Meet Your Neighbor

Adam Stowe

In this installment of our “Meet Your Neighbor” series, SLO LIFE Magazine sits down for a conversation with Adam Stowe. Born in San Luis Obispo and raised in Los Osos, he has had a lifelong passion for sports, especially baseball. He went off to the University of Michigan but graduated from Cal Poly. He and his wife, Lauren, a speech therapist, moved to New Orleans a week before Hurricane Katrina arrived. Together they have a three-year-old daughter, Quinzi, and live a stone’s throw from Sinsheimer Stadium in the same family house that Stowe did at that age. Today, he is three years into his tenure as General Manager of San Luis Obispo Blues Baseball, where he has been engineering a remarkable turnaround of the organization, which just a few years ago was on the brink of shutting its doors. For two years running the Blues have finished in first place and this year they played in the World Series in Wichita, Kansas. Here is his story…

So, Adam, where do you get your passion for the game?

Some of my earliest memories are of attending sporting events with my father. My dad was a baseball player. He played Triple-A ball before he decided that he needed to support a family, so he went back and got his Ph.D. in physics and became a professor at Cal Poly. He loves baseball and comes out to the park all the time. He and my mom were a host family this year and had a Blues player living with them at their house. They even ran the concession stand a couple of years back. They volunteered to run it, but they’ll never volunteer to do that again. [laughter] Long hours and terrible pay. I won’t let them work at the concession stand again. I love them to death for doing that, but that was more than anyone can ask.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a baseball player or a fireman. I was always an organizer, though. From the time I was probably five-years-old I was organizing neighborhood baseball games or soccer games or whatever you wanted to do that day. I was always the one making the phone calls and making sure everyone was coming and had rides. At one of the local neighborhood baseball games I organized, I must have been ten-years-old, someone had fouled off a pitch and I went to retrieve it and found that the baseball had gone straight into a beehive. All of a sudden a thousand angry bees are charging at me. I look down and my sweater is just covered in bees. Somehow I managed to take it off and throw it down on the street without being stung. But all of the other kids that were out there with me that day got stung, and they were all banned from playing baseball with me for a couple of weeks. It was torture.

Tell us about your family.

I think I am the luckiest guy alive because I don’t think that any other woman in the world would put up with someone who puts in so many hours for something that pays so little. It just happens that she’s a sports fan and understands my drive. It wouldn’t even be enjoyable without her. If I didn’t get to share all of our successes and problems I don’t think it would mean half as much to me. We have a beautiful three-year-old daughter, Quinzi, which is Lauren’s mother’s maiden name. She loves to go to Blues games. When I get up in the morning on the day the Blues are playing I wake her up by saying, “Hey, Quinnie, what day is it?” And she says, “Game day!” She’s got her own Blues hat and she walks in the stadium very proudly. She’s adorable. I guess I’ll give her a couple more years before I make her my official ticket taker. Lauren and I originally met in San Luis when she was a travelling speech therapist, which I find a little bit ironic because my mom was also a speech therapist. But, by the time that we really started talking, her assignment was up and she moved back East. We continued talking more and more and the relationship developed and we decided that one of us needed to move or we needed to call it off. So, she decided to move with the stipulation being that in a few years, when it was time for her to go off to school, I would go with her. A few years later she wanted to get her Ph.D. from Tulane because they were doing the kind of research she wanted. We went down there for a weekend and put an offer on a house. She went down and closed the sale and started decorating and moving in. Then a week later Hurricane Katrina hit. She had to evacuate. Our house was flooded and whatever wasn’t damaged was stolen. She was in Northern Louisiana for four

or five days before being able to fly back here. We spent the next six months flying between San Luis and New Orleans trying to fix our new house. I hate talking about it because so many people were so much less fortunate than us.

You lived in New Orleans for four years. What was that like for you?

I had done the whole corporate marketing thing, it was great, but it just wasn’t for me. You can only get so excited about selling widgets. When I got down there I contacted athletic directors all over the area. I talked to LSU, Tulane, University of New Orleans, Alabama, and on and on. They all said the same thing, “You have great business experience but nothing in athletics. Our advice to you is to get some experience… volunteer, take tickets, pick up trash after the game. It doesn’t matter, just get your foot in the door.” So, the University of New Orleans needed an intern in sports marketing promotions. I started as a volunteer there with my first task being to promote women’s basketball. Two months later they fired their director of marketing and hired me. I held that position for a couple of years and then moved up to the president of their athletic foundation. I was their chief fundraiser.

