Over two decades later, he finds himself at the helm of one of the premier programs when it comes to player development in youth baseball, the St. Louis Pirates.
“The genesis of getting into coaching, it wasn’t something that I initially wanted to do,” Strickland admits.
“I did have some younger cousins that were involved in high school baseball back in the early 90’s, and I remember I was sitting on the sidelines and trying to piece my life together after pro ball, and one of the dads asked me if I would coach. It wasn’t anything that was planned out, I was just volunteering my time and just doing it. It was wanting to offer something back to the community, and even to this day, it’s grassroots, which goes back to community service. The Pirates weren’t put together as a business, it was a community involvement to give back. Some of these people when I was coming up were supportive of me and taking me places and spending their money and resources that they had just to see that I was able to be successful in the game.”
Since then, the Pirates, the newest partner program of the New Balance Baseball Future Stars Series powered by PROGRAM 15, have evolved. The Pirates started as a fall season program with the goal of promoting area high school players to college and professional scouts. The program was so successful that it grew into a year-round institution in 2006. Due to the program’s efforts, hundreds of student athletes have received college baseball scholarships and many have gone on to play the sport professionally.
As that grassroots-movement grew, so did the talent level of the players they were able to attract. The Pirates have seen dozens of alumni taken in the MLB Draft – included are first-rounders Jake Odorizzi, Jon Harris, and Kyle Parker, as well as notables like Cody Asche and Mitch Keller – and seemingly countless players commit to colleges all across the country.
“The biggest thing we’ve done is we’ve been very blessed to have some really good players,” Strickland said. “It’s not that we go out and scour the country looking for those players, our basis has always been if we get a player, we’ll put everything we can into that player to make him better. As we got more talented players, it was easy to for us to become identifiable through the recruitment channels and through the club channels by the caliber of players we had. So, when that goes out and we get people committing to schools, there’s that grassroots-movement where people start talking about it. You want to do what’s right for the kid. It’s not cheap to do, sure, but I think people understand it all goes back into making sure the player is as good as he can possibly be.”
However, when asked what he’s the most proud of over his two-plus decades at the helm of the Pirates, that didn’t come up. While some might use the opportunity to brag about the amount of players who’ve come through his doors that he’s sent to professional careers, Strickland instead chose to look at the amount of lives his program’s been able to impact, regardless of whether they made it to the big leagues or never played again past their time in St. Louis.
“Collectively, you look over the years at all the kids you helped and that you’ve had some involvement with,” he said. “When we started to have some success, I would always ask myself, ‘Is it our program that’s really having this profound effect or is it the actual kid?’ I sat back and looked at it, and there would be these kids in their senior years that were in American Legion ball or some house league or something like that, and they didn’t have any opportunities to play college ball and nobody was recruiting them. But then, when they came here, those activities started to happen.
“When I look back at it over the years, the two things we’ve done is we’ve helped make kids better and we’ve had a positive influence in the community. More importantly, when you look at the list of players who’ve come through the program and how we’ve been able to help them move on to the next level with college baseball and in some instances, pro ball, that’s what really speaks. A great deal of the players who’ve come through here have gone on to extend their baseball career, and that’s really how we keep score. It isn’t how much money we make or how many wins or losses we get, we measure it by how many lives we actually impact.”
It was that philosophy, as well as an incredible devotion to player development, that led Strickland and the Pirates to partner with the New Balance Future Stars Series and PROGRAM 15 .
“I met Jeremy in Jupiter in 2012,” Strickland recalled. “We exchanged business cards at that time, but I stumbled across him this past year at the ABCA and he was talking about what he was doing with PROGRAM 15. I’ve always been trying to create relationships with people who are trying to push the game in the development part and the mentorship part with players in a different direction, people who are real. Talking to him, he was saying things I’d already been saying, but not motivated enough to do on my own. He was trying to do those things. What you want to do is align yourself with people who are like-minded, and that’s why I said we were going to take a chance and partner up with PROGRAM 15 and see where it takes us.”
Strickland will likely field teams at the upcoming National Tournaments in Cypress, Texas in late June and July, 2019. Whether it be his program’s innovations with technology – especially in being one of the first in the country to utilize the Hittrax system – or unique approach to an elite training regimen, the fruits of the labor that comes from that attention to detail with player development will surely be on display.
