03-Aug-2010
By Townsend Keller, Staff Writer Plano Star -Local business owner Kelly Archer is looking to change the way coaches and athletes across the Metroplex view the game of softball and is looking to do it through his Extra Innings facility in Plano.
Although he enjoys watching a baseball game as much as the next person, Archer is a self proclaimed “softball guy” and has made a career of coaching little league teams and being the head coach of Ursuline Academy.
“I got into it because my oldest child is a daughter,” he said. “The more I was around the sport the more I realized that it’s a very different sport than baseball.”
Archer highlighted the pace of the game as one of the main aspects of softball he enjoys.
“To me softball is like baseball on high speed,” he said. “It is a much faster game; the field is smaller so there are a lot more of bang-bang type plays than baseball.”
When he opened Extra Innings, Archer did so with one of the main focuses of his business being softball-friendly batting cages and facilities, a luxury he did not have himself when he began coaching.
“I had taken my teams to other local places and we were not really given a warm reception,” he said. “It almost felt like we were getting shoved in the back corner. If they happened to have any space, maybe they’d give us the back corner.
“They really just didn’t recognize that softball players are some incredible athletes and play the game as well and as seriously as a lot of the boys.”
Archer believes that the attitude toward softball players is the culture that has surrounded batting cages of being primarily baseball places and that they haven’t experienced the proper exposure to softball yet.
“Batting cages have been around for a long time, and for a long time they were a baseball place to hang out,” he said. “A lot of batting cages are just not accustomed to it yet.”
The bulk of Archer’s business comes from local youth baseball and softball teams. Archer also has an agreement with the University of Texas at Dallas baseball and softball teams, as well as seeing a lot of business from the Home School Athletic Association. Aside from those markets, there isn’t much business from high school teams in the area, something Archer attributes to most schools possessing state-of-the-art indoor facilities on campus.
Before this endeavor, Archer was employed at Fidelity Investments for 14 years. Though he didn’t necessarily resent life in the corporate world, he said he is doing what he truly loves at Extra Innings.
“I got to pick what I do,” he said. “When I’m with a softball team, teaching kids, when I’m sitting on the bucket throwing batting practice I forget what time it is, I could do it for 13 hours, 14 hours a day. I’ve picked out something I love to do and I could do it all day every day. I love it.”
He admits the transition from employee to business owner has been a challenge, however, as the everyday aspects of running a business fall on his shoulders.
“When I worked for Fidelity Investments and the computers went down, I called the tech line,” he said. “As an individual business owner, I am the tech line. At Fidelity if something happened in the bathroom we called maintenance, and here that’s me. That’s part of [running a business].”
Besides providing a softball-friendly facility, Extra Innings also runs a variety of clinics and an indoor hitting league in the summer and also offers individual instruction year-round. Archer said one of the things his facility does best is treat every player that uses these services with the same, regardless of skill, as opposed to catering specifically to elite players.
“From day one, one of the things that we really tried to do here was treat them all the same,” he said. “There’s a place here for every kid whether they’ve never played or whether they are an elite athlete getting ready to be recruited by a top-end school.”