What brought you back to SLO?

Once we found out that Lauren was pregnant we decided that we didn’t want to raise our child in New Orleans. We literally picked up when she was eight months pregnant, packed up our whole house and moved cross country with two U-Hauls and two cars in tow. [laughter] But, we were trying to figure out how it was going to be possible, financially, to come back. She could work as a speech therapist. There is a lot of need for speech therapy out there right now, but she couldn’t do it full-time because we had a newborn. I contacted Cal Poly, they were very interested but in a budget freeze. Cuesta didn’t really have a spot in their athletics department for my position. I contacted the Blues and my timing was great because they had just decided that week that they didn’t know anything about sales and marketing and that they needed to hire somebody. So, I flew back and checked out a Blues game and they asked me what I needed to be paid and I told them and they said, “Ummm, yeah… we can’t afford that.” So I said, “What can you afford?” A few days later they called me to say that they had come up with a creative idea where one of their sponsors, Ultrex Business Products, and the Blues would each offer me a part-time job to make one full-time position. So, in that first year I was splitting time, six months at Ultrex and six months with the Blues.

Tell us about the Blues.

It’s collegiate summer ball. The way the NCAA works is that, most of the preseason is spent by their coaches finding their players places to play during the summer. By NCAA rule, coaches can only have organized practices or coach their kids for so many hours during the course of the year. But, they also want them to stay active during the summer and the kids want to improve their skills so they’ll look to farm them out to teams like us. Because we have amateur athletes we can’t pay them, so we find them local host families who give them a room. They play against teams from all over California, even Las Vegas. Our team is made up of kids from around the country, we have kids from Kentucky, and Texas, and Villanova, Washington, all over the place. Nationwide, there are about 400 collegiate teams during the summer with about 40 leagues. So, within those leagues there are probably 200 legitimate college teams represented. Our league, the California Collegiate League, or CCL, is currently made up of five teams and it’s considered probably one of the top five leagues in the country, behind Cape Code and the Alaskan League it’s probably number three or four.

The Blues have had a colorful history, particularly in the past five years or so. Can you give us some background?

Oh, wow. I’m not sure I can do that justice honestly. I really just have secondhand information. I don’t know the specifics, but I can give you the order. It started off with Tim Golden. He took a failing product and turned it into a viable entity in San Luis Obispo. He eventually ran into financial trouble and brought in an outside investor. That investor, Joe Vergara, dumped a ton of money into the Blues. A lot of which, in retrospect, probably wasn’t spent exactly wisely. As money kept being invested it wasn’t coming back so they brought in another partner, Stevie Mac, who ended up, to the best of my knowledge, being mostly a con man. When he went to jail the team nearly folded. Joe said, “I have no more money, I can’t pay anymore.” Stevie Mac was in jail. They were going under and the coaches were looking at each other a couple of weeks before the season and saying, “Are we even going to try to do this?” And they decided that if they could raise enough money to get through the first few weeks of the season that they could then figure out a way to foot the bill for the remainder. That’s when they approached Jim Galusha, who was an ex-sports agent and the owner of Silverado Stages. The coaches pitched him on the idea of funding it and he said, “Sure. I’ll do that.” That year, the 2009 season, they got through. The next year they brought me on.

Anything stand out for you as you began your tenure?

One of my very first games with the Blues this ambulance rolls up and I didn’t even know that someone was hurt. I kind of got panicked and started running around asking, “Who’s hurt, who’s hurt?” And they said one of the players is hurt; he separated his shoulder. And, I said, “What, we called an ambulance for that?” And they said, “No, the ambulance is for the trainer.” And, I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, she took one look at the player’s shoulder and said, ‘I think I am going to pass out,’ and I thought she was kidding but then she really passed out.” Apparently, one of the coaches caught her but then someone called the ambulance because the trainer had passed out looking at a separated shoulder. I thought to myself, “Oh boy, what have I gotten myself into?” I don’t think she’s in that line of work anymore. [laughter]

What’s new with you as GM?

