I say me themselves, how it influences them, and it's really hard to pull yourself out of that. It really is. Well, it's tough because in that situation with the draft, whenever you have parents from the outside looking in and they don't know, therE's been so much stuff throughout different youth sports organizations over the years that everybody always just has a little bit of distrust for things. They're just like, well, you know, especially when things aren't going their way. Right.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:30:47 to 00:30:53
You know, my team's not very good that. Why is that team so good? They must have cheated. They might. They had to have done something.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:30:53 to 00:31:11
And so they make those assumptions automatically in their brain that, oh, well, there's definitely. Some people do make assumptions about how things are working, but there's things like that, though, that I think we do a pretty good job of educating people how that works. I rarely get that. I don't know if anybody's ever said, this is a draft league. How did that team get so good?
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:31:11 to 00:31:22
Because people understand how it works and they see that it works that way. We really do have a random draft. No, but that's my point. My point is that with NYBA, it was never that. I, I was there.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:31:22 to 00:31:48
I experienced it, I went through it. So it never became a problem because you guys stuck to your guns because you're like, hey, look, regardless of the situation, regardless of, and that's the uncomfortable part sometimes is there are situations that come up that you can say, I mean, I understand where you're coming, man. They lay the guilt trips on. Yes, big time. I'll have a parent say, look, my son is on a team, got drafted to a team that's been together all this time, or maybe even a select team that they signed up for.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:31:48 to 00:32:04
We met this coach, and my kid plays right field every single game. But there's another coach that will put him at shortstop. It would be so great for his development. It's a much better coach and he'll get to play a better position and he's going to bat higher in the lineup. It'll be so great for my kid.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:32:05 to 00:32:12
Right. But I have to say no because you're jerk for that. Exactly. Yes. They just cannot take themselves out of it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:32:12 to 00:32:29
And then the emails turn hateful. Right. And what's the number way you're going to be able to answer this question? I guarantee you almost every single time if I send a parent the response that they don't want. Yes, they asked and I gave them the response that wasn't the one they wanted.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:32:29 to 00:32:39
Right. They respond back with, wait a minute, I thought it was all about the kids. Exactly. Every single time. It's in our logo, it's all about the kids.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:32:39 to 00:32:49
And that's what they think. They can leverage that. I thought it was all about the kids, and I always respond back and I say, it absolutely is, but it's about all the kids, right? It's all about all kids and.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:32:52 to 00:33:21
Those. Few people that have gotten upset, it's usually because they want us to make exceptions for their child and we just can't because the only way to be fair about that is do it for everybody. I think when people lose scope sometimes, I know the number changes, but let's just say in the spring season, when it's the busiest, about how many kids are you guys sitting at right now? 1400. And it kind of bounces between 1300 and 1600.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:33:21 to 00:33:40
And then in the state of Texas, when we're talking about a youth organization like tied to cities like this one is. There aren't that many that have that kind of size. I mean, in the entire state, I'm. Not aware of a single youth baseball association, just baseball only, that is larger than us in the state of Texas, I'm not aware of one. Now there might know.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:33:40 to 00:33:52
People will say, oh yeah, combined. Look at this tournament, this tournament. And I'm like, well, that's a tournament, right? I'm talking about rec baseball league, I believe. I'm not saying there's not one, but I'm not aware of one that has more participants.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:33:52 to 00:34:36
And what I was kind of getting at earlier is that I think the way we do things is a part of that. We also have an advantage that if there's an association down the road that gets down to 500, 600 players, which a lot of them are now, well, they can't offer variety at 1500 kids. You can have a, not only can your nine year old play just with nine year olds, but they can play in the beginner division, the A rec division, they can play in a select division that's a rec division, or they can play in the AA comp division with straight up Double A. There's three different divisions, three different skill levels, just at nine U, whereas when you got 500 kids in association, it's like twelve. Not only do we not have those three divisions, but eleven s and twelve s are going to play together.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:34:36 to 00:34:59
And if they're still not enough, we're going to add the nine year olds to them or the ten year olds. So we do have a luxury, being as big as we are, that we have that protection. But I also. That was built. Yeah, it was, because we run such a good program, but then we also have the situation where players from those other areas come play with us because it is a better organization and it's run better and we're not perfect.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:34:59 to 00:35:25
I've never said to anybody, hey, I do believe we're the Premier League in Texas, or at least North Texas. I'll never say that we're as good as it gets because I'm always looking for ways to be better. Every single email that someone sends me, you and I talked about one earlier, even that one is ridiculous. When somebody sends a suggestion, as ridiculous as that suggestion was, I still said, you know what, maybe, I don't know. Let's ask the coaches.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:35:25 to 00:36:01
And I went and talked to the coaches and every one of them said, absolutely, that's ridiculous. So we are always looking for ways to be better, and we do find ways to be better. Sometimes we'll hear about either somebody's idea or something that they saw somewhere else and we'll implement that. But I think it's a pretty well oiled machine and people will ask me, and hopefully, I don't know if this is on your list or not, but people ask me, man, what's the hardest part about running a league of that many kids? And by the way, there's other associations that have, like Burleson, they have those kinds of numbers, but they also have cheerleaders and softball and it's all of that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:36:01 to 00:36:17
I'm talking just baseball. Yeah, they'll ask me, so what's the hardest part about running an association like that? Because it's got to just be so time consuming because honestly it could be a full time job for sure. But what I tell people is we really have running the organization down pretty well. It's not perfect.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:36:18 to 00:36:41
We're always looking to get better. It's a pretty well old machine. The hardest part about my job is running the adult daycare. Yes, that's the hardest part. Again, if you have 1500 kids in a season, even if every player only had two parents, you're talking about 3000 parents.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:36:41 to 00:37:05
But they have multiple parents, they're split families. So you're talking about on any given spring season about 4000 parents and out of 4000 parents only having four or five. Yeah, that was my point. That are discontent. But the problem is those four or five are just a pain in the, they love to just be the squeaky wheel and try to leverage and get their ways.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:37:05 to 00:37:27
And so you have to be not only thick skinned to that, but you have to learn how to address it and move on. They almost always try to engage you. What they want to do is provoke you enough that you'll respond in a bad enough way that they can hold that against you. And now they get their know. And I have to remind myself this sometimes, but I'm always coaching others too.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:37:27 to 00:37:40
Don't let it get know Nicole, who's our admin, who does a great job. Every once in a while somebody will get under her skin. I'll say, hey, just don't let it get personal. It's not you, it's them. Respond and just give them.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:37:40 to 00:38:03
I'll either take it over or I'll just tell them, just respond without emotion and move on. Well, that's what I learned working with you doing this. And that's why when we would sit in board meetings, there would be topics that would come up that we would say, and I can't think of one specifically, but maybe two or three of us would be like, no, I think we should do this. And you would be against it in that particular situation. But you were always open minded to it.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:38:03 to 00:38:18
There was never a point where you would say, no, this is how we're going to do it. There might have been a couple of instances only when you were like, hey, look, I've tried this six times. This is what happened here. This is what happened here. That happened for sure, but just the willingness to hear the opinions.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:38:19 to 00:38:40
And like you said earlier, you sent the email out, okay, well, I don't agree with this at all, but let me see what everybody else thinks. Maybe I don't know everything. You know what I mean? And I think that there's a little bit of a misconception about you sometimes because you're very open to all kinds of ideas and different ways to do things, but when you've been doing something. For 15 years, you learn some stuff.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:38:40 to 00:39:01
Yeah. In the same situations have come up a few times, so you've kind of gone through this enough to know, and. That'S what I'll do, is, I think a great leader. Part of what makes a great leader is recognizing the fact that although a great leader usually has to have some great ideas, not all the great best ideas come from you. And so you have to surround yourself with people that have great ideas.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:39:01 to 00:39:16
And so it's really a bad characteristic for a leader to pull rank or my way or the highway, and I don't think I've ever once pulled rank. I've never had been on the other side of the aisle and just said, you know what? We're going to do it no matter what. I've never done that. There's been times where I've said, look, I want to do what the majority.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:39:16 to 00:39:22
There's been several times where I've said, we'll do what the majority wants to do. Here's my opinion. And we would do it. And most of the time, I was right. Yes.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:39:22 to 00:39:41
But sometimes I'm sure I wasn't, but, yeah, I think you have to be able to do that. But that does happen sometimes where someone that comes in, I've been doing this for 15 years and you got somebody that comes along. So I've been a part of the association for a year, and they're like, oh, why don't we just halfway through the season, let everybody switch teams if they want. Yeah. Let me kind of clue you in on what would happen.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:39:41 to 00:39:56
Right. And I give them that same scenario. You coach a team, right? Yeah. What if we said, there's going to be a free agency for a week in the middle of the season, and five of your players decided to go play for somebody else because for whatever reason, they just didn't want to play for you, they didn't like you as a coach, they can go play better position, whatever.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:39:56 to 00:40:03
Five players left. Now what? And they're like, I'd have to start forfeiting games. That's right. Yeah.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:40:03 to 00:40:17
First, though, they would say something like, well, Nyba would give me five more. No, NYB doesn't have five more. We don't have kids sitting there just, we're saying, hey, just know I'll call you if we need you. So you have to help people see through. And then they're like, oh, I didn't think about that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:40:17 to 00:40:53
I didn't really think it through. But, yeah, there's been lots of things that, through trial and error, we've learned over the years, and there's a wealth of knowledge that a lot of us have. There's lots of things, I'm sure, that, you know, that somebody new, the organization wouldn't know. Well, I mean, when I came in originally, I'm sure, and I don't even remember all of it, but I always have ideas about things, and they always say, you remember how you feel about things, not necessarily the details of everything that happens all the time. We use that a lot in my business because we talk about making people happy with the experience, because they don't remember every detail about their loan or buying the house, but they realize at the end that, man, this was a good experience, or it wasn't.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:40:54 to 00:41:13
And my experience in dealing with you is that I'm sure I had a bunch of, we should try this, and we should try this, and we should try this, because I know I'm that way. And every single time that I remember, it was always like, okay, well, that's not bad. Or what I really learned from you was the, okay, great. So what are you going to do? How are you going to do it?
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:41:13 to 00:41:28
Tell me how it's going to happen. Thing that I ran into the hardest part, running the football organization when I did it, but I already knew it, so it was good going in because of you, was people would come in all the time. We'd add board members like, we should do this, we should do this, we should do this. And I would go, great. When are you going to start?
