Dan Medina knows that. You can strike out swinging seven out of ten times but still end up in the hall of fame.
He hopes to make his restaurant a haven for youth sports in the 80219, the south Denver neighborhood he considers home."I grew up extremely less fortunate. I grew up poor," Medina says."The word '80219' means something to me because I grew up in ten different houses. I can never really say 'I'm from a neighborhood' or 'I'm from a certain school' because I had to move so much.
He also dealt with discipline at Lincoln."He was the guy going to court hearings if a guy had 100 absences. If there was a street fight or a gang fight, he was the one calling the officers and helping out with the tickets. My dad set a lot, a lot of kids' lives on the right path," Medina says. "He was extremely respected in the community for what he did."
At Lincoln, Medina played four years of varsity baseball on Vinny Castilla Field, the school's home diamond built by the Rockies' Field of Dreams program with donations from Castilla himself. In the spring of 2001, during his last semester of high school, Medina was selected to play at Coors Field in the first-ever Top 40, an all-star game for youth baseball players from Colorado put together by the now-defunct."Kids from Lamar, Colorado, to Denver, Colorado," he recalls."It wasn't by class or grade or school district. They just brought together the top forty kids in Colorado.
"I just wanted baseball to be able to provide education for me," he says."I just wanted to paint a good picture for my younger siblings. I wanted them to say, 'Hey, look, he's a 4.0 GPA student, he's able to play college baseball, and the kid grew up poor as shit.'" The Medinas soon found an online job posting for a baseball coach at Edgewater's Jefferson High School, a school of fewer than 600 students desperate for a coach who would stay for more than a year."We go and interview, and in five minutes, they give us the keys," Medina says."We were the fifth coach in five years at Jefferson."At 21, Medina was named head coach of the Jefferson Saints varsity baseball team, and his father was the assistant coach.