CINCINNATI — The floodwaters have long since receded, but Mike Bricker still runs the fans. The industrial kind. And he runs them all day.
It’s been almost a month since floods forced his baseball and softball training facility to close, but you can still see the mud splatter on its windows. Cleaning equipment is still stacked near the front doors.
Shop vacs. Extension cords. More fans. He’s sent most of the dehumidifiers back, but there’s an ionizer on his office floor.
“The water just doesn’t come and go overnight,” said Bricker, the academy's owner.
Standing by the front desk, Bricker points to several baseball bats on display. At first, it looks like one bat is two different colors. Bricker smiles, because it is. One color is just stained by floodwater. Floodwater that forced them to close.
Bricker's daughter, who coaches there, tells me that he doesn't usually get emotional. Bricker is a former Major League Baseball scout who has run Champions Baseball Academy in Cincinnati’s California neighborhood for 22 years.
Want to see the impact of the floods firsthand? Take a look at this family video from the Brickers below:
He’s a former player. He’s a coach. And sometimes that means he talks like one. But when more than a foot of floodwater seeped into his training facility, his daughter says he cried.
“It’s a family business," said Olivia Bricker, who also coaches there. “We just like to act like it’s normal, because we don’t want to think about the bad stuff."
Bad stuff they're still trying to recover from. Bad stuff that threatened the academy's future.
“It was devastating," Olivia said.
She grew up playing baseball here. Yes, baseball.
“Baseball with the boys," Olivia said. "That’s all I ever knew.”
Before I speak to her, Olivia coaches a seventh-grade girl who also plays baseball. When she's done, she shows me a picture of the flooding. Right where we’re standing. She also shows me a video. You can hear her rain boots splashing in the water as she walks across the turf. Turf that was heavily damaged.
“This was after we had already pushed some water out,” Olivia said. “It was terrible.”
So she asked the community for help — against her dad’s wishes. At first, she said he didn’t want to tell anyone they needed help.
“We can’t do it on our own,” she told him.
A GoFundMe raised $7,000. It was enough to pay a company to clean the turf with a Zamboni. And it was enough to reopen. But the business lost its entire computer system. Something they're still working on.
“It was a real big job getting everything out, getting everything cleaned,” Mike Bricker said. “We put sandbags around every door. We sealed everything up, and we still got water. It didn’t work.”
While Bricker shows me around, he asks an employee at the front desk when his next lesson is. It’s in a few minutes, he's told. A father who took lessons here when he was a kid is bringing his son in for the first time.
Bricker smiles.
“It means so much to see how much this place means to other people,” his daughter Olivia said. “Because it holds a special place in our hearts as well.”
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Want to help?
If you'd like to donate to the academy’s recovery efforts, click this link to visit their GoFundMe.