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:41:30 to 00:41:41
What are you going to do to make that happen? And then that tends to kind of quell the ideas a little bit. You kind of at least got to be a part of the solution to that idea. Right. Or executing it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:41:41 to 00:42:12
And there's lots of things we can get into, the whole struggle with volunteers, but things like, it's always been one of my dreams to do a big opening day, and we've tried to do it twice. And here's the thing about volunteers is all throughout the season, as I'm helping people. Well, and real quick, before you go down that road, I want you to talk about how everybody in the league, except for two people, are volunteers, are volunteers. Yeah. So we have the umpire.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:42:12 to 00:42:26
Nobody gets paid. The umpires are paid, and then the director of umpires is paid, our admin is paid, and then we pay someone to run concessions. And so there's reasons for that. Everybody else, coaches, commissioners, board members, president. Nobody's getting paid.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:42:26 to 00:42:53
In fact, to be honest with you, for 15 years now, I've been paying to be the president because it costs me money, it costs me gas money, especially if I have to pick up the Ranger and take it to the shop over in Haltam City. I don't expense that to the organization. In fact, when my son was playing, there's very few perks to being on the board or being a commissioner. But one of the few is that your player plays for free. I never took that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:42:54 to 00:43:06
I always paid for my son to play only because I never wanted people to question why I was doing it. I was doing it for the perks. I always paid for my son to play in the Football league. There's not really any perks. There's a few, but I don't even take those.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:43:06 to 00:43:33
So it costs me money to do it because I want to do it for the right reasons. But, yeah, a lot of times, I think people, I'll never forget, actually, it happened a couple of weeks ago where someone called me, and a lot of times if I don't recognize the number, I won't answer it. Only because it's probably a random parent from baseball. So I can get back to him really quick, relatively quickly. But I'm at work right now or whatever, but I actually happened to answer this call, and the guy said, hey, I sent an email.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:43:33 to 00:43:45
Nobody ever responded. I can't remember what it was about. Let's just say it was, maybe it was a coach wanting to pick up rings within the season. I'm just making that up. But they said, I sent an email, nobody's responding.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:43:45 to 00:43:57
I'm like, oh, well. Because that's one of the things I pride myself on. We're pretty good with communication. It's usually the very first compliment somebody gives us when they first come to NYBA, say, man, the communication here is great. It's very well organized.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:43:57 to 00:44:05
Communication is great. So I hated to hear that. The guy's like, I sent an email. Gets dropped sometimes immediately. I'm thinking, oh, maybe it went to spam.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:44:05 to 00:44:21
What happened? And I said, oh, I'm sorry. I said, what's your name? And so I opened up email, and before I could even Search, I saw that he just sent the email 20 minutes before that. And it's like, I think people really don't realize that this isn't my job.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:44:21 to 00:44:37
I have a full time job. I run a business. At one time, I ran 110 restaurants, restaurant chain, up to 110 restaurants at one time. I'm not getting paid and I'm not doing this full time. I'm squeezing it in in my free time.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:44:39 to 00:44:55
So sometimes we do have to remind people that, and I don't throw it in people's face because I signed up for this. Yeah, totally. I don't complain about it. I am not complaining that I have to spend my free time running this. I signed up for this, but I asked for a little bit because honestly, I reply to emails probably as quickly as most people reply to texts.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:44:55 to 00:45:10
Still pretty quick with it. But some people are just very, there was somebody not too long ago started emailing on a Saturday night because he couldn't get a hold of anybody. And I'm like, it's Saturday night. Nobody's at the. They were complaining because they couldn't get hold of Nicole.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:45:10 to 00:45:26
I've emailed Nicole twice and she's not emailing back. I'm like, well, the website clearly says she's a part time employee that works Monday through Friday, normally nine to one. Yeah, this is night, right? So, yeah, it's a great reminder. I don't get paid to do know.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:45:26 to 00:45:37
When I first came to NYBA, there was not a paid admin, there was a paid director of umpires. And the umpires got me tell you. Let me touch on that real quick. Why we paid the umpires. Because the umpire business is tough.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:45:37 to 00:45:50
Yeah, I was about to say that's. A whole nother podcast. We have a shortage of umpires. There's a shortage of everything right now. Every official, but every league, football, basketball, baseball, every sport.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:45:51 to 00:46:10
And there's reasons for that. Exactly. Big time. But you can go up the road to some of the other associations, and when your game is being called on Saturday, it's being called by a fellow coach, a dad in the league, and their son, which is great. Like I said, the YMCA serves a purpose at NYBA.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:46:10 to 00:46:29
What we want is we want officials that have been through training don't have any kind of skin in the game. You're getting a real umpire. And so we do pay the umpires, and they all go through training. And I always have to remind people, because somebody say, anytime somebody complains about a call in a game, every time, I already know right away who lost. Yes.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:46:29 to 00:46:37
Of course, rarely does a coach call and say, hey, I had a great game tonight. I won. But by the way, this umpire stinks. Yeah, that doesn't happen. It's always because they lost the game.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:46:38 to 00:46:52
Which doesn't mean, by the way, umpires make mistakes. Exactly. That's all the time. Look, in Major League Baseball, that is the elite. Like every umpire, like, if their dream is to umpire for a career, is to get to the major leagues, that's the best of the best.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:46:52 to 00:47:03
And now they have instant replay. Yes. And still then sometimes the next day, people are going, they got this wrong. Even with instant replay, they got it wrong. So our umpires don't have that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:47:03 to 00:47:22
It's usually a young 16 year old kid who played Baseball, and now it's his first job is calling games. We have people that have been calling for a while. We've got people that retired from 16 to 60. We have people out there calling games. They get paid, but they don't get paid that much.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:47:22 to 00:47:39
They're not making a living at it. Yes, they're doing it for a hobby. It's a token of appreciation for coming and doing the game. But I would say 90% of those guys are doing it just because they love being at a youth baseball game. And so that's why they do that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:47:39 to 00:48:00
So, yeah, we've always paid them. It wasn't long after I'd been here back in the day, the concession stand was run by volunteers. And so every season it was kind of a lottery. Every team, it got to a point where we had more teams than we had spots, that there were games because we were growing so fast. So some teams didn't get it, but most teams had one night they had to cover concession stand.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:48:00 to 00:48:14
The problem with that is every night you got new people running it. So it's never going to run well. Ever imagine going to McDonald's and every single day, all the employees changed, the manager and everybody. So we had new employees every single day. So that wasn't good.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:48:14 to 00:48:24
Nobody wanted to do it. No. It was being forced to we started. Offering a buyout thing where it's like, hey, if your team doesn't want to do it, if they just want to pay the. I'll remember what it was, $100 for the night.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:48:24 to 00:48:32
So teams started doing that. Nobody wants to work it. Let's just pay everybody put in $10 and we'll pay it. There's so many teams doing. I said, look, I came from the restaurant business, let's just run it like a restaurant.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:48:32 to 00:48:44
Yes. Let's put the products in there people want. Let's price it accordingly, and then let's get some kids in there working their first job and it works out perfect. So now nobody has to work concession stand. They go watch their kids game, which.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:48:44 to 00:49:24
Especially in Mansfield, parents love. My wife's on the Booster Club for Western Western Wildcats, and she's president of Booster Club and finding parents to run concession stands at the junior high games. And now she's involved with the high school watch because we do volleyball too, is the bane of her existence, because I get it, nobody wants to do it. And the whole thing about volunteers, what I was going to say about why you have to have some people that have jobs that are paid is because, and I used to tell the board this with the Football association, and I would say, what are you going to do if the volunteer doesn't show up and doesn't come in to do what you need them to do? What, are you going to fire the volunteer?
