UNSCRIPTED: Caleb Kimmel and World Baseball Academy
UNSCRIPTED
By Keith Edmonds
Fort Wayne Ink Spot
Our city is blessed to have outstanding youth organizations that provide young people with opportunities for success and leadership growth. Sports is a “tool” that attracts many youth toward these organizations, as it offers a bridge to link common interests between them and the adults trying to keep them focused on life goals. The World Baseball Academy (WBA) has a unique history that has helped position it to provide leadership opportunities for our youth for some great things currently happening, and for many years to come!
The founder of this tremendous organization, Caleb Kimmel, is a native of Fort Wayne and graduate of Homestead High School and Valparaiso University. In 2000, while still in college, Kimmel worked alongside his father, Brad Kimmel, to form Between the Lines LLC, which served as the event planner for the annual Hoosier Classic Summer Baseball Tournaments.
After graduating from college in 2003, Kimmel expanded Between the Lines by adding baseball instructional programs to complement the established tournaments.
I recently sat down with Caleb to discuss what led to his decision to start the WBA and what his goals are for the organization. It was refreshing to hear true “passion leadership” through his words and to gain a better understanding of what the World Baseball Academy brings to our community.
Q. What were your initial thoughts behind forming the World Baseball Academy?
A. World Baseball Academy is a 501(c)3 nonprofit and we are blessed to own and operate a 26-acre campus called the ASH Centre Sports Facility. Our organization has grown to serve over 5,000 kids a year. Functionally, we operate under two hats. First, we are a programming entity, a youth development organization. Second, we are a property owner, with OPS (Optimum Performance Sports) as our tenant.
WBA’s vision is all about developing young people to be difference makers. It’s trying to answer the question of how do we develop future leaders? We are leveraging the platform of “sports,” which is our vehicle, to build relationships with young people, and invest time, energy and effort in their lives in hopes of them becoming future leaders. So it’s not just baseball players that we’re trying to develop, its future leaders.
Q. Tell our readers a little about yourself and what your baseball background is.
A. I’m a Fort Wayne kid that attended high school here and enjoyed playing baseball, which was my passion although I also played basketball. I was fortunate enough to attract some college interest and ended up at Valparaiso University, where I played baseball and majored in marketing. At a young age (13), I was exposed to the operational aspects of the game through my father, who started forming tournaments as a small fundraiser for our summer baseball team and the expenses our team incurred.
My college marketing degree required an internship, so I converted the Hoosier Classic tournaments into a small business as my internship project. That provided a wealth of business experience for me at a young age. My father had major back surgery the following summer, so I ran things for him. That’s how I became interested in the entrepreneurial aspect of sports. Baseball and my passion for the sport was part of my DNA growing up and I never wavered from that.
Q. How do you use baseball as the “tool” to attract young people into your organization?
A. After college, I got a job with the host hotels of our tournaments (Holiday Inn, Hilton) so I built relationships with the general managers and was offered a sales position. After a few weeks into the position, I stumbled across the Tahcumwah facility on a sales call. It was old and needed a lot of work, but it had character and I liked that. I called my dad and said if we wanted to keep the tournaments alive, this might be the place to make it happen.
About six months later, I jumped “all in” as a tenant at Tahcumwah with hopes of growing my business. Fast forward a few years. As I got more involved in baseball instructional programs and event planning, I realized I had a lot of influence on young people, who literally hung on every word I said. It was during those times as a 23- or 24-year-old that I felt God telling me he had a call and purpose in my life to do something more than just help kids get better at baseball.
However, it was after a mission trip to El Salvador at age 26 with our high school youth group to work with their national baseball federation that God’s purpose for me started to become clear. That trip changed my life! I came back saying to myself, “OK, God, I need to use baseball for something bigger than I had originally planned.”
Q. Where do you find the amazing kids you work with? Is there a referral process, do you scour the neighborhoods, or do they just walk in?
A. From 2003 to 2009 the instructional programs grew to include serving over 1,000 kids in personal and group programs and coach Eric Wedge Baseball Camps. A new part of the story was written in 2009. I owned a business called Between the Lines LLC and dissolved it to form the World Baseball Academy as a nonprofit to better position our organization to impact our community.
Also that year we realized there were many kids that couldn’t afford our services. We wondered: “How can we impact more kids?” We brainstormed how to do outreach and came up with the On Deck Initiative, collaborating with Boys & Girls Club of Fort Wayne, for a six-week camp, which went extremely well. After two summers of doing this, we realized we needed to keep this going year-round, not just summers, to keep our connections with kids stronger and their interest in us higher. Today the On Deck Initiative has blossomed into a series of youth development mentoring programs serving over 1,000 area kids each year.
Q. What is the mission statement of the WBA?
A. Our mission statement is ”To use the platform of baseball to exemplify excellence in leadership beyond the game,” but our “vision statement” is a little more focused: “To develop leaders and positively impact our world.” We feel these two components help us use the platform of baseball to develop future leaders. It’s a challenge we readily accept. We like to look at our organization under the guise of the four T’s of impact: tournaments, team support, training and trips, which are our avenues of promotion.
Q. What three key aspects of the WBA would you like to leave with readers that will give us better insight on what it’s all about?
A. (1) We are passionate about developing the next generation of leaders. (2) Continuing to answer the question, how do we help change perspectives and mindsets? (3) How do we leverage the powerful platform of sports for all the right reasons?
