So John, just, I’ve known of you and your organization in the space and whatever, but we’ll talk about your org here in a second. I want to know about you, man. Yeah. The road to get here and who John Payo is and that, it’s just interesting the path that we all take to get to where we are. People see us at the end spot. But I’m curious, how’d you get to where you are today, your baseball career taken back through high school up to this point?
Yeah, so in high school I had the pleasure of being coached by Rich Emer. He had been a college coach before and was deciding to settle down. He had three daughters, and so he moved out of Orange County into Temecula and took over the program at Temecula Valley High School. And so we got to reap the benefits of years and years of experience and incredible baseball knowledge. And he brought in Mike Spears who was fresh out of college as a hitting coach. And so just being around those two guys as a 15, 16, 17 year old kid, I got to absorb quite a bit. And Mike would sneak us into semi-pro games in high school back in the day. And so we got to do a lot and see a lot. And after high school, I went to junior college, played a couple of years there, took a deal to Chapman, and through a coaching change, I had all my stuff in the back of my truck and I was ready to move in.
And through a coaching change, I found out that I was no longer rostered or part of that, those darn coaches, man, those darn
Yeah. I mean, back then we didn’t have Twitter and we didn’t have the internet and stuff, and nothing was ever published in newspapers. And so I was like, okay. So I just turned the truck around and went back home and started coaching. And the first American Legion team, I think that I coached, I had Johnson was on that team. And so it was just some crazy talent that I’ve been able to rub shoulders with and be around, especially as a young coach.
So how old would that would’ve put you? Right about what then
I About 2021, right? About 2021. And I wanted to somehow become the best game manager that I could be. And so that’s where Mike came in again, and he had started ABD in the late nineties, early two thousands. And so I called him and I said, Hey, send me anywhere. Send me across the country. Send me wherever you need to send me. I said, I don’t care what you pay me. I want to coach as many games as I can possibly coach.
And so did you think that, I mean, prior to that, because young coaches are going to watch this, you always get to, Hey, did you always know you wanted to be a coach? I mean, was it?
Yeah, yeah. No, the plan, I was an econ political science double major, and the plan was, I was thinking about being an attorney and the athletic director at the high school I was from, and Rich emd both as I was graduating, I showed up to one of my brothers baseball games who was playing for him at the time, and they talked me into it and they said, we’ll help you with your student teaching. We’ll help you with this. We’ll cover this. And coming out of college without a job and the prospects of more student loans and things like that, going to grad school, I was like, yeah, I was. Give it a shot.
Why not, John? You’re smarter than to be a damn darn coach, man.
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, long story short, what is it now? Almost 30 years in, it was a good decision because it’s provided a good life, provided the opportunity for me to be a father to my boys. And looking back now, they’re both my youngest is graduating this year. That’s the best role or anything that I’ve ever, it’s the best thing I’ve ever been a part of is raising those two boys. And so looking back, I thank those two. I thank Rich all the time for pulling me in. Realistically, CBA is simply an extension of the networks that he and Mike built and essentially handed us at a young age. And so without those two guys, we’re not here.
Well, the other thank you needs to be the guy that told you weren’t good enough to play anymore, then started catapulted you on the, well,
The funny thing, the funny thing is he’s a prominent division one coach right now, and he moved back to California recently to coach on the West coast, and I was the first person he called and he didn’t remember, and I spelled it out for him. I said, Hey, man, I said, why are you calling me? Because, and I spelled it out for him, and we hugged it out and had a good chat and it ended positive.
What’s that old saying? It isn’t personal, it’s just personnel.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Well, there was something in your answer that I think is really interesting because this is about you, but very similar. I was playing and shut it down with the Cubs in 91, and that kind of thrusted me into coaching at a young age. And so what I wanted to ask you, that’s why I asked you about the age of which you started coaching, because again, there’s probably a lot of young coaches out there. Did you find it difficult at 21, that line between, you’re just right out of plan, those guys probably aren’t a lot younger than you. What were some of the challenges or things on that? Do you remember that at all or no?
Yeah, no effective communication. Effective communication was definitely a limiter or a barrier, whatever you want to call it, because I didn’t, as a young coach, I didn’t know how to speak to younger players in a way that it would be received as advice or as something that they would want to make their own. Where 25 years down the road or 30 years down the road, it’s become second nature as a teacher now and everything. But that was the biggest part. And learning that making kids run and punitive discipline isn’t always the greatest answer to every problem days gone by, man, ain’t that to truth.