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:49:26 to 00:49:46
We got to a size where it just wasn't fair to expect somebody to do the job without any pay. Yes, there's a lot of. Eventually, not only we pay people to work the concession stand, we needed somebody to manage that. So we started paying a director of concessions, and then eventually we grew to the point where we needed an admin. It's a lot of people.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:49:47 to 00:50:07
Even if we did a good job of putting things on the website and cutting down on the email. But again, with 1500 players, 4000 parents in the league, even if only 5% of them are sending you an email, that's a lot of emails. Well, plus all the board members are all volunteers, so they're all at their job. And most of us run businesses. Yes.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:50:07 to 00:50:15
You had your own business. Dwayne has his own business. Chris has his own business. Daniel's a full time pastor.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:50:18 to 00:50:30
We needed to hire part time admin, and Nicole's been great. That's been a huge benefit to the association. And we didn't do it to make being on the board easier. We did it because the association had grown so much. It was just the right thing to do.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:50:31 to 00:50:53
When NYBA started back in the 70s or whenever it was for years, it was just, in fact, back then, I don't know if you know this or not that when baseball started, when NYBA started, it was everything. It was basketball. Oh, really? It was baseball. I think they even did girls softball for a while, but then as it grew a little bit, MansfieLd baseball, whatever it's called, I don't think it exists anymore.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:50:53 to 00:51:05
But it did for a while. THe Basketball association did. Oh, yes, girls softball. All that kind of peeled off. So, I guess probably in the beginning it was called Mansfield Youth association or something.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:51:06 to 00:51:39
But, yeah, we grew to the point where, just, like, there was a need to run it. Honestly, I think even the smallest of associations should run it like a business, but in that same wheelhouse, we needed to bring on an admin. So, yeah, like I said, it's a pretty well old machine, and everybody knows their duties. One of the other greatest things I think we did early on was there were always commissioners, but when I got here, the commissioners really didn't do anything except get to pick the players they want and the fields they wanted to practice on. They weren't doing anything right.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:51:39 to 00:52:15
And so we restructured what a commissioner's duties were and made it worth doing. And honestly, the greatest benefit to being a commissioner, aside from fulfilling your desire to have a servant heart, is being able to network. Being the president of NYBA, I knew tons of people, so if I ever did need a player, I knew who didn't have a team and who was out there, and they knew me, and it made it very easy. So that's honestly one of the great things about being a commissioner is being able to network and meet and learn so many people. It really helps you be able to put together a decent team.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:52:15 to 00:52:52
So, as big as the organization is today, it actually is smaller than what it has been in the past. And you've been doing this for, like I said, 15 years. But overall, you start to see. I dealt with it very heavily in football for many reasons, but overall, you start to see a little bit of a decline in participation. Now, I think baseball is a little different in that baseball has very much become even more so than, I think, some of the other sports of business because there are so many little baseball clubs where you pay to be on this team and you pay to be on that team, and you play in these tournaments.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:52:52 to 00:53:12
And I experienced AA tournaments or AAA tournaments and major tournAments, and you go to some of these AA tournaments and you really have a bunch of rec kids out there that are playing in this tournament getting destroyed because you think. You have to say they play the. Tournament right, but they're on this select team and they do. So there's an aspect of that for sure. I don't want to get into the way into that.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:53:12 to 00:53:43
But really and truly, why do you think we've seen a decline overall in sports participation, especially with all of the benefits that I think that playing sports gives kids? Yeah, I think I have a good theory on that. And before I jump into that, I do want to say that NYBA spiked in participation up around 2200 kids at one time. It lasted for about a year or two, but what happened after that is the other associations started taking notes. Like there's one down the street that basically just tried to clone what we were doing.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:53:43 to 00:54:01
So we took a bunch of kids from other associations all at one time, and then they started changing their programs and they got some of them back. So we've actually been at for spring season around 1000, 401,500 kids for a very long time now. Now you may say, well, there's no growth there. Well, shrinking. We're not shrinking.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:54:01 to 00:54:20
We're not shrinking. And everybody around us is not just baseball, it's softball. Softball is really a scary situation. The numbers that they've gotten down to, they've made a quick comeback a little bit in the last couple of years. But girls softball is shrinking.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:54:21 to 00:54:31
Hockey participation is shrinking. Volleyball participation is shrinking. Football overall. There are fewer kids playing youth sports than there used to be. And some people will say, oh, it's because they're all playing select.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:54:31 to 00:54:54
No, they're playing select. 15 years ago, there were select teams, too, and select teams outgrew. I think it was a little different because it's more of a business now. There's always been a mentality that if you're going to make the high school team, you got to leave Rack ball, which I do not agree with at all. When I coached my kids, no one ever paid me to coach.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:54:54 to 00:55:06
It was not a paid situation. And again, I'm not knocking these clubs or anything like that. That's great. I think they fill a niche and there are certain players that they benefit from being in. That's not how I ran my teams.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:55:06 to 00:55:20
Nobody paid me. We played NYBA every single season. We played spring and we played fall. We'd play a couple of tournaments during each one of those seasons and we'd play World Series in the summer, and that's all we did. I didn't want to burn my kids out.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:55:20 to 00:55:35
I didn't want to burn my parents out. I didn't want to burn me out, but I wanted to set them up to succeed. And every single one of my players who played with me forever, that tried out for the high school team, every single one of them made it. Every single one of them. And we never went to Steamboat Springs, we never went down to Florida.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:55:35 to 00:55:45
We never did any of that. And it always gets me because I'll hear of a team, oh, we're going to steamboat this summer. I'm like, you're losing here. The teams here are beating you. I mean, I can understand.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:55:45 to 00:55:57
It's like, hey, look, it doesn't matter. What tournament we play here. We're beating everybody, we're dominating everybody. And then maybe you need to go see some new competition, but you're losing games here. It's not about being able to face new teams all the time.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:55:57 to 00:56:06
It's just about get your kids on the field. Throw the ball, hit the ball, catch the ball. That's what baseball is. Get them out there playing ball. And that was my mentality.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:56:06 to 00:56:21
We'll play the NYBA league, but we'll play in the appropriate league. Just play a lot. By the time my kids were 13 years old, they were all playing in the high school division at NYBA because they were better than the ReC teams that were in 13 U. But there was a place for them still to play. So we never outgrew out NYBA.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:56:21 to 00:56:35
But I do understand why some people leave. But the whole mentality of, if you're not out playing tournaments every single weekend on a select team that you're paying $3,000 a season to be on, you're not going to make that school team. That's baloney. Yeah. I'm not saying you're wasting your money.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:56:36 to 00:56:43
I'm just saying that's baloney. That's not the only way to get there. But, yeah, you're right. There are a lot of club teams and stuff like that. But here's the culprit, in my opinion.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:56:44 to 00:57:04
And people at first can be like, that's not it. If you think about it long enough and you think about examples of kids that you know personally, you'll start to agree with it. It's electronics. Yeah, it's electronics. And my son has gone through somewhat of what you might call an addiction to electronics.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:57:05 to 00:57:14
Most every kid does. And when I was a kid, which was a long time ago, everybody wanted to play baseball. What else are you going to do? You're bored. Play baseball today.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:57:14 to 00:57:29
I got to go find a stick and draw in the dirt or bored. Out of your mind? I got to find something to do. Well, you wanted to play baseball. Well, now baseball is competing with gaming, MLB, YouTube, all these different things and making TikToks and all this watching TikTok.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:57:29 to 00:57:58
And then also, there's way more single parents and split families than there were when I was a kid. Also, I'm not saying they didn't exist, but it's way more prevalent now. And so if you can just imagine for a minute a single mom who works a full time job that has a couple of kids, and she's trying to do the right thing and put them into baseball or whatever, and every day she comes home and she says, hey, when it's practice day, it's time to go to practice and get ready. And the kid's like, I just want to. Mom, not tonight.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:57:58 to 00:58:15
I'm tired. They say I'm tired, but what that I'm tired. To a teenager or any child over about five, I'm tired means I want to play games. I want to do something on my iPad. And then Mom's sitting here going, boy, what I wouldn't give to pour a glass of wine and turn on the Hallmark Channel.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:58:16 to 00:58:30
And I'm not blaming moms at all. Dad works all day long. I'm tired, comes home, and even in a fight, families that haven't split up, dad comes home from working hard. Mom's been working hard. Mom wants to pour a glass of wine, and dad wants to turn on Sports center.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:58:30 to 00:58:53
And it gets real easy to say, okay, we won't go tonight. And then when it's the next time it's ready to sign up, it's like you didn't even go to half the practice last season. Let's just not register. I wholeheartedly believe it's not 100% of the problem, but I believe it is. The majority of the reason why fewer and fewer kids are playing youth sports is because parents and I did it, too.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 00:58:56 to 00:59:14
You want to give your kids, if. Our parents had it, they absolutely would have taken advantage of. Plus, you want to give your kids what they want. You don't want to feel like you're forcing them to play. And that's what it ends up feeling like, is because baseball and girls softball and basketball and football is now competing with Fortnite.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:59:14 to 00:59:32
Well, and what's hard, too, is whether people want to admit it or not, is parents are judgy. So if you show up with your kid to baseball practice and they don't want to be there, and they hate it, and they're miserable, and they're acting a fool. Will show it, right? And then the parents are going, why are you dragging your kid out here to do this? Why are you reliving your life through your kid?
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:59:32 to 00:59:46
And you're like, and some parents are like, that's not what I'm doing. I'm getting my kid out of the house so he's not sitting in front of his computer screen all day long. This is my goal. I don't care about being a baseball player. I'm just getting him out of the room because what I dealt with.
Mike Mills (Host) | 00:59:46 to 01:00:12
So I had Nintendo when I was a kid. I remember specifically playing with my budies. We were playing Mario and Zelda and all that stuff. But the difference in those games then and these games now is, like I tell my son all the time, if I played Mario Super Mario Brothers on my Nintendo, and unless you had the little code, but if you lost the three or four guys, you start all the way back at the beginning, and even with the 99 guys that you got with the special now you got to keep going. Yes, you would die, and you would get bored.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:00:12 to 01:00:24
You're like, okay, this sucks. You'd throw in your machine, and then. You go outside, and it also was more about just beating your highest score, right? And now you play, just, what level can I get to? And like you said, you start over every time.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:00:24 to 01:01:03
Now it's all your new adventures and talking to your friends. I really believe that's hurting youth sports more than anything. And the kids just want to be on their devices, and I don't really know. I would love, actually, I've thought about at one point trying to put together a committee of other, whether it's board members of other associations, just people that are really embedded in youth sports and trying to brainstorm to see if there's things that we could do to help curve this. Like I said, NYBA has been immune to that because as other associations are shrinking, they have fewer options.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:01:03 to 01:01:31
I mean, there's some seasons where some of these associations, they tap out. They say, we don't have enough players to play this season, come back next season. And so we've become immune to it because of our size. If we weren't as big as we were, we would be going through some of that shrinkage, I think. Well, I encountered it with my son and not so much with my daughter, but definitely with my son, where it is designed purposefully to be addictive.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:01:31 to 01:01:37
That's how it's created. They're figuring out ways to get you on the Facebook. Does it? To grow up? Yes.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:01:37 to 01:01:43
Did you ever watch what's the social? Same. They're doing it to us. Same thing. It's the same thing.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:01:43 to 01:01:56
So this was constantly a struggle. And what happens at home, too. And my wife and I would disagree, especially when he was younger. She understands now, and she, we're on the same page with it. But for a lot of his growing up years, we would run into that, I don't want to go today.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:01:56 to 01:02:06
