The role faith plays with the Warriors is clear from their name. It has Christian roots. Their logo is a shield with a cross on it. The team does not choose players based on religion and welcomes a multi-denominational roster. But Warriors coaches must make a spiritual commitment, officials said. “It would be dishonest to say that’s not where this whole idea comes from,” says Casey Cramer, a former NFL player and student at nearby Covenant Seminary. 

Several years before the St. Louis Cardinals hired Mike Matheny to be their manager, friends pursued the longtime catcher to coach their sons’ St. Louis-area youth baseball team.

A veteran of 13 years in the major leagues and a witness to countless moments in youth sports that disturbed him, including overbearing coaches and conflict with aggressive parents, Matheny resisted their repeated invitations.

On that flight home, he reconsidered, under certain conditions. Matheny pulled out his laptop, clicked open a blank page and started writing the terms of his participation.

“I always said that the only team that I would coach would be a team of orphans,” he began. When he was finished he had outlined goals and rules that he would later call “probably a little radical.” Friend and former Cardinals teammate John Mabry took a look at the letter and was succinct in his assessment: “You’re nuts.”

Matheny invited about 20 parents to his home, so the first time they heard the letter he was reading it to them. Before the end of the second sentence he had already told them, “The biggest problem with youth sports has been the parents.”

He described a team without parental intrusion, without the guarantee of winning, and with a distinct, faith-inspired element of character development. He finished the letter, asking whether they could make this “commitment.” [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]

The initial answer was silence.

“When I do public speaking events a lot of time I can get a pulse of the room — are these people with me or not?” Matheny says. “But I really had more negative vibes than anything else at the time, even though these were people I knew. I can understand as I’m reading it (how they’re thinking), ‘Who does this guy think he is? Who made you the guru?’ … Nobody wants to be told they’re doing something wrong, especially when it comes to your kids.”

One father broke the pause: “Well, I’m in.”

THE TPX WARRIORS

The first season, about a dozen families joined and agreed to butt out to let their coach do the coaching. There was one team, the Wolverines, a nod to Matheny’s alma mater, the University of Michigan.

More families came, and one team became four, spread among four age groups. Louisville Slugger, a Kentucky-based bat and equipment manufacturer, signed on as a sponsor. And by 2011, the TPX Warriors, named after one of the bat company’s models, were born as a club, still wearing the maize and blue, like Matheny’s Michigan.

Other elements of Matheny’s letter took root. Players must spend part of each practice in a “character study,” a classroom-like discussion about topics such as integrity, leadership and relationships. Players are required to volunteer at charity events. This season, about 50 boys played for the four Chesterfield-based TPX Warriors teams. And that’s only the teams and players directly influenced by Matheny’s letter.

As more families became involved, the letter went viral, spreading from that group at Matheny’s home to other teams, other leagues, other sports and other former major leaguers who took to coaching. Matheny says it’s rare that he visits a city with the Cardinals this season and isn’t asked about his “manifesto,” as it became known. Youth organizations from two other states have inquired about the Warriors’ organization. Locally, members of the Warriors’ board of directors are looking at ways their program could expand because, as an executive at Louisville Slugger said, Matheny’s letter could be the catalyst to “reinvent youth baseball.”

“We don’t have this figured out,” says Rick Sems, the regional president of PNC Bank and a member of the Warriors board who has two sons on the teams. “We don’t think we’re perfect. We’re trying the best we can to change youth baseball. This is an experiment. … We want to put something together that Mike can put his stamp on. At the end of this is we would like to change the tenor and tone of youth sports. I think if you don’t shoot really high, then you don’t get there.”

FIELD OF DREAMS

Out in Weldon Spring, tucked alongside a meandering woods-lined highway, are two baseball fields carved into a farm, and on a late July day the dirt is so baked by record summer heat that it’s cracked and flaking like dried skin. Before the players arrive for practice, the farm’s owner has hooked a trough of corn to a tractor and dragged it around to lure cattle away. The boys know by now to avoid the gifts the cattle leave behind.

“Welcome,” says Brett Dempsey, the coach of the TPX Warriors’ 12-and-under team, to two visitors, “to the Warriors’ field of dreams.”

Michael Kolb, 12, is the seventh generation to live on this land west of St. Louis, and now he only has to walk across the street from his house for some Warriors’ practices. His father, Jeff, whose family owns Dave Kolb Grading, deployed the business’s earthmovers to level the first field five years ago.

Jeff Kolb said he woke up one Saturday morning and in a bolt out of W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe,” or the Kevin Costner movie it inspired, decided “to build a baseball field.” A handful of teams, including the Warriors’ four, practice on the Kolb field.

He cleared the crops from about 5 acres for two fields so something else could grow.

Read More