Well, and that kind of even leads me to, and why I told you, again, I love doing these types of interviews because get to know you guys better and the start of it. But the one thing that I think has stood out for me in the diamond allegiance and your membership and your focus of your organization is development. You guys are keen, keen, keen on development. And so what is that? Why is that? And you particular, and I always joke, you and Eric Backage our mad scientist on this end. I think you guys could talk for days on this stuff. So how’d you get so locked in to the development? And then even on that question, dovetailing, that stuff’s ever changing and it seems to be that you’re always wanting to be on the forefront of that on development. So why is that?
Well, I think that that stems primarily from Mike and the roots that we, I guess grew up in this. And the practices were always the most important. The practices, the workouts, monitoring and managing a player’s individual development over wins, over tournament, anything. I mean, those are nice and stuff, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have one, you’re not going to have the other. And so when we set this up, development was the most important thing. And so our entire structure is built on development and it’s tiered in a way that it incentivizes kids to go out and do a little more and work a little harder. And as they move up the wrongs in the organization, that development’s rewarded. And so you can’t just roll in as a accomplished, committed kid and not make it through those rungs.
We don’t necessarily recruit anymore, don’t do any of that stuff because we know that the game is changing. We know that the younger players today are changing and their expectations are a little different than they were even 10 years ago. And so as long as we stay true to the structure and the format that we have, we’ve got a couple guys in the organization that do a really, really good job with that. Joe Spears, Mike’s son, has a facility in the Inland Empire that stresses development through all kinds of speed development, Proteus, motion, all kinds of stuff that he has that our entire program accesses. And so for us, that’s the most important piece is at the end of the day, this player that showed up at 15 is see bigger, faster, stronger, better, more emotionally stable than when he showed up. And so if we can say yes, then obviously we did our job as an organization.
Yeah. Well, and the other thing just talking about that, what have you seen in your time, I have my own opinions on this, but on the receiving end of getting guys to come through travel ball and on development, where does competition fit in all of this for you in the model? In other words, I get a guy who’s like, Hey coach, how’s my arm look? Or where should I be delivering? I’m like, Hey man, get him out. Isn’t that the idea? So what’s the balance as you guys try to do in CBA between the competitive piece versus the development for the individual kid?
One fuels the other. You have to be, and so in practices, we try and make everything as competitive as possible and not unforgiving to where a kid that’s physically behind the curve is going to get swallowed a little bit.
Good choice a word by the way, right there. Curve.
Nice. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I dunno. Shameless plug. You’re welcome. But we try and make everything competitive. We try and make it where we set the standard super, super high in practice and it’s almost impossible to me. And so then through that, you’re going to have kids striving and striving to not only meet those standards but also move up the rungs in the organization. And I think to kind of answer that a little further, the one thing that’s changed the most for us is strength development. When they changed the bats, I don’t know, eight, nine years ago, whatever it was, it changed everything. No longer could an average strength kid swing a bat even in a high school game and hit for any power or anything like that. Now you see the change in the college game, you see the change all over the place. I mean, some guy that player in professional baseball hit a ball at 119 the other day. That’s absurd. And so for us, especially for the players in the upper rungs of the organization, if you’re not a different and better athlete every three months, you’re not doing your job as a young player. You have to be bigger, faster, stronger in some way, shape or form every three months. And we try and stress that as much as possible. We do lose some players because of that, but if those aren’t the players we Because of what? Just not the appetite for putting the work. I don’t need the weight lift. Why do I need to do that? Why is that important for baseball? And you run into a lot of parents that have the belief that weightlifting is still, I mean I remember this 20 years ago, weightlifting’s not for baseball players. And so I was playing at the time, it was just coming in, so I know exactly.
Yeah. And so you still have a little bit of that, but I think for the most part, people are beginning to embrace it more and more. And this kind of hit me as we were talking, well, two things we said Temecula, it’s a good baseball and good wine, right?
Yes.
Yeah. You got to have some good wine there. So you’ve, on the high school level, you’ve seen it. And this kind leads me to the travel ball thing. I would get the question a lot as a college coach of, Hey, do I need to do the travel ball to be recruited? And again, I’ll let you speak to, I have my own answers on that, but what do you see as one of the main benefits or differences or whatever between the high school stuff and the travel ball?
I think playing for somebody else is beneficial. Getting different views and ideas on things. Being a high school teacher myself, I know that not every high school program has a baseball minded person running the program. It’s really hard to find an English teacher who also does baseball or whatever kind of teacher who does baseball. So you’re seeing kind of the evolution of the high school game changing with walk-on coaches and they don’t last very long due to the work requirements and things outside of that program. For us, it’s rubbing elbows with different players. You bring in a player from the Inland Empire versus a player from San Diego. And the competitive spirit, I think of better players being around each other creates an even better environment. And so for us, we want our kids to get along and prioritize being a teammate before an individual.