I don't want to play today. I don't want to feel like doing this. And she was like, he doesn't want to go. Why are you forcing him to go? I'm like, because it's not that he doesn't want to go, it's that he wants to sit up there and play that video game.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:02:06 to 01:02:21
And my son did the same thing. I had to confront him is that he got to a point in his life where everything was weighed against playing games. So if I ever said when he was small, I'd be like, hey, we're going to go to the lake, to the lake house for the family. Lake House for the weekend. Of course that's where I'm going to go.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:02:21 to 01:02:39
My cousin's going to be, well, now it's like everything is. If I say something like, hey, we're getting together on Sunday, well, what are we going to be doing? Because is that going to be better than telling me? But what he's doing is he's comparing it to gaming, right? And if what we were going to do didn't sound more fun than gaming, he'd say, I really just want to stay home.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:02:39 to 01:02:51
I'm tired and I just want to relax. Well, game, I ran an experiment with my wife and we did this on purpose where I said, okay, my son did something. I don't remember what it was. He got in trouble. And I'm like, we're going to take his PlayStation and his iPad.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:02:52 to 01:03:15
He was younger, he was probably seven. And we're going to take it away for two weeks because of this thing that he did. And I said, I promise you, within two or three days, whatever it is that you need him to do, or you want him to do, or we're going to do this, he will be the most amenable, agreeable kid that you've ever come across. And it's exactly what happened. Because the moment that I shut that thing off and it wasn't an option anymore, now it's not a choice.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:03:15 to 01:03:31
Right. Once, it wasn't a choice then if I said, hey, we're going to go to football practice or, hey, we're going to go, I need you to help me outside in the yard or whatever the case may be. Well, he was so bored out of his mind that he was like, yeah, sure, whatever, I'm down. It wasn't part of the equation anymore. No, it wasn't.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:03:31 to 01:03:47
And again, when we talk about this kind of stuff, I think sometimes it gives the impression that I did the same thing. I'm not judging anything. I'm just saying that this is what it is. Yeah. It's where our society has evolved to.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:03:47 to 01:04:02
That's a part of our lives. And I was talking to somebody the other day, just things like our smartphones and a. Can you imagine what smartphones are going to be like in 20 years? Because if you think back 20 years ago, they didn't exist. Yeah.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:04:04 to 01:04:20
It'S hard to even fathom where this stuff is going. But yeah, it's a reality. It's where we are. It's a reality that people stream TV now and watch YouTube videos instead of watching CBS on Tuesday night. It's just where we've gone.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:04:20 to 01:04:46
But I would hate to look back and know if we just done this well, and I think maybe it could have helped the situation because I don't think that gaming and all, that's the devil. No, it's just so addictive that it's. Hard for them to encompassing. You got to have balance and it's hard for kids, the youth, to make those decisions about balance. And then as a parent, it's hard to not give your kids what you want.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:04:46 to 01:05:17
Like we've talked about, that if you're dragging them out to practice and all they're thinking about is, I want to get home to game. It makes you look like a bad parent. Well, and that was the thing that I just realized this, I want to say relatively recently, within the last couple of years. But I was always, always a big believer when my kids were growing up, I wanted to give them choices because my thought process was, I'm going to give you a choice to teach you how to learn how to make choices, because some choices are bad and some choices are good. So it was kind of a thing where I would want to say, hey, look, I'm going to give you this opportunity to make a choice.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:05:17 to 01:05:31
Now, more often than not, they would make the wrong choice or the choice that wasn't there that I wasn't wanting them to make. And I would get frustrated guys, I was like, you need to make this choice. And they're like, I don't want that. I want to do this. And I'd already given them the choice, so it was kind of like, can't go back on it.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:05:31 to 01:05:57
But then as they got older and I got it better as a parent, I tell them all the time, they're science experiments, that we're all just figuring out how this stuff works. But as they got older, I started to give them actually less choices because I'm like, no, I got to focus more on your habits and behaviors rather than your ability to make decisions because your brain is not functioned yet or it's not fully developed yet. So I'm not going to give you a choice. You're going to do this. This is what we're going to do.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:05:57 to 01:06:07
I'm going to steer you a little bit. Yes, I'm going to steer you in this direction. And I would tell them there isn't an option here, this is what we're going to do. But I would tell them why. I would say, you're going to do this because of this, this and this.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:06:07 to 01:06:34
And there would be choices at some point, kind of like, I think a lot of parents say this, we're going to play baseball this season, and when I get to the end of the season, decide, you don't want to play baseball anymore, then that's your choice, but you're going to go through it first. You're not giving. Yes, we're not going to give you the choice of not doing it. We're going to give you the choice of going through the experience and then electing to not do it after that. But then what I would also add on top of that is I would tell the kids, but you're not going to do nothing.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:06:34 to 01:06:55
So don't think that because you eliminate this choice, that means you get to just sit around and do nothing all day long. Exactly. Yeah, it's tough. It's a different day we live in. But the good news is there are still lots of kiddos out there that do want to play, and there's different kinds of kids that want to play.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:06:55 to 01:07:23
There's kids that want to play that really don't have much natural ability to play sports. They're just not a lot. And that's why our rec league is so good, because there's a place for kids like that to play and still get to experience baseball. You don't have to be the best shortstop in Mansfield to get to play baseball, but then there's a league for those that are a little more advanced. They're not necessarily the studs of the area, but then there's a place for the studs to play, too.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:07:23 to 01:07:33
Why do you think there's been a thing that's developed and I don't have perspective on it? So maybe this existed before. How old are you again? Old. Okay, come on.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:07:33 to 01:07:39
56? 50. Okay, so you got ten years on me. So twelve years about. So you may have a different perspective on this or.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:07:39 to 01:08:33
No, but I don't remember being a kid, having parents be so wrapped up in the sports side of sports. And what I mean by that is, best way I can explain is when I was coaching my kids, playing baseball and football and basketball, one of the things that I would always tell the parents is you have to remember that if you're looking at this as I'm doing this so my kid can play in high school, or I'm doing this so my kid can play in college, or I'm doing this for whatever that puberty is a game changer. And when your son or daughter hits that age, it doesn't matter that they've played on this select club team for the last ten years, and that this kid has never picked up a bat. Because when puberty sets in and that kid's hand eye coordination and his size and his speed catch up or exceed everybody else's, the fact that he didn't play baseball for ten years and your son did is going to make no difference to anybody else.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:08:36 to 01:08:47
I feel like. I think. I'm sure I had my moments, but I always looked at the youth stuff, and this is why we never played until recently. Really getting into the club side of things. Now my son's in junior high and we're working to get to high school, that kind of thing.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:08:48 to 01:09:07
But prior to that, we played tournaments, but it was always a little family group of parents that hung out. We weren't ultra competitive, and we actually lost a few people here and there because I wasn't that way. I'm like, I'm not trying to win every tournament. I want them to learn, I want them to grow, I want them to know how to play the game, enjoy the game, think it's fun. So that way they have a passion for later on.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:09:07 to 01:09:37
And I didn't see it as much in the parents that I had because I was very straightforward about that stuff from the very beginning. But running the leagues and being involved in NYBA and Being involved in these tournaments and now getting even more into the select stuff, I see so many parents that are so wrapped up in. I got to prepare myself, my kid, to play at this level and play at this level, as opposed to just letting them enjoy it for a period of time. And then when it becomes time to get serious, when the hormones kick in and the body is what the body is, and you see that your kid has aptitude. Great.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:09:37 to 01:09:53
Yeah. That's probably the hardest thing for all parents is, and it's just natural, is that they are never able to see their own child's performance with really clear vision. You're always going to feel like they're better than they really are. Oh, sure. Daddy goggles.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:09:53 to 01:10:16
There's a reason daddy goggles. But you're right, things change. I've seen literally six year old teams that are just taking it way too serious. I've seen 14 year old teams that aren't taking it serious enough to at least get to the goals they want. But, yeah, I know you're getting into the whole club thing now, too.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:10:16 to 01:10:44
Like I said, that serves a purpose. It's good for certain kids, but I don't believe it's the only path. Oh, no, I think there's lots of paths. It boils down more to the player themselves, passion for it, or desire to play, but it also boils down to the coaching that they're getting. And repetition, repetition and coaching is very key because you can be out there with a bad coach and play every single weekend and not get any better.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:10:44 to 01:10:55
Right. But you also can be with a really great coach. But if you're not getting playtime and you're not practicing, you're not going to get any better. Yeah. There's different flavors for different people.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:10:55 to 01:11:10
We experienced it a little bit with. So this was the first year that my son played school football. So I'd coached him in flag and tackle all the way from the time he was in kindergarten till 6th grade. And I was more than happy, by the way, to let it go. I'm done.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:11:10 to 01:11:18
I retired. It was great. But what I experienced when we played this year, his football team was. I mean, we were terriblE. It was really bad.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:11:18 to 01:11:30
That was my YMCA crush. Mean, it was. It was rough. And going to these was. And this is football very specific to football because Troy, he hasn't really hit puberty yet.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:11:30 to 01:11:46
He's still kind of a smaller kid, and some of the other kids are starting to get past him in size and whatnot. It's frustrating for him, but in football he knew what to do. He was aware, he knows how to throw the ball. He knows how to run an offense because that's how he did it. So he understands the game very well.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:11:46 to 01:12:15
His size didn't necessarily put him in a place where he was like the best player because he was a smaller kid. But if he had had size, he probably would have been. But my point is that all these kids came in to play junior high football and 90% of the kids that played on his team had never put on a helmet in their life. This was the first time that they were playing tackle football. And I knew going into it to some extent, once I figured out kind of the dynamic of it, I was like, all right, this is going to be a little tough.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:12:15 to 01:12:28
We're going to have to work through this. Maybe we'll have some big kids, they'll just figure it out or whatever, but that didn't happen. So we would go play these teams. Like Burleson was a good example. We were playing in that division and they would just annihilated us.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:12:28 to 01:13:01
Some of it was size, but they would all have four or five kids that you could tell had been playing tackle football since they were like in third grade and they were just lightness up. And I would be in the stands and the dads and the parents like the coaching and this and that. They'd have all these complaints about what was going on. And I'm like, guys, you have to understand, football is not something that you just decide to do as a twelve year old. And then all of a sudden you're good at it just because you're a good athlete, because it's a different game, because you have to have aggressiveness, you have to want to go out there and hit somebody and not be scared.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:13:01 to 01:13:26
And it's not that they can't get there because they Most certainly can and will, it's that it's not going to happen the first year that they do this because this is a whole new thing. We're sitting here telling your kids every day, be nice, don't bully anybody, be polite, say yes, ma'am, thank you, and don't yell, don't get in fights, all this stuff. And then we push them out onto a football field and we're like, all right, kill. And we wonder, why does he not want to tackle anybody? Yes.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:13:26 to 01:13:56
So my point is just that you have to go through experiences and you have to do stuff before you're going to become good at it. You can't just show up and automatically expect that your kids, and especially football, was a great example of that. But this idea that some parents have about, well, I just got to do all these things and I'll set them up to play some kind of get a scholarship, play in college, whatever. I mean, if that happens, great. But I've always told my kids and everybody else that I've coached or worked with over the years.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:13:57 to 01:14:08
Your kid playing high school, playing college, playing anything else has zero to do with you. It's 100,000% on them. They have to have the talent. That's the number one thing. Okay?
