Seminole sports complex is worth the investment
Whitey Eckstein knows a thing or two about being a sports dad.
The retired teacher and longtime Sanford city commissioner has two sons who made it to Major League Baseball.
Rick Eckstein was a hitting coach for several MLB teams before taking a job as an assistant coach at the University of Kentucky last year.
Younger brother David Eckstein has perhaps one of the best underdog stories of all time.
At just 5-feet-6 nobody gave him much thought, much less a chance.
But David made it as a walk-on at the University of Florida and was drafted by the Red Sox.
In 2002, he helped lead the Anaheim Angels to win their first World Series.
Four years later, this time as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals, David was the World Series MVP.
Whitey Eckstein says the foundation for both sons was youth sports.
But not in an overexuberant, win-at-all-costs sort of way that is so common today among moms and dads on the sidelines. Quite the opposite. Whitey Eckstein didn’t even attend David’s Little League games.
“I did not want to put that pressure on David,” Whitey told me. “Baseball is fun. I wanted it to be fun for him.”
His experience with his sons is one reason why Whitey Eckstein is such a big supporter of Seminole County’s youth-sports complex, which broke ground this week. He and David both spoke at the ceremony. “My wife spent hundreds of hours at fields with the kids,” he said. “Some of the fields we went to we were so hot. They weren’t built for fans.”
Seminole’s new sports complex will be built with a few creature comforts for mom and dad.
There will be shaded areas, including tables with umbrellas and a shaded playground for younger kids, smartphone charging stations, water fountains designed to fill sports bottles, and plenty of concession stands. As a new soccer mom, I like the sound of that. I also like that Seminole chose a complex that can host large tournaments for soccer, baseball, softball, lacrosse and football for its largest project yet, funded mostly through the county’s 5 percent hotel tax.
For a while, Seminole had ambitions of its own convention center. It even started setting aside money collected on each hotel room for such a project.
County officials came to their senses after realizing the convention business isn’t what it used to be.
“They couldn’t make the numbers work out,” said Joe Abel, director of Leisure Services. Youth-sports numbers tell a different story. “Youth-sports travel was probably the single largest recession-proof economic driver,” Abel said. “People could combine a vacation with taking a child to a travel tournament.”
Families traveling to youth athletic events make up a large part of the more than $7 billion-a-year sports-travel industry, according to the National Association of Sports Commissions.
Seminole is in the enviable position of being not too far from beaches and theme parks.
And the county is hoping its $36 million investment in the new complex, including land and construction, will pay off with families dining and sleeping in Lake Mary and Altamonte Springs.
If you think that money would be better spent on roads, schools and cops, I’d say you’re right. But elected officials have conveniently hamstrung themselves with rules about how tourist-tax dollars can only be spent on marketing and sports venues.
At least Seminole’s focus on youth sports is far more likely to draw visitors than the NBA arena Orange County built with tourist-tax dollars.
People don’t travel across the country to watch the Orlando Magic. Heck, a lot of people won’t even travel down I-4 to see the Magic.
But you can bet the price of box seats that families will travel to watch their daughter play in a national soccer tournament.
And those experiences, as David Eckstein said this week, are so important for young athletes.
“This is exactly where it starts,” he told the crowd at the groundbreaking.
There are a lot more underdogs out there waiting to be discovered. And Seminole could just be the place where that happens.