That’s a huge piece of what we do. And then taking that back to their high school program, because if you’re a leader in your high school program and you have eight other players who may not be as talented as you that don’t play travel ball or whatever, I think your interactions with them are going to be the same as the interactions with your teammates on your club team. And so you learn those skills, how to be a leader, how to talk to people, how to motivate your peers without being overbearing. And you take that back to your high school team. And I mean, that’s just a life skill. That’s not so much always a baseball skill. That’s a life skill. And I’ve learned a lot, especially watching my own sons go through baseball themselves, go through high school and club and now into college, I’ve learned a lot on how to speak to players and how to do things in a better way and how to reach kids a little differently. And that’s what we want our players to do inside the club environment. And so for us, it’s teaching them those things along with baseball to bring back to their high school team. And in a perfect world, the high school coach, we have high school coaches that send us their players just for that. And so in a perfect world, it absolutely works.
Send ’em there to bring a little bit of the CBA training or whatever
Back into the the training, the confidence building. Because at the end of the day, our job is to make these kids feel like Superman so they can stand in the box or stand on the mound and conquer anything. And so we won’t always have the most talented kids, but I guarantee you we’re going to have the most confident kids knowing that they can tackle anything anytime.
It’s funny, I was having dinner actually with a family of the CBA in Vegas, and it was just interesting to me because when we talk about the brand of CBA, you guys are expanding. You’ve got a name in the industry, and I say this all the time on these interviews like, look, I’m no expert in the travel ball space, but I’m learning. And it’s just interesting how much your brand CBA comes up across, not just where you are locally, but out there. And I had kind of said, why’d you play for, it was just interesting about what CBA meant to them. So I guess I would ask you if someone’s watching this from another part of the country where CBA is not in there, what does CBA mean to you or should mean to you of a kid out there of the CBA brand, if you will? What does it mean?
Well, you’re coming into a family, you’re coming into a group of guys that had no intention of doing anything like this ever, and it ended up falling together. And we did it because we had each other’s back. We did it because unfortunately we had some circumstances in 2013 that forced this. But you’re walking into a family of people that get along, that get along as friends, that get along as brothers, and that’s the kind of environment we want all of our teams to embody and to have. And so not only are you going to get a different view on baseball, like a more aggressive, more free view of playing the game much more so than other places and probably even their high school team. But you’re walking into an environment that these people that are going to help you with the game, not only are going to help you with the game, but they’re going to have your back for the rest of your life. That for us, that was the intent. Build, develop, and make sure these kids know that they got a home forever.
You said it earlier, it’s funny. Same thing in coaching. We’re so fortunate to have this little, it’s almost like a little laboratory for our players to be able to grow. And it’s so much greater than baseball because they are going to be family people. They’re going to probably run their own businesses and do different things. And the fact that we get to educate and teach and use the baseball field is the lab, if you will, is actually rewarding as heck. So what’s probably one of the best success stories of maybe a kid that’s come through the program or whatever, that you get that random text call, letter, email saying, Hey man, I appreciate it. Even if it wasn’t good at the time.
Well, yeah, recently Luke Williams, Luke Williams was a high school player, graduated 2015 out of Aliso Miguel, and we couldn’t get a college to take him, couldn’t. He was on a team that year. Chris Bets was behind the plate. Nick Madrigal played short. We had just, I mean Peter Lambert’s in the big leagues was a pitcher. Bailey falter in the big leagues was a pitcher. I mean, this team is ridiculous. And so we couldn’t get anybody to take him. And so Joe and I and Josh Glassy are standing there watching a game in Arizona. Luke gets a base hit, and the way he rounded first base, we all looked at each other and Joe goes, he’s going to be a big league. And I’m like, Joe, we can’t even get to college to take him. I was all, how’s this? And so sure enough, as we get into January of his senior year, I called his dad and I said, Hey, I said, I think it’s time to get an advisor. I said, there’s just so much buzz. He’s like, what are you talking about? He just committed to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It took us this long to get a college. What are you talking about? So he ends up being a fourth rounder and signs, and I still have the message on my cell phone. I’m knocking out, I’ll never delete it. He called the day he got called up and we called each other and talked about it, cried it out a little bit.
But taking a kid like that who when he was a freshman, he was 5 7, 5 8, maybe 130 pounds behind the curve a little bit. There you go. And turned into, played some football and baseball in high school and just grew into this unbelievable athlete that as a senior nobody wanted to take a chance on. And he continued to bet on himself and continued to bet on himself. And the confidence was through the roof. And now he’s having the time of his life played on the Philies last year, traded to the Giants, and he’s loving life, doing it, living the dream.