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:14:08 to 01:14:25
You can have all the desire in the world, but if you can't throw the ball or hit the ball, then you ain't going to play. All right? And then you have to have the desire because there's a lot of kids that have really good talent and have ability, but they don't have the desire. Like the kid that burns out because he played twelve years and they never stopped. And then he gets to high school, he's like, I don't want to do this anymore.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:14:25 to 01:14:46
It's like a job, but you have to have those things and we have nothing to do with that, so you have to just let it go. But it's really tough for parents to do that. And I understand, but I just don't know why that. I feel like that has changed from when I was playing at that age until now. Or maybe there's just more of an abundance of it because the business side.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:14:46 to 01:15:10
Are you saying that you feel like there's a lot of parents today that feel like, hey, as long as I follow the recipe, the cake should be great. Correct? Yeah, there's different recipes that get you that cake, but yeah, the kid's the flour, I guess, in that situation. And if you don't have good flour, if you don't have the flour, and if the kid doesn't have any talent, you can only do so much with that. But that's okay.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:15:10 to 01:15:18
And it's okay. There's nothing wrong with it. And that's why I've said, but don't have false expectations. Right. As a parent, I think we have to appreciate sports for what they are.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:15:18 to 01:15:33
And the reason I've always said I liked my kids, I wanted my kids to play sports. I mean, I understood it. So that was part of it because I participated myself and knew how to play the games. But it was more about the lessons that you get taught. You have to learn how to cooperate with other people.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:15:33 to 01:16:00
You have to work hard to achieve something and practice and things don't always go your way. You might have done everything right and the umpire made a bad call or the referee made a bad call and you lost the game, okay? There's nothing you can do about it, so you just have to keep going forward and move forward. And I think all of those lessons are so incredibly valuable that sports teaches you. And when you focus on that stuff as opposed to the winning all the time and being the best player on the team.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:16:03 to 01:16:29
You have to experience the moments and you have to experience it is a lot of about the experience. It's funny. It's really not related to what you're saying, but one of my favorite stories of my time at NYBA, I was coaching, and it was back early on when Zach was small and we were playing in the draft league, and I got a kid out of the draft that had just been bounced around from team to team to team. He was the kid that nobody ever invited back. So he'd go back in the draft and he was just bouncing around.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:16:29 to 01:16:44
So I got him. He was not very good at all. He loved baseball, man. He loved to play, and he loved being there like he had the heart of a lion when it came to just everything you'd want in a baseball player. He just didn't have necessarily the talent.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:16:44 to 01:16:56
At least I didn't think he did. But anyway, he was the weakest kid on the team. He did spend a lot of his time out in right field, and he couldn't touch a ball to save his life. But I was determined. I'm like, I want this kid.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:16:56 to 01:17:10
He's such a good kid and tries so hard. I want him to experience victory, right? And I don't mean the team winning. I wanted him to win. And so I would pull him off to the side and work personally with him at practices on hitting and all these different things.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:17:10 to 01:17:26
And I'll never forget back then, it was like a ten game season. We were on like game seven. We were coming down to the end of the season. He had never been on base except for a walk, but he had the biggest smile on the team. Happy to be there.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:17:26 to 01:17:37
I've been working with him, working with him. He gets up to bat. Everybody in the entire division knew who this kid was because he played on all the other teams. Everybody knew he was. Everybody loved him because he had heart.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:17:37 to 01:17:53
But he just wasn't good player. Nobody wanted him on his team. They loved him. Yeah, this kid gets up to bat and he knocks the ball clear to right field fence like it just bombs it. Everybody on both teams going crazy, stood up, was on their feet.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:17:53 to 01:18:17
He takes off running the base he rounds first, round second, as he's coming to third, and I'm coaching third. I'm watching the ball and the ball starting to come in, so I put my hands like this and I'm like, stay right here, right here. I don't want to name his name, but stay right here, right here. And with the biggest granny kill, he rounded third and he going, went home, got thrown out, but everybody was going nuts. It was the greatest feeling in the moment.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:18:17 to 01:18:36
He lived with his grandparents. His grandparents immediately came over the dugout. Of course, I was close by because of third base coaching, and they were like, he came in and they were congratulating whatever, and they came over to the fence me, and said, oh, my gosh, that was the greatest moment of his lIfe. That's just so amazing. Thank you for all.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:18:36 to 01:18:43
And I said, I wish he would have stopped at third. And they go, well, you know, he can't hear, right?
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:18:46 to 01:18:58
I'm like, what? They go, yeah, he can't hear. I've had, like no idea. Twelve practices with this kid. At least we were in our 7th game, and I didn't know he couldn't hear.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:18:58 to 01:19:02
He could read lips. Yes. Wow. And he couldn't read my lips. Round and third.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:19:02 to 01:19:14
That's amazing. And even though I was doing this, he didn't get it. But it's one of my greatest moments. I've had some really great moments that just feel awesome. But I love that moment that he got that hit.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:19:14 to 01:19:28
But I'll never forget that. I'm like, you didn't think you should tell me that? And they said, well, he wears hearing aids to school and people pick on him, all this. And so baseball is his moment. He refuses to wear them to baseball because he wants to be just like all the other baseball players.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:19:29 to 01:19:50
And it broke my heart, but at the same time, I'm like, well, now I can better coach him. I can make sure that he's. Because who knows how many things I had said to the team, and he couldn't even see my face. Yeah, no idea. But see, that's that kind of stuff and those kind of moments that make you want to continue doing what you're doing.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:19:50 to 01:20:14
And I know now, I want to talk real quick, before we wrap up here, I want to talk about your business a little bit. So speaking of your passion for kids and everything that you like to do. So now you are running a company that helps schools and organizations do fundraising. So tell us. We've said everything we've said about NyBA, and I don't make a dime on that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:20:14 to 01:20:44
I lose money basically being the president, but I made my living in the restaurant business, and I did that forever. And the time came that I was no longer with the same company I had been with forever. And I thought, if I'm ever going to start my own business, now's the time, right? While I'm not working for anybody, don't have a job, basically. And so I thought it'd really be great if I could find something that gave me the same kind of fulfillment that I get out of running baseball.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:20:44 to 01:21:13
But I can make a living at it because I am passionate about baseball. I feel like it's been my calling to try and make sure that the kids in this area get the best youth baseball experience that they can have. And so I'm passionate about that. I've always been passionate about kids. Anyway, long story short, I got involved with this existing company that does fundraising with schools where I have these incredible, just.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:21:13 to 01:21:34
They're really special people that work for me. They're amazing people that are very charismatic, and everyone just loves to be around them, and the kids just love them. And they go into schools for two weeks at a time, and they go in there and do a character program where they're talking to kids about basically being good humans. And, man, Mike and Kevin look different, but they're still the same. We're all the same.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:21:35 to 01:22:08
We may come from different backgrounds, but we all have the same opportunities that they teach these kids to dream big. They can be anything in the world they want to be. And that when they dream big and accomplish those goals, they inspire others. It's all this great messaging, but all along the while, it's a fundraiser for the school, and they put on a big event at the end that's typically like a fun run or an obstacle course or something like that. And so instead of the students being out selling $12 candles or seeing how many candy bars they can pedal, they get friends and family to sponsor them in the event day.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:22:08 to 01:22:54
And so maybe for every lap they run, Grandma gives them a dollar or whatever. And so Grandma feels a whole lot better about giving a dollar per lap and that student going and doing their best than just, hey, buying a candy. What do I hate the least out of this catalog or whatever? And so it's just a really great thing, and it's been very rewarding because what my people do in the schools is phenomenal, like the testimonials I get from teachers and principals and parents. And it's just incredible the difference that they're making and we just finished the fall semester and it's something I'll communicate with them before we start up spring, but they have had an impact on over 10,000 kids lives just in the fall semester alone.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:22:55 to 01:23:22
So it's really great. I'm serving schools. We're doing schools all across DFW, and it's a really special program. Most of my schools will tell me the two weeks at Apex is here every year, because once we get a school, about 90 95% of the time we hold on to, and year after year, they just talk about what a great program it is that that's the most exciting two weeks of the year. Attendance is up because the kids don't want to miss seeing the team members.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:23:22 to 01:23:53
It's just a really great two weeks. And I'm not going to get rich off of serving a school here, but if I can put enough of them together, I can make a living at it. And I really feel like we're making a difference. And it's funny because the easiest schools for my people to serve are not necessarily the schools that need us the most. And what I mean by that is a lot of the fundraising companies like to chase the big, wealthy schools.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:23:53 to 01:24:13
That's where all the money is. But yet what we do, it's really, I mean, all students benefit. We serve schools all across the metroplex from all different walks of life and tons of money in some and no money in others. But a lot of the kids that really need the program are the hardest for my people to serve because the kids are more unruly. They're not getting good guidance at home and things like that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:24:13 to 01:24:32
And they're the schools that nobody wants to send their kids to and things like that. That's where we really can make a huge impact because those kids just don't want to disappoint my team members. They think so highly of them. And it really is a great two weeks. It's a really good, feel good two weeks.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:24:32 to 01:25:03
Most, I would say majority of my principals and a lot of the teachers friend me on Facebook after the school gets going. I've made a lot of good relationships that way. I've learned a lot about the school system that I diDn't know before, which is for another podcast at another time. But one thing I'll say is, although there are just like anything, there's a handful of people that probably have no business being in education. There's a lot of people out there in education that really give their heart and soul to it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:25:03 to 01:25:24
And they're underappreciated, they're destroyed by parents. It's just like baseball. You can have a class full classroom of 20 kids, but it just takes one parent to make your life miserable. And the schools deal with that on the regular. And the more time goes, the less the schools can do about it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:25:24 to 01:26:03
And everybody, as soon as they pull a student out of a classroom for disrupting the rest of the class, it's lawsuits being threatened that that student's not getting the education to the other students. And it's tough. It's really tough. And I really feel for a lot of my educator friends now, but most all of them, their hearts are in the right place and they work hard and they are not doing it for the paycheck, although they deserve more than they're getting. Because if you think about it, our kids spent twelve, if they went to college, even more years being developed by people we don't even know.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:26:04 to 01:26:27
A lot of times they're just paid nothing. I think it's the greatest travesty of anything, because if you think about your kids time spent their life in their adolescent years, right? Younger and adolescent years, that they are, the vast majority, eight weeks. So they spend 40 to 50 hours a week with some other human being. That's not you being raised by them, right.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:26:27 to 01:26:43
So they're away from you more often than they're with you because they're sleeping, they're doing whatever. They're with mom and Dad for four or 5 hours a night while they're awake. That's it. They're with this other person all the time. And we talk about wanting to be when we are one of the best countries on the planet, et cetera.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:26:44 to 01:27:02
But we have to invest in people. Like if you want to be the best, if you want to run a. Can you imagine for a minute, let's say for a minute that being a first grade teacher paid $200,000 a year. And I'm not saying that's the answer, but if they made $200,000 a year, yes, you'd have a whole lot more people trying to get that job. The schools could be way more selective about who gets those jobs.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:27:02 to 01:27:22
You would get the best of the best, but instead of the way we treat teachers now, we get the ones that are just willing to do it, right? Yeah. And not necessarily the best. Yes, well, and sometimes they have to, or that's where they end up. I don't give Chili's a hard time, but I joke about Chili's that I use Chili's an example that people end up at Chili's.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:27:22 to 01:27:30
Nobody goes to Chili's. Nobody's like, hey, let's go to Chili's tonight. Nobody says that, but people say, where do you want to go? I don't know where you want to go. I don't know where you want to.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:27:30 to 01:27:38
And it's like, it's the happy new. It'S the neutral, let's go to chill. Know what you're going to get, right? And I think that that's what people, kids do or young adults do in college and stuff. It's like, what do you want to be?