One of the first things I asked when coming on board was, “Have you ever considered becoming a non-profit?” I thought it would be a great benefit to the organization, most importantly it would allow donors to make tax-deductible donations. Last year was the first time we officially became a 501(c)(3). We would not have been able to send our team to the World Series in Witchita this year without our non-profit status. We had an anonymous donor come forward and because of our non-profit status he was willing to fund up to $15,000 for the trip. Beyond that, I have had this picture in my mind for how to run a clean, family baseball program here in San Luis since, I don’t know, probably college. And, it has taken me three years to get to the point that I consider a baseline. A lot of it was recovery and I have had a lot of help along the way. But, number one, I want it to be family entertainment; number two, I want to provide the players the opportunity to play against top-level competition; and number three, I wanted to make best use of the most underutilized resource on the

Central Coast, Cal Poly, by starting a thorough internship program where they actually “learn by doing” like their motto says. I think we are finally where I would like to start. I mean, I think the year before I came on their annual attendance was 7,000. This last season it was 22,000, so it has basically tripled in three years. But that’s our starting point.

What comes next?

This is where I can really start to get creative. Now that we are basically breaking even I can try things. We’ve thrown so much against the wall some of it was bound to stick. I really want to give it a minor league feel. I want it to be interactive with the crowd and the staff and the players. The last thing I want is a separation between the field and the fans. I want it to be sort of one big neighborhood barbeque with a baseball game going on at the same time. I want to have more fireworks shows, I want to do more special events at the ballpark, I want to have more theme nights. I want to get more involved in the community. I want to have more local non-profits come out to games. You know, I’d like to team up with local non-profits to do fundraisers all year long. I’d like to give back to the city every year to make improvements to Sinsheimer Stadium. The city does an amazing job of keeping that facility going during the summer. It is so highly used and it is a picturesque facility. I mean, I really don’t think we could ask for anything better. I really want the Blues to be a communitydriven team. And that is where I see us going and all of my efforts will be directed toward that end. My latest marketing idea is, you know those Napa Auto Parts trucks that drive around town? They’ve got those Napa baseball caps on top. I am so getting one of those! Do you know where I can get one of those? I want to put a Blues hat on my car. Actually, I could probably just buy one from Napa, paint it myself and put it on my car. That would be awesome to have a little Blues car driving around town!

Well, the Blues are going places. Reflect on your recent trip to the World Series for a moment, what goes through your mind...

I have been humbled by the amount of support from the community. People truly want to see the Blues succeed. Some people may be hesitant and not confident yet, based on the recent history, but people are trying. These are still challenging times and people are coming forward to help out whether it is volunteering or being a new sponsor. I’m amazed. And it actually makes me prouder to be a member of this community to see all of these different people coming forward to help. We have an incredible manager and recruiter in Chal Fanning. Jim Galusha and his wife, Sharron, have been wonderful. They have allowed me an amazing amount of leeway. I was very fortunate from the get-go that they put a lot of trust in me and allowed me to try things. Some of which failed, some of which worked. But, because of that, we are now back to where we should be. I’m just thankful they put their faith in me.

It really seems that you have gone full circle in so many ways.

That’s true. My family and I are now living in the house that I was born in. My grandmother lived there, my great grandfather lived there. So, I have had many Christmases in that house with great memories of my grandparents and family already. Then after college I lived there again with a bunch of buddies. I made the Ox for the Blues in that backyard, then when we came back from New Orleans—I’m there again. So this is the third time I have lived there. It’s awesome, I mean, my daughter is now in my old room where I was when I was her age. I can’t imagine anything better. I get to have my parents and my wife and daughter at a Blues game. It doesn’t get any better than that. I get to sit next to my dad, and instead of him worrying about how many hotdogs need to be on the grill, he talks to me about how this batter needs to be more aggressive or that fielder needs to get in front of the ball. It’s ideal. It’s a true family business, from grandparents to grandkids.

Adam, it has been great talking with you and we wish you much success in the coming season.

Thank you, anytime and Go Blues! SLO LIFE

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