Yeah, talk about, yeah, I don’t know who the hell those guys were at Arizona State that wouldn’t take him at that time. You know how many times I hear that. But that’s the beauty I think of our sport is the maturation pace. And when you say, man, when guys get a little bit of a chip on their shoulder, but they don’t blame, they sit around and keep working hard. And if it’s the motivation of, Hey man, I’m going to prove everybody wrong or I’m just going to keep being me. But those are the stories that are awesome.
Yeah. But I don’t know who the hell those Guys were. Arizona State didn’t dig into that.
So I always like this question too. This is one of those tough ones where, but we’ve kind of talked about it a little bit, but everything now and you’ve seen in the industry or whatever, what would you tell that 21 year old John Pano that started out way back when, that maybe would’ve helped him dodge some potholes or some hurdles that maybe could have shortened the learning curve? There’s that curve thing. Again, shorten that learning curve a little bit. So what would you tell that young 21 year old John Pano that you know now?
Yeah, man, I’d tell him a couple things. Tell him one, not everybody’s your enemy. Because I think that’s something that we do when someone’s across the field, not everybody’s your enemy. And then also build relationships before the X’s and O’s. Build relationships before looking at whether a kid can hit or field or any of that. Because what I’ve learned more so in the last five to six years is one will fuel the other. You build the relationship, you build the confidence it’ll take care of. Most times it’ll take care of on the field stuff. And so as a coach now, that’s first and foremost is I want to earn the trust of that young man before I do anything. And so I guess that would be the most important.
Well, it’s too, it’s obviously to your core because you’ve weaved that in one fuels the other multiple times in our short conversation that it’s not just this, it’s all process.
Yeah.
Yeah. That’s good. So the crystal ball question, so where do you see three to five, 10, whatever, where do you see yourself? And it could be whatever, life, business, whatever, baseball, not baseball. And then where do you see your organization going and as you guys grow in the next three to five years? So we’ll start with where’s John Panto in the crystal ball world?
Well, I plan to retire from teaching here in six years, take my minimum and gone. Things are changing fast, schools are changing fast, and I don’t feel like I’m a dinosaur, but when I sit in meetings, I feel like I’m going to do something else. I don’t know what it is. I’m going to continue doing the baseball, but I’m going to incorporate something else. I don’t know what that is yet. I got six years to figure it out. And at 55, I don’t feel like I’m too old to venture into something new. I don’t know, maybe I’ll work in a bike shop. I love cycling, so maybe I’ll work in a bike shop.
Do you really?
Oh yeah. Yeah.
It was funny. I was walking with somebody just yesterday, we were walking by a fitness thing or whatever, and he showed me the different things. He says, oh, there’s the spin room. I’m like, dude, there’s one thing I hate in life. It’s cyclic. What’s the interest in that? How’d you get started in that? Sorry to sidebar, But that’s interesting. Yeah. No, man. No. When I first got into teaching and I was done playing, I felt like just a piece of garbage. And the athletic director that rope me into this whole thing was racing mountain bikes at the time. And I went out for a couple rides with them, got a bike and raced as a professional from 2000 to 2003. Yeah, yeah. While I was coaching and teaching and the whole thing. And so I got to do some pretty crazy stuff. Got to go to Canada and all kinds of other places riding a bike. My youngest son bikes now, and Ben Greenspan, right?
Yeah.
So Ben, that’s his passion cycling.
He looks like it. He’s got the long, slender, yeah, he loves it. And he’d try to get me to do it, and I’m like, I can’t. And his dad, I worked for when he was the ad at Indiana, and Rick would kill me if I’m, this might be the part where they edit out, but his dad rigged Greenspan. He was a little on the larger side, shall we say. And I just saw, so his dad got into cycling with Ben or I don’t know, vice versa, but he’s eaten up with it now. I just saw a picture of him last week. I didn’t recognize him, has lost, I can’t believe what he looked like. So It is healthy. It’s a fountain of youth, man. It’s a nature scrub rush.
It’s beautiful. And Barry Bonds is big into it, right? Is he now? Yeah, I don’t know.
Yeah, no, he came back, spoke to our team, and that’s his passion right now is he bikes all the cycles all the time competitively. So your son does it, so you pass the torch onto him. Yeah.
My younger son, he sat me down in seventh grade and he’s afraid I was going to kill him. And he told me he didn’t want to play baseball anymore. And I was like, all right. And now I actually thank him for making that decision because we’ve shared just awesome times on the bike together. And just watching him go through this last year of his high school racing career, it, it’s been fun.