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:27:38 to 01:27:44
I don't know. I'm going to be a teacher. It's fine. I can go do that or whatever. Not everybody, I'm just saying.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:27:44 to 01:28:07
But see, I think times have changed, especially since COVID during, because I was there with them, too. We were serving schools virtually, some of them. But when COVID happened, the teachers jobs changed dramatically, where now they had to deal with all these regulations of students that were in person. They had to deal with students that weren't even on the campus. And then they had this hybrid situation.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:28:07 to 01:28:29
It was really tough, but even then, I felt like the teachers weathered that storm really well. But now, like this year, for my business, the a number one profession that was applying for the jobs that I was hiring for with my team members were teachers three times more than ever before. They're trying to get out because they're stressed. The job has changed. Well, they don't pay well enough.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:28:29 to 01:28:41
Yeah, it used to just be that. Well, yeah, you don't make a lot of money at it, but I really want to do that now. I'm not going to make a lot of money at it. And the job is going to be so difficult. Parents are going to treat me like crud.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:28:41 to 01:29:13
It's not at all schools, it's not all situations, but it is in a lot of them out there where my thing is just teachers are very undervalued and very underappreciated, and we would be way better off if we put more value on what teachers do and compensate them accordingly. Yes, I 100% agree. And it's one of those things, I joke all the time with my wife that because I'm sure you love to coach. I love to coach. I love being with the kids and working with them and doing all that kind of stuff.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:29:13 to 01:29:33
And I would say I would love to quit my job today and go coach whatever I could and teach. That would be great, but can't walk. Away from what I'm doing. No, I can't make enough money to make it worthwhile to me to do that. And I feel terrible for those teachers out there that just love what they're doing.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:29:33 to 01:29:53
And they put so much time and effort into it and so much passion. They're so underappreciated. I know people say, oh, well, we send them the gifts for Christmas, and we send them the mug for their birthday or whatever, the little things that people do and parents do. And if you're in a good community, that stuff happens. But the amount of time and effort and stress of dealing with, I mean.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:29:53 to 01:30:06
We get around our kids. A handful of $10 gift cards to chili does not make up for the fact that they're making about half what they're worth. Yes, it doesn't make up. And as parents, after 2 hours around my kids, I'm like, I'm done with you. Like, go away.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:30:06 to 01:30:31
I want to deal with you anymore. And we put these kids with these teachers 8 hours out of the day and just take for granted the fact that they're dealing with all the stuff that we hate dealing with for 2 hours when they're home with us, and. Then we hold them to really high expectations. Yes, we're only going to pay them this, but, man, they better perform like they've got doctorate degrees and, gosh, now it's a tough time to be a teacher. It's a tough time to be a police officer.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:30:31 to 01:30:44
It's a tough time to be a lot of things, but it's a good time to be involved in youth baseball. So how much longer you think you're going to do this? That's a great question. My answer has changed over the years because people ask me that. I remember after five years, how much longer are you going to do this?
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:30:44 to 01:31:01
You've been doing five years here in Year 15 for a long time. My answer was, I don't know. I feel like it's my calling, and I feel like that's my give back to the community, is to try to make sure that the kids have a good experience at baseball. All the kids.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:31:03 to 01:31:17
But I do feel like now I'm starting to see the end. I just don't know how far. I can't tell how far away it is. I feel like there's still a note at the bottom them that says, object may be closer than they appear. Right.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:31:17 to 01:31:43
Maybe sooner than I think. Like I said, I don't know if I said it on here or not, but there are a good group of commissioners we have now with some real talent that I think are going to be able to step up and take on some new leadership roles. And I just really want to make sure, yes, it does take up my time right now, but the juice is worth the squeeze. I enjoy the time anytime. In fact, the way I think, like I said, it just takes one parent.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:31:43 to 01:31:58
I have that one parent that gets in my ear and just tries to do their best to try to make me miserable. All I got to do is go out to the park and watch a ball game. Just walk through the park and then immediately I'm realize all the people I want to keep doing it forever. I'm like, this is the magic. This is why I do it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:31:59 to 01:32:30
And I just want to do it forever. But I would say as soon as I, at some point or another it would have to happen. I guess I told you before that I could see myself really doing this in retirement, but I'm still several years away from retiring, so am I just going to. My plan is to help groom some of these younger, newer commissioners and maybe some coaches that we have into taking on these leadership roles and see if I can't step back. It's not that I feel like if I step back, it's going to collapse.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:32:30 to 01:32:35
It's just that a lot of people. Still want to do it. Even like yourself. I do. I want to.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:32:35 to 01:33:09
But I know that I need to let somebody else because honestly, when I came along, I know I brought a lot of new ideas and me and a lot of other people, yourself included, were able to contribute and make NYBA better. The association would benefit from that. That's one of the reasons why I want to get some new board members on board, whether I'm here or not, just to bring in new ideas, new set of goggles, look at things differently. But I don't know, it'll be really hard for me to walk away from it. Like, there's a part of me that says, I did my tour of duty, I did 15 years on me.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:33:09 to 01:33:19
Like, how much blood you got to give? But then there's another part of me that says, but why? What's so bad? Why wouldn't you just keep going? Yeah.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:33:19 to 01:33:40
If somebody ever came along that really wanted my position and I felt like was really qualified and would do a good job, I'd step aside in a minute. Or if the general population, the coaches said, hey, look, it's time for a change. But that's not what happens. I have people tell me on the regular, I hope you don't leave anytime soon. Yeah, this is so much better than our experience was down the road.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:33:40 to 01:34:21
I hope you're not going anywhere till my kid is in high school. So I get those kind of notes all the time that keep me going, but I don't know. Well, it's tough because it's funny you say that people get spoiled with things, and what I mean by that is if you grew up playing NYBA or your kids did, they started like mine did, started at three, and then played all the way, know, 6th grade or whatever, or even high school or junior high, you kind of take for granted how well it runs and how good everything goes, and there's always hiccups. Nothing's perfect. There's always things that go sideways, but for the most part, but those people, maybe myself included, you lose sight of what you have until you go participate in another organization.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:34:21 to 01:34:48
And I got that perspective because of football and basketball and other things. But if you don't do those things and you just play baseball, it's like the parents that just play baseball, those are kind of the ones that have been there for a long time that you run into problems with, but the ones that come over from other organizations in other places and they play with you, they're like, this is great. That's part of what fuels me to keep going is because people do tell me that they come from other associations. Like, this experience is so different. Yes.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:34:48 to 01:35:15
And I don't want Mansfield to lose that. I don't want NYBA to lose that. And I know that it's not happening just because of Kevin, but I know that as long as I'm here, I'm going to make sure that's happening. And so I don't know if the next group of people will keep those things sacred that are so important to making sure the experience, because things like that were happening when I first got here, where coaches were selecting some of their own players out of the draft. That's like, that stuff can't go on.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:35:15 to 01:35:27
I remember when I first got here and somebody said something about the good old boy club, and, boy, I defended that to them. I'm like, it was literally my first. I'm like, there is no good old boy club here. No, I wouldn't be a part of a new book. But they were right.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:35:27 to 01:35:43
There was a good old boy club. When we say we have a random draft yet, some coaches are being allowed to say, hey, make sure I get these two draft. That's the good old boy club. That's by definition what the good old boy club is. Some people are getting away with things that other people aren't taking care of your budies or whatever.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:35:43 to 01:35:54
And I don't think anybody had ill intentions at all. It just seemed like that's just how it's done. They helped us rake a field one day. Let's let them pick a player, whatever. People justify stuff like that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:35:54 to 01:36:26
I'm not saying there were bad people running the association or had ill will. I think sometimes you only know what you know, and sometimes you just don't realize that, hey, what we're doing here really lacks integrity because it seems right to us, but because nobody's calling us out on it, we don't realize it's not. I noticed that Paula and Bret, whoever this is. Yeah, Bret works with me. Yes, Bret, thanks for the right, you know, I don't know if he mentions maybe somehow incorporating VR into the experience of baseball could be part of a solution, but, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:36:26 to 01:36:45
Something like that. Maybe virtual practices is a thing that could be. Yeah, could be. But I think we need to think outside the box because at the nuts and bolts of it, we are still getting out there and practicing and playing the game the same way we did back in the 70s. It's the same game, same thing.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:36:45 to 01:36:57
Might change the rules a little bit, but it's the same game. And he's right. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as aluminum bats. It was only wooden bats. So at some point we had to start allowing aluminum bats.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:36:57 to 01:37:15
And he's right. That's my whole point is what are we not evolving into that we should while still protecting the integrity of the game? If this is just the way life is now and everything electronic, golf's done that. Yeah, golf. You're a great example.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:37:15 to 01:37:33
Yeah, well, and I don't know how prevalent it is now, but you see a lot of those whole golf courses turning into the soccer thing with the big ring around it where they're kicking the ball, but then also the top golf. Yes. And playing nine holes as opposed to eight. And you can practice. You can practice your golf swing virtually.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:37:33 to 01:37:49
Yeah, absolutely. And so he's right. That's a great point. Honestly, it's something I really hadn't thought of. But it's that kind of thing, though, that I'm interested in having discussions about with some other people that are embedded in youth baseball because, and honestly, it's all youth sports.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:37:49 to 01:38:19
I don't think it's just baseball needs to be thinking about this. I think softball does and basketball and everybody, and we're not competing with it from a business standpoint, for the best of the kids. Yeah. Human that humans being humans and enjoying this great game that we love, whether it's basketball or baseball, how do we evolve with time so that people keep wanting to play that that's part of your childhood. And if something doesn't give, I don't think it's going to be.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:38:19 to 01:38:26
The only baseball a kid's ever going to play is against Hank Aaron on the TV show MLB. The.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:38:28 to 01:39:25
One, one quick thing, and I want to wrap up, but I do want to ask you, because we've talked about this before, and I personally want to know the state of it, but one of the things that we've always said about NYBA is that I think that we could do, or you guys could do even more if you wanted to, to some extent, if we had the fields to do so. And there's a misconception to some extent of the people that play in the league about how much control NYBA has over the fields and what you can actually. Then, you know, we go to places like playing in these club stuff now we go to Texas Star and we go to all these, and we're so centrally located to the southeast part of Tarrant county and Midlothian and Burleson and Joshua and all these teams that go play in McKinney. If I have to go play in McKinney one more time for a baseball tournament, I'm going to lose my mind. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, because in my opinion, like I've already stated, we are one of the largest, if not the largest, youth baseball association in Texas, one of the largest in America.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:39:25 to 01:39:41
