From time to time, we like to look deeper into the background of those driving and/or influencing fastpitch softball and learn more about them and their efforts.  Today, we speak with Dave King, founder of Triple Crown Sports, and a person listed in the poll of The 10 Most Influential People in Softball Today we ran Sept. 13.

Triple Crown Sports has been a work in progress for over 30 years, always expanding and morphing into new areas of growth and development—and not just in softball, where TCS is known today for producing over 80 fastpitch events and reaching 7,000 teams at the high end/high level of the sport.

Many in the softball world might not know that Triple Crown Sports – a clever word play connected to King’s last name—is also heavily involved in baseball, basketball, volleyball, fastpitch and slowpitch and even drift car racing.

With Triple Crown Sports national events going literally from coast to coast—California to Texas to Florida plus the company’s flagship Independence Day tournaments in Colorado, the home state of King—we thought it’d be insightful to catch up with the event producer and learn more about his fascinating background as an athlete as well as where TCS is today and looks to be in the future…

 

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StudentSportsSoftball.com: You come from a sports background, being a great high school athlete and then a very successful pole vaulter and decathlete at Northern Colorado.  Tell about sports for you growing up…
Dave King: I’m fifth generation from Colorado and, although I have an accent that sounds like I’m from the South, it’s actually from my growing up in Meeker, Colo., a small town of about 2,500 people which is in Northwest Colorado between a lot of the ski areas.

My Dad was the high school track coach so that led to me growing up in and around sports. He was also a basketball coach and I followed those two, although I was more successful in track.  I also played baseball through high school.  My day would be playing baseball after school to 5:15 pm and on to track until 6:30 pm.

I started coaching the Meeker baseball team as an assistant coach when I was 15-years-old and then became the head coach when I was 19.  I also coached a lot of kids in Northwest Colorado in all-stars and that’s how I got into events—some of the big tournaments I would host in the area included Babe Ruth teams.

In high school track was my best sport, especially the javelin, pole vault and 1500 meters.  I ran a 11.2, 11.3 in the 100 meters; I wasn’t that quick, but when I was a junior in college at Northern Colorado I picked up the decathlon and finished ninth or tenth in the NCAA’s.  It was a lot of fun.

 

SSS.com: So you were already running events as a teenager… how did you get to the point of parlaying this into Triple Crown Sports?
DK: A good friend and next door neighbor got me to be a licensed security broker and when I was a graduate assistant in college I started working at his company.  We got jobs afterwards in the insurance industry, which was absolutely not a fit for me, but my wife and I had two kids while in college and with a third on the way I stayed on at this insurance job for almost six years.

I was good at it, but continued to run tournaments on the side—my first softball tournament I did when I was in graduate school.  In 1982, I started Triple Crown which played slowpitch softball tournaments in three cities in Colorado—Meeker, Grand Junction and Breckenridge—with the overall winner going to Las Vegas.  These were very successful and were a forerunner to the business we have now.  We offered men’s, women’s and coed slowpitch tournaments in these Colorado mountain towns.  We continued slowpitch events across the United States, Mexico, Canada, Thailand, Australia, and England for 27 years.

 

SSS.com: Another interesting note in your background is you went on to the Harvard Business School not too long ago… was that to help you better run Triple Crown Sports?
DK: Yes, I enrolled in their executive program (3 years – 1 month per year) when I was 50, one of the landmark experiences in my life.  I wasn’t a very good CEO and was way too far off the mark.  I felt I couldn’t run a sustainable business and didn’t have the skills and knew I needed to learn more if I was going to take Triple Crown to the next level.

Harvard was amazing–there’s no way to equate the monetary difference for the value you got back to your business.  I got way more value than they got out me.  Another major benefit from going there was the people I met.  For example, there are three people that I met at Harvard who are now on my Board of Directors.

 

SSS.com:  It’s been 30 years since you started TCS and you’re obviously big in the softball event space.  Before talking fastpitch, what are some of the key events you do in other sports?
DK: I got heavily involved in women’s basketball and have been in the space a long time. My mother was very good and coached a lot and my wife, who was my high school sweetheart, was a college player.  I was an assistant women’s basketball at Mesa College and I wasn’t very good—I’d call my dad every night for advice!

In 1993, we started the Preseason WNIT and have been in college basketball ever since.  We started a women’s event in Cancun, Mexico called the Cancun Challenge in 2005 and later added a men’s division in 2008.  We have CBS Sports Network televise the tournament each year and even caught the eye of ESPN in 2009 when No. 4-ranked Kentucky won.  That team had six future first-round NBA draft picks on it.

