The Window

I’ve decided to give the next decade of my life to Open Athletes. Not a season. Not a launch. A decade. I want to say that plainly, up front, because everything else here only means something if you believe I mean it.

I write this from a place of conviction, not certainty. Those are different things. I’ve learned to tell them apart.

So let me start with the part I’m not proud of.

I wasted my window.

When I was playing, I had a real audience and access to rooms most people spend a whole career trying to get into, and I did almost nothing with it. Not because I didn’t have the chance. Because I was scared. Too scared to be on camera, too scared to say what I actually thought, too scared to be myself in public while it still mattered. And then the window closed, the way it always does, and I spent years thinking, man, I wish I had done something. Open Athletes is me refusing to let another athlete make that mistake. Everything I’m about to say comes out of that regret.

Now let me tell you who’s writing this, because it matters.

I’m a Division III baseball player. I won a national championship at Trinity University, but Division III is the level the scouts skip. I got drafted in the 31st round by the Mets in 2016, which is a polite way of saying I was almost not drafted at all. My signing bonus was $5,000 and my salary was $3,000 a year, and I paid for my own housing, my own food, my own equipment. I qualified for the Olympics with Team Israel, and I want to be precise about that, because precision is the whole game here: I was on a team that qualified. I did not go to Tokyo. I am not an Olympian. Then my back gave out. I couldn’t walk. I was done. I did not make a million dollars in my career. I barely made five thousand.

That’s the resume. I’m not the smartest guy in the room, and I never have been. I don’t have an MBA. Nobody in my family does this. The first time somebody slid a term sheet across a table, I nodded like I understood it and went home and looked up half the words.

But I saw something in that locker room I couldn’t stop thinking about.

I watched too many teammates walk away from the game with nothing. No job. No plan. No idea who they were once the uniform came off. Disciplined, competitive, genuinely impressive people, guys who performed under pressure their whole lives, and the day the game let them go, the world treated them like they’d never mattered. Making $3,000 a year to chase it in the first place. I couldn’t fix all of it. But I couldn’t sit still either, and sitting still is what breaks you.

So I co-founded More Than Baseball, the largest independent support organization for minor league players. We got into rooms most players never get near. We changed the conversation. We raised about $2.5m and put 98% of it straight back into players’ hands, players the system had already decided were disposable. A 31st round nobody raised $2.5m for guys making $3k. Sit with that for a second, because it taught me the only thing I really know.

I was not more talented than the players I was fighting for. I was not smarter. What I had was access, and a voice, and the nerve to use both before they disappeared. And most athletes never realize they are sitting on the exact same thing.

So here’s the thesis. Here’s the whole show in one line:

You are not the talent. You are the distribution. And most athletes have it backwards.

When you’re a college, professional, or Olympic athlete, you own two things money genuinely cannot buy. A real audience and access to the room. That’s it. That’s the asset. And here’s the cruel part: the window is short. Brutally short. You get it for a finite stretch of your life and then it’s gone, and most athletes spend the whole time treating that access like memories to look back on instead of inventory to build with. You don’t have to be LeBron. You don’t have to be Kevin Durant. You don’t have to wait until you’re rich. The seat is cheaper than you think. The window is what’s expensive. And nobody tells you that while it’s still open.

Open Athletes exists to tell you, every single day, while it’s still open.

Is that a big swing? Yes. Is a daily show insane? A little. Am I going to do it anyway? Fuck yes I am.

So we built a daily show. Not a podcast when I feel like it. Not a newsletter when there’s news. A daily live show on the business of sports, told from the athlete’s seat, for the athletes who are building. The show is the product. That’s the whole strategy, and I’ll be honest, it’s an unglamorous one. The show builds the audience. The network gives that audience a room. The fund lets them own a piece of what gets built. But none of the downstream matters if the show doesn’t air. So it airs. Daily. For years.

I’m not betting that I’m the most talented person to ever point a camera at himself. I’m not. I’m betting I’ll still be here, on the reps, long after the people chasing a moment have moved on. I didn’t inherit an audience. I’m building one from zero, the way I’ve had to build everything from zero. Endurance is the strategy. It is the only edge I have ever actually had.

And it’s a grind. Some mornings the audience is small and the effort is large and the math looks crazy. You do it anyway. You do it because the reps are the point. Because trust only compounds if you show up when nobody’s clapping. Because somewhere out there is an athlete two years from the end who needs to hear, today, that they are sitting on something real. I have faith in the reps. I have faith that the truth, said plainly and said daily, finds its people.

We are going to reach athletes who would otherwise walk away with nothing and show them they were never nothing. That’s the work. That’s the whole thing. The sponsors, the network, the fund, the numbers, all of it is downstream of that one promise, kept, daily.

To my family, who watched me chase things that made no sense on paper and loved me through every one of them: thank you. You’re the reason I can take a swing this big without being afraid of the ground.

And to every athlete who’s ever felt the window closing and figured it was too late: it isn’t. It’s open. That’s the name. That’s the point.

I’ve been the released kid with a bad back and no plan. I know exactly how that feels. And I know it does not have to be the end of the story.

So let’s build the thing I wish had existed. Every day. For as long as this world will let us.

Shoot your shot. I’ll see you tomorrow.