I wholeheartedly believe that Mansfield could be the youth baseball hub of North Texas. I agree easily. Yes. I mean, we have, in my opinion, one hand tied behind our back, and we're still one of the largest. And it's not because we're the largest city.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:39:41 to 01:39:57
No, it's not because of all these other things. It's because we have a great offering here. We have people here that care about youth baseball and offering, and people have shown us they want to come play here. Not only do people come play here, but they end up moving here, which the city doesn't want to recognize. They spend their dollars here.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:39:57 to 01:40:31
Yet the fields, over time, instead of improving, have, for one of the biggest. Organizations in Texas, the Fields have deteriorated. We play on some of the worst. I'll put this in the right way, but literally, I've said this in meetings with the city, the fields that we play on now look identical, except they look identical to the ones I played on when I was a kid in Burleson at the old Bartlett Park. And when I got here 15 years ago, they looked better than they do now.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:40:32 to 01:40:52
When I got here 15 years ago, we had a nice flower bed right there at the entrance. Groomed, looked really nice. It wasn't anything fancy. It wasn't a brick entry with ironwork or anything. As it deteriorated and got worse and worse, I finally brought it up to city and, hey, look, this used to look really good.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:40:52 to 01:41:08
Can we spruce this or whatever? Well, instead of doing that, they leveled it and putting rocks in. It's a rock bed now, but we. Have big league dreams. Yeah, well, gosh, maybe we should talk about that because honestly, that's a little bit point of a contention right now.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:41:08 to 01:41:23
I will say that when we took that big Spike and jumped to about 2000, 102,200 kids, I was really scared. We didn't have enough Fields. It was tough. It was really tough to run the league with not enough Fields. That's when we were forced to figure something out with big league dreams.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:41:23 to 01:41:44
When I got here, we did not use big league dreams for a variety of reasons. What I was told when I got here, or had heard, everybody was telling me, and I don't mean necessarily board members, but parents, we don't want to play big league dreams because they charge us to get in. There's beer being served out there, which, to be honest with you, you go to Chuck E. Cheese, there was beer, but for some reason, or at the Ranger game, there's still beer. They didn't want it to be.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:41:46 to 01:42:05
Parents bring their own beer. Now, the problem is we experienced a big spike in participation, and we needed to do something because we already had moved to starting the season earlier than anybody else starts their season. We were playing later than anybody else start their season. There was nowhere else to go. And so I finally arranged a meeting with big league Dreams corporate.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:42:05 to 01:42:26
They came from California because they wouldn't work with them before that. They wouldn't like, if you want to play here, you're going to pay this and pay to use the fields and all this. So I got them together and I said, look, and up until this point, what I was told, and I'm pretty confident this is the truth, big league dreams had lost money. The company had lost money on this location. Every single year had been open.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:42:26 to 01:42:40
They were in the red every single year. And so I sat down with them and I said, look, the most expensive seat you have in this place is the empty one, right? Because they're not buying hot dogs, they're not buying pizza, they're not buying whatever. They're not paying to get in. The empty one is the most expensive one you have.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:42:40 to 01:42:55
So let's work on that. I need field space, or we need field space. Sorry. And you need people in these seats. So I negotiated with them to get the gate fee down to a lower gate fee for our parents.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:42:55 to 01:43:08
That was more reasonable. And I negotiated that anyone 13 and under didn't have to pay and no players ever had to pay, and that the two coaches could get in free. And that worked for us. It wasn't ideal.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:43:11 to 01:43:24
BLD is in pod. They have two pods. There's four fields over here, four fields over there. They call them a pod, and each one has a concession stand. The agreement was that if we were playing on this pod, the beer taps were turned off over here, and if we're playing on both of them, they're turned off in both places.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:43:24 to 01:43:58
And they did that for a long time. And honestly, I don't have a whole lot of complaints about BLD, except that they recently sold. I do wish that the city had made youth baseball, not necessarily NYBA is youth baseball here, but they should have made the youth baseball experience a bigger part of the plans for BLD, a bigger priority. Everybody paid for that, approved that, thinking that's where Our kids are going to go play baseball. But honestly, it was built BLD, the company, their target softball, their target participants, a beer drinking softball player.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:43:58 to 01:44:06
That's where they make their money. Those guys come out there and buy pitchers of beer at a time. They pay good money to play there. That's who they wanted in there. They didn't even want us there.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:44:06 to 01:44:30
So we started playing on the weeknights, and we made those negotiations, and it worked out well. And I'll never forget, I'm not taking full credit for it or NYBH take full credit, but it is what it is. I'll never forget at the end of our first season of using that park, in the newspaper, everywhere in Mansfield, it said BLD finally turns a profit. Right? So I'm sure it was a combination of things, but that was part of it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:44:30 to 01:44:53
Well, now there's new owners in there, and without calling a meeting with us at all, without discussing, and by the way, Forrest, if you're watching this, the manager of BLD, high respect for he. He works with us and does a great job. This has nothing to do with the manager or the staff at BLD. This is BLD corporate. The new owners decided to pretty much double the gate fees on us overnight and all these other rule changes.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:44:53 to 01:45:37
And basically for me to put a family of fours just half their games out there, six games out of a season or five games, it was going to cost that family over $100 in gate fees just to go watch their kid play. They were going to pay more in the gate fee, forget buying a hot dog or a $7 Coke or whatever. They were going to pay more to go watch the game than they were paying us for registration fee to get a uniform and all these other things, umpire fees. And it just doesn't make sense. And I realize they're a business and they got to do what's best for their business and I don't know what their financials look like after they did that and we stopped playing there, I mean, I had parents, they didn't even tell me they raised the gate fee.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:45:37 to 01:46:04
The reason I found out is the night they did it, I started getting all these texts from BLD, from parents. They're going, this is ridiculous. We do not want to play here anymore if this is the way it's going to be. And so I talked to Forrest and as much as I didn't want to do it because I know that Forrest, the manager over there, he has performance that he's gauged on and a lot of its numbers and things like that, but I just couldn't, we couldn't in good conscious tell this family, you're going to go play over there. It's going to cost you a lot of money.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:46:04 to 01:46:31
And so we tried it the first season. Not doing it's not easy, it's not what we prefer to do, but all of our games are back at the sports complex. But to your point that you made so BlD, if you're watching this, we should talk. Well, we don't have to have your fields, but I wish the city, like I said, I wish the city made it more of a priority that youth baseball was part of the experience. Part of the youth baseball experience is playing over there and it's really not in the lease agreements with them at least.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:46:31 to 01:46:56
I don't know what it is with the new owners, but at least in the prior owners, they were supposed to give us certain amount of usage of the fields if we asked. And like girls softball played their one season and they never went back for a reason. And we kept doing it because we needed the field in that time 15 years ago. Immediately we started having meetings with the city saying we need to do this to our fields. I never once went to them and said, let's scrape and build, right?
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:46:56 to 01:47:10
We need a whole new park. I never did that, but I'm like, we need to start working on improvements. And right away, it was like, oh, there's a master plan, and there's all these things. And over time, because there's always a master plan going on. We don't want to spend a dome today if we're spending $2.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:47:11 to 01:47:35
They'd always say, it's a few years away. Why spend those doms now? So, nothing ever got done. And so, over time, the trees and the shrubs went away, and the posts out front of the park are all rusted and unpainted and all these things. The only thing really positive that's happened in that park, as far as an improvement, is they built us a storage building that's too small, but they built us a new storage building by field one, and that's it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:47:37 to 01:47:57
Same restrooms that were being used when there was only four fields there, and there's nine now. Same little tiny concession area that is smaller than this little space we're in right now. It's just ridiculous, and we can't get anywhere with it. And, yes, you could say, well, they put it up for bond, and the voters spoke, well, we're in a recession. There's a lot of other things going on.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:47:58 to 01:48:22
Tax appraisals had just come out. There's a lot of reasons why it may not have passed, but at the same time, it doesn't take a bond package, just budget some money. In the last 15 years, we could have transformed this park into something amazing if they just spent a little money, a little money each year. Instead, now it's so far behind. You talk about Burleson or Grapevine and some of those other cities that built nice parks.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:48:22 to 01:48:34
Those parks not only are so much nicer than ours, but they've been around for a while now. Even they're starting to get a little outdated. Still have the same field. Yes. That don't look as good as they did 15 years ago.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:48:34 to 01:48:49
So I just don't really understand. There's times where I feel like, you know what? NYBA is not just one of the largest baseball associations in Texas, one of the largest associations in Mansfield. Like, what other group has that many members in it? There might be some.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:48:49 to 01:49:11
There's not many. There's times where I think, you know, we just got to make our voices heard. And then, in fact, we got called. We were actually going to go to City hall one time, and we got asked to stand, wanted you. The reason I wanted to ask you about it, and I'm sorry we had to wait till the last year to do it, but the reason I wanted to ask you is because I think you personally, and NYBA gets a lot of grief about the fields.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:49:11 to 01:49:27
Like it has something to do with what you're not willing to do or unable to do, or the cities or. They don't understand how much. Because I witnessed it myself, because I've been to the Parks and rec meetings, and you guys fight for this every single year. It's an ongoing battle. Every single year.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:49:27 to 01:49:49
We just can't know. I will say there's a lot of good people in the parks department that work very hard for us, and I'm going to give a special shout out to Heath. Heath's the most incredible employee that they have, to be honest with you. But they all have jobs to do, too. But like I said, there's some good people there, but then there's some people that honestly, I feel like could care less.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:49:49 to 01:49:56
They'll just give you lip service or whatever it takes to get you to go away. And it's a shame.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:49:58 to 01:50:29
We say that we talk about ourselves, the city of Mansfield, in such a positive way, and there's so many positive things that happen with this city yet that there's things like this that we just neglect. And there's very few young, by the way, girls are invited to play with us if they want. They usually choose to play girls softball, so girls want to play, they can play there. When I say the word boy, it's just mostly, it is boys. But you'll be hard pressed to find a single boy that lives in Mansfield that doesn't, at some point play NYBA.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:50:29 to 01:50:44
