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By MARCIA C. SMITH HUNTINGTON BEACH – Inside an unmarked, 4,000-square-foot corner of an Enterprise Lane industrial office complex, a skinny, tanned man with a Softball Connection ballcap, eyeglasses and the beginnings of a handlebar mustache is talking above the sizzle of 60 mph pitches and the aluminum clang of bat on softball. Tony Rico is speaking about good players being "the hunters" rather than "the hunted." He's calling pitches "chances," swings "decisions" and softball "life" sliced up in scoreboard innings. Fluorescent yellow softballs spit from pitching machines inside three batting cages that run the width of the room. Teen-age girls take heavy-armed swings at bullet after bullet, their eyes narrow beneath their hard-plastic helmets, their attention lasting as long as one pitch. "Make good choices and you'll be successful," says Rico, the renown softball coach-philosopher-guru who's scuttling among the cages, sprinkling nuggets of wisdom on this hour's batting pupils. More than 250 players, from beginners to three-time Olympic softball gold medalists, travel from as far as the Bakersfield and Chandler, Ariz., to this hidden space to learn from Rico, 42, the owner of the Softball Connection instructional facility and the coach of the national powerhouse Worth Firecrackers Gold youth softball team. His students, most ranging in age from 8 to 18, want to sharpen their softball skills to improve as players, maybe land a college athletic scholarship or compete for the U.S. National Team. Dozens of Rico's success stories have landed on this room's walls, their college jerseys in frames, their images in autographed posters and their Olympic memorabilia shielded beneath glass. His best advice won't be about the mechanics of a swing or a stance in the batter's box. He's the kind of coach – a "Yoda," one student called him – who'll teach you to think for yourself, try, fail, try again and succeed. "I'm teaching life here," says Rico, who urges batters to think like a CEO running a Fortune 500 company, a veterinarian operating an office full of gimpy puppies or an Army sergeant needing to talk a terrified soldier out of foxhole. His metaphor-loaded approach works. Look at the walls, the front-office desk crowded with three-foot tall championship trophies and the Olympians like shortstop Natasha Watley, utility player Amanda Freed, second baseman Lovieanne Jung and catcher Stacey Nuveman who drop by for quick tuneups. Look at Rico himself, a man of Mexican heritage, barely 5 feet, 8 inches tall in Nike cross trainers. He's the son of World War II veteran, a single parent to two sons, a baseball player who never played anywhere professionally … unless you count Holland. • • Tony Rico was born in Bellflower, racing into life "before the doctor could even get his shoes on" in the delivery room, his mother told him. The youngest of five children to Carmen, a full-time parent, and John, a construction worker and former Army sergeant, Rico discovered baseball at age 5. He and his father listened to the Los Angeles Dodgers games on the radio and read the boxscores in the newspaper the next day. He remembers taking a torn corner of the newspaper up to his father the day an ad for Little League sign-ups appeared. His father let his youngest child join the team even though the family didn't have much money. Succeeding in baseball was important to Rico because his father, a man "as stout as a linebacker and two of me," he says, had to forfeit his athletic dreams when he was drafted into the Army as a high school junior. His father never had diamond stories. He had war horrors, memories of ordering young men to "Die on your gun!" when his troop came under fire in Iwo Jima.
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"Soldiers died around him," Rico said, his eyes drifting to a corner of his office where an American flag sits in a triangular glass case. "That's the flag from my father's funeral in 1998."
John Rico lived to see his son become a star shortstop for the North Bellflower Little League Eagles, a quarterback and a pitcher and second baseman at Bellflower High and a short reliever at Cerritos College.
"I had the talent, but I was lacking poise and discipline until I went to Cerritos," says Rico. "Coaches told me, 'You keep acting like that and you're off the team.'"
He learned to play with honor and confidence, not arrogance. His cleats needed to be polished black, uniform clean, hair short and neat. He had a role on something bigger than himself: a team.
These were the lessons he wanted to teach others, first as an assistant at Cal State Los Angeles, where he completed his bachelor's degree in physical education in 1988.
Then Rico began giving hitting lessons at Switch Hitter Baseball School. Earning $25 a lesson didn't pay the bills, so Rico joined his father's profession, working construction for the transportation department.
"I was 6 feet under the street with a digging spade and an aching back, wondering what to do with my life," Rico remembers. "I missed ball."
In 1990, Rico signed up to play for the Minolta Pioneers, a Holland professional team that was excited to have an American player from California join their roster. When he arrived at the airport, the coaches missed him coming off the plane.
"I think they were expecting a tall, blonde surfer dude, not some little Mexican guy," says Rico, still laughing. "So that lasted a year."
And Rico returned home to Southern California, took a job as a physical therapy aide at a Costa Mesa clinic and, on a whim, agreed to give a softball player a hitting lesson at Arnold/Cypress Park.
Three parents awaited Rico outside the batting cage that 1991 afternoon, saying "Will you teach my daughter?" He reluctantly took on one student. Then two. Then more.
He taught hitting lessons out of the backyards of two Irvine homes, 14 hours a week, four nights a week, $25 a pop.
In 1993, Rico started private lessons inside a 25-foot-long cage behind his Huntington Beach home. He had a shoe-string budget and put $250 toward a used pitching machine called "The Chucker."
Gary Wadine, the founder of the Firecrackers, wanted Rico to coach his daughters. By 1996, he wanted Rico to help coach the teams and by 2002, he handed Rico "the briefcase" on a plane ride back from a Tulsa, Okla., tournament to run the Firecrackers.
"My mom used to say, 'Life is what you make it,' and here came softball, this great opportunity, that gave me a chance to stay close to sports," says Rico, who left his physical therapy job in 1998 to become a full-time softball coach.
In September of 2006, Rico started Softball Connection, with three batting cages, 60 students and one student's mother, Melinda Manahan, working as the scheduler and administrator.
Today, Softball Connection has 260 students taking lessons from Rico, a remarkable number considering his only advertising comes by word-of-mouth.
His 2007 Firecrackers 18-and-Under Gold team became Amateur Softball Association national champions. More than half the roster has landed softball scholarships to college next fall, including Pacifica High shortstop Kristen Arriola (Arizona), Kennedy High pitcher Allee Allen (Oklahoma) and Kennedy High twin outfielders Elia and Jamia Reid (Cal Berkeley).
But Rico doesn't like to talk to new students about other players' championships, scholarships or gold medals. He makes a new connection to each player, asking what she did last weekend and whether she enjoyed herself before saying, "Show me you can hit five ground balls."
Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit.
"You made the right choices," Rico says.