So that’s the thing. This is how ignorant. So what’s the competitive world in high school With the cycling or just he does it outside the high school setting?
No, it’s a club that high schools have pretty much every high school now in California has one. There are four levels, and you have to earn your way through the four levels when you start as a freshman. And he got to the highest in California, finished second in California this year through the whole series. And so it’s been fun watching the evolution of him as a person through the sport, because he started as his little meatball, as a freshman, developmentally way behind everybody. And then ended up catching them and doing really, really well.
And that’s kind the segue to the next. So I guess, are we going to see AC, BA cycling? Cycling?
I wish. That’d be cool. Yeah, the C get out ahead of that thing stand. But yeah.
So the crystal ball for C, b, A in the next 3, 5, 10.
Yeah, just keep going. I mean, we see a lot of teams expanding and plopping satellite groups everywhere. We’ve never done that. I say this, lemme preface this. The only time we do it is if it’s a fit. If it’s a fit with the group of people that we have. If you’re a like-minded person and you have the same values and the same everything, we’ll do it. But it has to be underneath the same structure. We got a lot of rules. A lot of kids choose not to play with us because we’ve got rules. The way you wear your pants, the way you wear your eye black, the way you, basically everything you do from the time you walk from the car to the field and back, there’s some guiding something that is going to help you become a better player, going to help you become a more responsible person. And now we’re finding today that both parents and players don’t necessarily want to embrace all of that guidance. And so we’ve recently kind of relaxed our hair policy. We were pretty militant. I was the same.
We were pretty militant on the hair. And so now we’re just going above the collar, just keep it somewhat tidy. And so I don’t want to say that we’re compromising here. We’re trying to work with people.
You’re evolving. You’re evolving.
Yeah. Yeah. And so I think now 30 years in, I have more suggestions than we do hard line rules. I kind of took that from John Wooden after watching all of his stuff.
You know what? When you started down that path, I was literally going to say, you got a little, the John Wooden stuff in here, it sounds like.
Well, it’s true. And the more that I listened to a lot of those older coaches talk in their latter days of their career, I’m like, man, now I get it. Whereas a younger guy, I was like, what are they doing compromise. He’s ridiculous. And now I’m like, man, I get it.
Well, so my father-in-Law was a longtime ad coach actually got me started. But he would always say, kids want discipline. They want to feel like they’re a part of something special.
And While they may complain about some of those rules and things that you have right now, it still gives them a little bit of something to be like, Hey man, we’re different. We do this a certain way. So I love it. But you got to evolve.
True. No, absolutely. And for us, I think the more we infuse and the more we get better across the program in the different areas we’re in, because obviously Southern California is a pretty large area. And so the more we put resources like Joe’s facility and things like that in every area that we have to make sure the development is consistent and the same. And not to throw a shameless plugin for the curve app, but that’s what we’re hoping the Curve app can incentivize is that kind of development across the program and not where a kid in San Diego is getting a different product than a kid in Long Beach. We want them to have the same product and the same opportunities.
Well, it leads, again, you’re right on the last, so why the Diamond Allegiance? Why’d you decide to be a big part of this? And again, I know from our side of what we’re thrilled to have a group, not only you and your people, you bring to it the CBA, as I’ve already said, means something to a lot of people around the country, but why’d you decide to do it?
The people. The people involved. There are a handful of people over the years that I’ve developed relationships with that I trust, that I trust with anything. And Eric Backage was one of those people, and I’ve known Matt for a long time and had some knockdown, drag out games with him. And he is a character. He is always been a character, always going to be a character. And I’m drawn to passionate people like that. I’ve always been that way. Go talk to that guy just to talk to him because he’s so passionate about, he does like petty. I love talking to Petty and just giving him so much grief. And he stands in and he takes it. And we were in an elevator four years ago. I used to stay at the same hotel with him on purpose. And Jupiter’s to mess with him we’re in the elevator and you probably want to edit this part out, but he looks at me and he goes, man, he goes, all you do is talk shit.
And he said it in fun. He said it with a smile. And he goes, he looks at me and he goes, and your kids, man. He goes, I can’t beat you. He goes, but your kids, all they do is talk shit and have fun. He goes, it drives me crazy. And the more that I can learn from Jeff and the way he runs his business and the way he, and the same with Matt. It was the people. And so the first three calls I got Petty Gerber, and those are three people that I have a ton of respect for. And I was like, well, you know what? If these three guys are in, I’m stupid not to. And wherever it takes us, you know what, I’m going to go all in and two feet in and we’re going to make it work as much as we can because if those types of people are behind it, it can’t not be successful
