If you know GoldenComm very well, you know a lot of us follow baseball. I, personally, am a lifetime Angel fan, so with my horse out of the race even before the All-Star break, I started following the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The Pirates have not been to a World Series (or even made the playoffs) in over 21 years – dry since 1992 to be exact. I can still remember that early 90’s team with Andy Van Slyke, Orlando Merced, Barry Bonds, Jose Lind and Doug Drabek to name a few of them – geez, we have a couple of people in the office that were not even born yet in 1992! At the All-Star break, I decided that rooting on the Pirates was the best second choice if my Angels were out of the hunt, and that’s what I did.
So it was with great luck that in August a speaking opportunity came up in the Pittsburgh area for a late October date. Looking at the calendar and comparing it to the Pittsburgh Pirates’ record, I accepted the engagement and started crossing my fingers that I would be in the Iron City for a Word Series game.
Well, as you know, the Pirates did make the playoffs, won their wild card game, but lost to the Cardinals in the NLDS – no World Series. Bummer.
As my Pittsburgh trip got closer I received the list of attendees that would be in my website optimization seminar. One of the companies signed up was Bear Construction out of Canonsburg, PA.
By clicking around on their website I noticed they have a pretty awesome portfolio.
One project they completed immediately caught my attention – they were the builders of the world headquarters of Pony Baseball.
Did someone say, “Pony Baseball?” Whoa – if you know me you know I LOVE PONY BASEBALL.
After the seminar, Kris Beil (President of Bear Construction) gave me directions and I headed over to the home of Pony Baseball. The lobby is awesome, as you can imagine – it doubles as a museum and has a ton of history, photos, baseballs, jerseys and bats of kids that played in the past and made it to the Pony World Series. Just this summer, I had the honor of helping coach my son’s team (Mustang Division) with good friends of mine Coach Jim Stowell and Coach Richard Lemmon (we all had sons on the team).
The highlight of the visit was spending time with Pony President and CEO Abraham Key and their Director of IT Brent Liberatore.
These guys were nice enough to give me a tour and talk baseball with me.
We also got into an interesting discussion about their business and the challenges of their website – which is in position for a re-design sometime in 2014. It’s not like you have to ask me twice to talk about baseball or websites – pretty awesome day.
The Pony.org redesign will be no trivial effort as that website has to schedule thousands of scenarios from hundreds of teams all around the USA and the world in elimination brackets on the road to the Pony World Series. Good luck with that project fellas!
Oh yes, the construction of the facility is TOP KNOTCH – nice job Bear Construction.
Meeting Great People + Visiting Pony Baseball = Better than Playoffs.
Hope to be back soon.