Everybody at least tries it. Very few don't at least try it. Lots of them play it. You'll be hard pressed to ever find kids on any of the high school teams that didn't, at some point, play. Yeah, very rarely does it happen yet.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:50:44 to 01:50:58
We've just ignored that park. And every season, every year, we do minimum maintenance. Whatever it takes to just put lipstick on. We don't even put lipstick on the pig. I'm not even going to say that, because they don't even do that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:50:58 to 01:51:15
We groom the fields just enough. We repair the mounds just enough to get through another season. That's all that gets done. When the restrooms get terrible enough, they'll repaint them, but they're the same stalls that were in there 15 years ago, the same flooring, same mirrors, all that. And I just don't get it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:51:16 to 01:51:39
We build these nice parks, we build nice infrastructure and buildings and we want to attract all these nice businesses and all these things. Yet so many kids go through that park and so many. On any given Saturday we'll have, gosh, 20. I do the math on it. Occasionally, 2500 spectators that I go through that park on a Saturday who leave and go spend their money in this town.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:51:39 to 01:51:51
But we won't spend any money on that park. For instance, we need fenced in warm up areas. The kids have to warm up, throw the ball where people are walking. Yes. And it's just ridiculous.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:51:51 to 01:52:10
And if somebody for the city were sitting here right now, they would say, oh, we have plans right now to try to address that. But there's been plans to address that for 15 years, right? Yes. And there was a master plan for years and I was told, oh, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And then I remember we got just to the point where some stuff should have started happening.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:52:10 to 01:52:26
It's like, well, we've decided the master plan is so old, we need a new one. Right. And everything went out the door. In fact, at one point we need more restrooms at that park so bad, we were willing to foot the bill on a good chunk of putting some new restrooms out there. Yes, I remember that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:52:26 to 01:52:32
Remember? Yes, I fought hard for that. We fought hard for that. We were going to put up half of the money. Most of the money.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:52:32 to 01:52:52
Yes, most of the money. And they sent it out for bid came back. Somebody on the council at the time, it wasn't current council, but council at the time, somebody didn't like it, send it out for rebid again, get some more bids. The process took so long that by the time they got the bids that they were the extra bids they wanted to get, the price had doubled because lumber was going up. And then they scrapped it.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:52:52 to 01:53:08
We can't pay this much money for something like that. So guess what? We still have the bathrooms we had 15 years ago. We have nothing more. And so on Saturday, you'll see either lines of kids or people lined up out the bathroom door to use the bathroom, or they're standing out back peeing on the Trees.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:53:08 to 01:53:33
And there are no attendants or people from the city that are there to clean the bathrooms and take care of it. That's all the volunteers that are there. Well, I don't want to bore them too much on that because I'm not going to complain about that. In their eyes, we do lease the part from them, they leave it to us in good shape. I don't want to knock them too much on that because the people that are in charge of that, I think we can pick up phone, we can say, hey, we need this.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:53:33 to 01:53:48
And they do a pretty good job with that. But as a city, we just treat most of our youth sports really bad. We just ignore them. And it's such, which is OD for. A place with six high schools.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:53:48 to 01:54:06
And sports is so important in high school sports. I really don't understand it. And it's funny because I'll never forget one council member. The very first season we started using big league dreams. His first night out at big league Dreams, he was a newer council member at the time.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:54:06 to 01:54:27
I won't name him by name, but he went out there and he could not believe we had just spent all this money to build this park. And now he had to pay to get in there. And he sent out an email to me and every council member, the mayor, everybody, and said, this is ridiculous. It's not an appropriate amount. We shouldn't even have to pay to get in there.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:54:27 to 01:54:42
Fired it off. And I remember thinking, wow, at least somebody, at least is advocating for us. And he got shut down quick. Yeah, well, I wasn't privy to the conversations that were had with him, but that whole issue went away. It was never spoken about again.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:54:42 to 01:54:51
The only time things change is when people demand it. And that's really what it boils down. That's what I say. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. And there's times where I feel like it shouldn't come to that.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:54:51 to 01:55:15
And that's why we haven't done anything like that. But we did have a night where we were going to go make a statement at a council meeting and we had a ton of people that were coming to try to get more fields. And I was politely asked not to do it before it happened and told that we will have some meetings and we will get it addressed. And they assured me that the solution was coming and it was all part of that first master plan. How'd that work out?
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:55:15 to 01:55:37
Did not happen. But then you also get bigger fish to fry. It's like, do I really want to spend the time it would take to advocate championing, really champion getting, because I do. Honestly, that's been one of my goals on my plate, is like, I really want to stay long enough to see these kids get a better park to play in. Yeah.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:55:37 to 01:55:54
Whether that's a new one, because that seems to be the city's best interest so far has always been to build a new one, get rid of the old one, build a new one. Which if they can do that that's fine. But it's like it doesn't have to be all or nothing. And that's what it's been, all or nothing. And since it couldn't be all, it was nothing.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:55:54 to 01:56:32
And I've really wanted to see the day that these kids got a park that we could all be proud of that when you walk in. And we're working on another plan now since the bond package didn't pass. And I want to believe in it but I've heard this so many times before it's hard to believe it but they're working on a plan to maybe put some brick and mortar and rod iron at the front and putting in some warm up areas, things like that. But I mean until we actually put something at that park and actually do something it's getting really hard to bite him. It's almost like they just keep crying wolf.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:56:32 to 01:56:50
It's like you keep promising things to us and I'll even communicate that to our members. This is where we're headed and what it's going to look like in the next two or three years and 15. Years later it's worse. Yeah. Well I want to say I appreciate we're at almost 2 hours here so we went a long time.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:56:50 to 01:57:17
But I really appreciate you coming in and talking to me. And I do think that the time and effort that you've committed to the city and doing what you're doing, I hear more grief that you get than positive. I know you hear a lot of positive stuff and I think that that's awesome because there are, the vast majority of people are thrilled and love how everything works. Yeah. Like I said, with roughly 3000 parents in a season it's usually just five or six that express discontent.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:57:17 to 01:57:36
But man they really try hard to make your life miserable. And you just have to try to move past those because making 2995 people happy is pretty darn good. And I learned that a long time. You'll never make everybody happy no matter what. We could stand out at the ballpark and tell everybody to come out tonight because we're handing out free money and somebody would complain that it wasn't enough.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:57:36 to 01:57:54
We didn't give them enough notice. You just can't make everybody happy. But I think we do a pretty good job of doing the right thing as often as we can. That's in the best interest for all the kids. And when people do send something nice.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:57:54 to 01:58:10
I don't need anybody to tell me, thank you. But when you get some positive feedback about how we're, wow, I just got here. This is so much better than any experience I've had before, or you hear, wow, this was our great. My son had the best season ever. And people have to realize coaches volunteer, too.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:58:10 to 01:58:25
I don't go out and interview coaches and we don't decide, oh, well, let's hand pick whoever volunteers. A lot of times you're calling like you got called the very first time to say, hey, we don't have a coach. Can you help us? Yeah, that happens. We have to recruit coaches, and sometimes we have to tell coaches, look, this isn't for you, and you don't need a coach anymore.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:58:25 to 01:59:05
That's happened a few times, but I'm really proud overall of what you were a big part of where we are today. And there's a lot of people in the past, the Lesters, the Tonys, the Josh's, and even the guys that were here when I got here, they had an impact on making NYBA what it is today. And I think we've done a pretty good job of evolving over the years and continuing to be open to change. But I do think we need to think about next level and what baseball looks like for the next ten years and how we slow down this gravitation over to electronics or maybe incorporating electronics, like Bret has said. But, yeah, I appreciate being here.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:59:05 to 01:59:30
I could talk. I've said before, when this is all over, when I do leave NYBA or step down, I need to write a book, because there's so many things I'm not saying, not necessarily to bad about people, just about experiences of what comes with running an association like this. Just the nature of some people. And like I said, the schools. I could do the same thing with schools.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 01:59:30 to 01:59:49
I wouldn't do it now because I wouldn't want anybody's feelings to get hurt. But like I said, our school system needs some attention. The teachers don't get the love and the administration don't get the love if they need to. But yeah, I could talk all day about some of these things, but I appreciate you having me. It's been a lot of fun.
Mike Mills (Host) | 01:59:49 to 02:00:14
We'll do it again sometime. Like I said, we could talk for hours and hours about this, and down the road we'll hook up again. My hope is that maybe we can get some headway on some fields and really make an improvement for the city and get people fired up about that a little bit, because I do think my kids are older. They're not going to be participating in that and I ain't having any more kids. My son doesn't participate anymore.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 02:00:14 to 02:00:46
But I'm just really passionate about just the experience the kids get here because it can be a good experience and it can be a bad experience, and it's not always going to be great. You can't just sign up for NYBA or anywhere, and it's going to be a perfect season because there are volunteer coaches and there are volunteer people. We can't control all of that. Sometimes we can react, but we can't necessarily control things from not happening. I think overall, I know we're trying to wrap this up, but I think overall, our parents, because I think we lay a good groundwork, but overall, our parents are well behaved.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 02:00:47 to 02:01:16
You see these videos online and people fighting on the fields and things like that. And I'm not saying that things don't ever get out, people don't ever get out of linE. But for the most part, it's very minimal and it's very controlled. And I think part of it is us laying the groundwork and being serious about, hey, if you are coming in here acting that way, we're going to eliminate you. You won't be here at our park, but we also just have really good people here that really care about a great baseball experience, and you were one of them.
Mike Mills (Host) | 02:01:16 to 02:01:37
Well, I think you've done a great job and I hope you continue to do the job because I think it means a lot to the city and I do think there's a lot of room for improvement. And I think that you could continue to be the advocate for that and make a difference with it, and I look forward to it. So we'll definitely do this again sometime. But again, I don't know if you know or not. I have a YouTube channel and we've thought about starting some podcasts, so I'll have you as a guest.
Kevin Lewis (Guest) | 02:01:37 to 02:01:41
I want to mine. Love it. I love it. Love talking about this stuff. It's one of my favorite topics.
Mike Mills (Host) | 02:01:41 to 02:01:56
So if anybody watched this all the way to the end, I appreciate it if you see it down the road. Thanks for hanging out and tuning in for a little while, and we'll get back to real estate and finance another day. But this is something I really enjoy and I really appreciate you being here, Kevin. Absolutely. Thanks for doing this.
Mike Mills (Host) | 02:01:56 to 02:01:56
All right, we'll see you guys later.