Growing up in the 80219, the sport provided a way to stay out of trouble and get an education. Now he wants everyone to get in the game.
Dan Medina knows that. You can strike out swinging seven out of ten times but still end up in the hall of fame.
He hopes to make his restaurant a haven for youth sports in the 80219, the south Denver neighborhood he considers home."I grew up extremely less fortunate. I grew up poor," Medina says."The word '80219' means something to me because I grew up in ten different houses. I can never really say 'I'm from a neighborhood' or 'I'm from a certain school' because I had to move so much.
He also dealt with discipline at Lincoln."He was the guy going to court hearings if a guy had 100 absences. If there was a street fight or a gang fight, he was the one calling the officers and helping out with the tickets. My dad set a lot, a lot of kids' lives on the right path," Medina says. "He was extremely respected in the community for what he did."
At Lincoln, Medina played four years of varsity baseball on Vinny Castilla Field, the school's home diamond built by the Rockies' Field of Dreams program with donations from Castilla himself. In the spring of 2001, during his last semester of high school, Medina was selected to play at Coors Field in the first-ever Top 40, an all-star game for youth baseball players from Colorado put together by the now-defunct."Kids from Lamar, Colorado, to Denver, Colorado," he recalls."It wasn't by class or grade or school district. They just brought together the top forty kids in Colorado.
"I just wanted baseball to be able to provide education for me," he says."I just wanted to paint a good picture for my younger siblings. I wanted them to say, 'Hey, look, he's a 4.0 GPA student, he's able to play college baseball, and the kid grew up poor as shit.'" The Medinas soon found an online job posting for a baseball coach at Edgewater's Jefferson High School, a school of fewer than 600 students desperate for a coach who would stay for more than a year."We go and interview, and in five minutes, they give us the keys," Medina says."We were the fifth coach in five years at Jefferson."At 21, Medina was named head coach of the Jefferson Saints varsity baseball team, and his father was the assistant coach.
"I remember our first tryout. We had kids in jeans and collared shirts playing catch and had never played in their life," Medina says."But we needed them because we had to fill the team." After the Rockies won the National League pennant for the first time in October 2007, Medina had his best season with the Jefferson Saints, with a 7-12 record."That's the best team I've ever coached in my lifetime at any level," he recalls."That 2008 team defined me as a coach and helped propel me to the life I have now."
At first, Medina told CA thanks, but no thanks; he was happy with the progress he'd made at Jefferson. But then his father told him he couldn't pass up the opportunity:"If you want a challenge, why wouldn't you go to the completely opposite demographic than the one you just reached?"CA was not only far wealthier than Jefferson, it was bigger by about 400 students.
After one year with Medina in charge, CA ranked among the top five baseball programs in Colorado, and with a 12-7 record, the varsity team qualified for the playoffs. Medina wanted his team from the spring to play a 32-game summer schedule, but students would tell him they couldn't make it because they summered in Cape Cod or Aspen or were going on a ten-state tour with their favorite band. It was a far cry from the challenges he'd had at his previous school.
Chatfield High School had gone through five coaches in just four years, even letting one go in the middle of the year. That surprised Medina, because"I knew that community was straight baseball," he says."Every kid there since they were five years old wanted to play major league. They had Division I athletes out of there."
A lot of those coaches were Chicano."I was able to go pluck these guys," he recalls."They were leaving some good positions because of the opportunity for us to do something that had not been done: Go and deliver in the first year." He found a vacant building just off West Jewell Avenue and South Wadsworth Boulevard in Lakewood that had been used by Colorado Christian University as a training facility; he planned to fill it with batting cages, artificial turf and a game simulator.
Although kids must try out, the facility is also open to the public, so that anyone can walk in and pay to hit off its coin-operated batting cage. People often come in to take batting practice while they wait for their table to open at the nearby Sushi Katsu, Medina says. Medina had a two-hour meeting with Vig. Two weeks later, over a Zoom conference, he announced to his Chatfield players and coaches that he'd taken a job withMedina wasn't going to be the head coach of the Metro State Roadrunners, though, just an assistant coach,"which I liked," he says."I got more personable with the players.
“Poker nights, bingo nights, we were using and frequenting other watering holes,” Medina says."And finally I was like, ‘Hey, Curt, I think if we ever found a location in my neighborhood, I can just have the fourteen teams that play for my facility run all their year-round events through a bar, which would be a good shot in the arm to start with.
Some of those friends are running branches of the Boys and Girls Club, or their own businesses. Others are coaching high school athletics across Colorado, from Pueblo to Sterling."It's really cool touching base with not only high school guys I had, but college friends that I've had that have still come back and gave back to the game of baseball after they played at the highest level they could," he says.
Baseball Denver Lincoln High School Rockies Colorado Rockies Coors Field Jefferson High School Metro State University Vinny Castilla
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