There are four annual college events including the one in Cancun every Thanksgiving.  Scope-wise, it’s our most high profile division behind baseball and softball.  Youth baseball is our largest division and youth softball is just behind it.

We also have pilot divisions in girls volleyball and girls basketball.  We started with my middle son an automotive division that has drift racing, which is a small event and it’s very much outside my knowledge zone.

Finally, there’s a television division that nationally televises or webcasts 21 events each year and a poll division that is in its third year. That gives us six sports divisions: college basketball, volleyball, softball, baseball, drift racing and girls’ basketball.

 

SSS.com:  Let’s talk softball: what would you say are your primary successes in the sport?
DK: We’ve built a series of good events and when we decided to build a championship we began a system of team rankings.  The rankings are based on a series of factors including play at key events and quality of players produced.  The rankings started meaning an awful lot in terms of choosing teams to make it to the championship, having the right mix of teams and having them play in the right sequence within the event.

In order to do that, you need a way to do it and have some validity to it and that takes a while, but we feel our rankings are a great tool to qualify teams for our events.

Regarding on the field, our 4^th of July tournaments are the benchmark of our softball division. We now have 80% of the 1,000 teams that show up to play that week with three of the big four events starting with the Sparkler in Westminister, Colo., which we built from scratch.  We eventually purchased the Fireworks tournament which is the next largest and is played at the Aurora Sports Park in Aurora, Colo.  Next is the Independence Day tournament in Boulder which is managed by Dan Burns and then our Sparkler Jr. which is in Loveland and Greeley, about 45 minutes north of the Denver metroplex.

Our national championships in Reno, Park City, and San Diego would be our second biggest and most important piece as it’s for the 10u, 12u and 14u divisions.

Next we have the Rising Stars (Fla.) and Ronald McDonald (Texas) which are very good events in the Southeast and Southwest.  Both are major national showcases in the fall each year.

Also key for us are the Las Vegas and Reno showcases and three Southern California showcases in conjunction with SoCal’s Finest, led by the Firecrackers’ Tony Rico and Don Minard.

 

SSS.com:  With all you have on your plate, it’s amazing you have time to coach a team of your own…
DK: I love coaching and teaching and am fortunate to be with great girls who are on the TC Stars, which comprises players from Northern Colorado.  Plus, I get to coach with 14 former players in our nearly all-woman coaching staff.

I’m fortunate that everyday at 3:30 pm, if you look out my office window you’ll see two fields where we practice.   And all I have to do is walk 15 feet out the door and I’m into a training facility.  We have an 18,000 square foot building and they’re side by side with the fields and the training facility.

Leaving the work behind and going out to coach the team–that’s the best part of my day.

 

SSS.com:  There are a lot of organizations in fastpitch now—how do you see TCS fitting in the landscape and integrating or competing with ASA, PGF, USSSA, etc.?
DK: The main difference is we’re not a governing body, although the older ones like ASA do sanction some of our events.

We want to use their goods and services since a lot of the events we run we need to get insurance and other things, like in Florida, for example, where we use ASA umpires. With ASA, Pony, USSSA… those organizations don’t worry about us as competitors and you take us out five years and we certainly won’t look like a competitor.

We want all of them—ASA, USSSA, PGF—to make it.  They need to be successful to grow the high-end level of softball. Our TC teams play in these events, like the ones we mentioned earlier, but we do a lot of other events as well.

Our niche is that we create premium events.  We’re not providers of insurance, officials; some of the core benefits that the governing bodies provide.  We really support that, but it’s just not us.

 

SSS.com:  Where do you want to be in the next 3-5 years?
DK: I’m not a size-based guy, I think we’ll create very well-executed events and believe that there are opportunities to grow quite a bit.

It usually takes us three years to put together an event and start a new event somewhere we want to go and stay. I feel there’s a lot more opportunity in softball and feel our footprint will be larger because our staff is very good at executing events.

The showcase business will consolidate. It has to or otherwise the events will die.  There’s always the demand for good regional and national products, but after that, all that’s in the middle, I don’t know how it will survive.

 

SSS.com:  If you could make any change in the sport of softball, what would it be?
DK: Our biggest fundamental issue is coach development, that’s the biggest thing I’d like to see changed.  I feel what’s killing a lot of American club sports is the depth of coaching, which is just not there.

There are people holding down the job, but they haven’t been trained on how to manage fundraising, the development of young ladies, travel, scheduling events, dealing with parents and all that comes with being a leader of young people.

The ones who are good have to mentor those who are new or upcoming.  The fundamental difference I see between young women and men is that women demand to be taught.  The women are there to learn and the minute they quit learning they quit coming.   So, dramatically expanding development of coaches would be that big change.