Glowball and Life as a Youth Baseball Entrepreneur

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A Kid Ripped His Shirt Off and Climbed the Backstop. That's When Aaron Pridmore Knew He Had to Change His Life.

The song was "Rodeo." The hip hop one.

Aaron Pridmore was walking the concourse between fields at his first Banana Ball youth tournament — 75 teams, 48 states, Cincinnati and Cleveland, 2022 — when he heard the music and looked up. A kid had pulled off his shirt and was climbing the chain-link backstop. Not in trouble. Not goofing around unsupervised. This was his walk-up. His moment. He'd choreographed it. He got to the top and started dancing for the crowd.

Parents on both sides were losing their minds. Not in anger. In pure joy.

Aaron stood there watching and couldn't stop smiling. He'd already worked at Best Buy for 26 years, risen to district manager and territory manager, coached youth baseball on the side, started a podcast interviewing kids about the game, and written a future resume to apply for a job with the Savannah Bananas. Now he was watching a kid climb a backstop to a hip hop song in front of strangers, completely fearless, and everything clicked.

This was it. This was what he was supposed to be doing.

26 Years, 700 Kids, One Podcast Nobody Expected

The Slide Podcast didn't come from a business plan. It came from a rec league in South Carolina and too much negativity.

Aaron was coaching his son. Not as the crazy parent — he was deliberate about never being that guy. But even in a low-key rec league, he was watching kids get talked at in MLB-level terminology by coaches who'd forgotten they were teaching nine-year-olds. Kids were checking out. Kids were "retiring" at ten. The joy was getting squeezed out by adults who'd turned a hobby into a job.

He told his wife one night: he wanted to help kids. He believed God had put him here for them.

So in 2023 he launched a show that does something almost no sports podcast does: it actually talks to the kids. Not the coaches. Not the parents. The players. He started asking youth baseball and softball players across the country about their love for the game — the first home run they hit, the coach they'll never forget, the moment they almost quit.

Seven hundred interviews later, he knows something that most adults in the youth sports world have stopped hearing: kids just want to play. Given the choice between winning a championship on a top-flight travel team or playing with their friends, they pick their friends. Almost every time.

The Future Resume and the Bananas Interview

Aaron first learned who the Savannah Bananas in February 2022. He went down the rabbit hole fast. Saw the trick plays. The walk-ups. The dancing umpire. The parents in the stands screaming for both teams. He couldn't look away.

By August, he'd finagled a seat at Grayson Stadium for a live game. Sat there with his wife and watched what the organization had built. By the time they drove home, she was already calling realtors in Savannah.

He reached out to Jared Orton, the Bananas' general manager, on LinkedIn. Orton connected him into the organization's application process — which, as anyone who's followed Jesse Cole knows, works nothing like a normal job application. Instead of a resume, the Bananas ask for a future resume: not what you've done, but assuming we hire you, what would your dream role look like? What would make you excited to get out of bed?

Aaron had spent years teaching resume classes and had never heard of anything like it. He sat down and wrote out a five-year plan for a youth Banana Ball director role — what he'd build, where he'd take it, who he'd serve. His first interview was two hours spent entirely on that document. The interviewers said they weren't ready yet, but they'd remember him.

Three months later, the CFO called. They were ready.

75 Teams, 48 States, No Pressure

The first Banana Ball youth tournament ran in Cincinnati and Cleveland in 2022. Seventy-five teams showed up from 48 different states. Aaron had never seen anything like the environment it created.

In normal youth tournaments, two teams compete against each other and the parents develop a low-grade rivalry that simmers through the weekend. Someone's kid gets hit by a pitch and suddenly there are two groups of adults who are barely civil to each other in the concession line.

None of that happened here. Because the Banana Ball format — trick plays, walk-ups, choreographed moments, rules designed for entertainment — rewired what the parents were paying attention to. When the opposing team landed a trick play, the other side's parents couldn't help but laugh. You're not competing against the other team. You're all watching something fun happen together.

A kid came up to Aaron at the end of the tournament and said this past season was going to be his last. He'd been done with baseball. Then he played that weekend and had the best time he'd ever had on a field. He was coming back next season.

Aaron asked him how that was possible — he'd played a version of the game he'd never played before, with rules he'd just learned. The kid said: there was no pressure.

That's the whole thing. That's the entire insight. Remove the pressure and kids play better, have more fun, and stay in the game longer. Adults have spent decades building pressure into youth sports without realizing they were doing it. The Bananas figured out how to take it back out.

The second tournament, in Savannah in 2025, got hammered by weather. They evacuated the complexes every single day. The staff worked every night reworking brackets and schedules. It was a logistical disaster.

Newsweek ran a poll after the season asking parents to vote on the best youth tournament of 2025. The options included Cooperstown, Triple Crown, and PG tournaments. The Savannah event — the one with the weather chaos — finished number one.

What the Best Buy District Manager Learned About Putting People Where Their Hearts Are

Aaron spent 26 years at Best Buy. District manager. Territory manager. Responsible for large teams across multiple locations. He learned one thing above everything else about building a good team: put people where their strengths are.

The computing expert goes in computing. The kid who knows everything about video games goes in gaming. You don't rotate them for coverage. You build around what each person is genuinely good at and genuinely cares about. The moment you put a talented person in a role where they can't use their talent, you've set them up to fail and yourself up to lose them.

He sees the same principle at work in how the Bananas hire. Their future resume process isn't just a quirky HR gimmick. It's a filter for finding people who know what they want to build and have thought about it enough to write it down. It tells you where someone's heart is before you offer them a role. And when you hire people based on where their hearts are, they show up differently.

Stu made the same connection from his own experience. When Stu Kent was growing, a DoorDash driver who kept delivering lunch to the office eventually walked up to the front desk and asked where to apply. He said everyone he talked to whenever he brought food seemed genuinely happy to be there. He wanted that. Six years later, he's still with the company.

Culture is visible from the outside. And the people who want to be in it will find their way in.

Field of Dreams in September

Aaron is now VP at Global Nation, which brings black light sporting events — glow-in-the-dark equipment, UV setups, the whole experience — to sports complexes and stadiums around the country.

This September 26th, they're hosting the first-ever black light sporting event at the newly finished Field of Dreams MLB stadium in Iowa. Home run derby, celebrity softball game, content creators with millions of followers, barbecue chefs with six million social media followers cooking for the crowd, and a country music artist opening the night.

He thanks God for it. He doesn't say that performatively. He means it.

What Stuck With Me

Most entrepreneur interviews on this show are about building products or scaling revenue. Aaron's episode is different. It's about what happens when someone figures out what they're actually for — and then organizes their whole career around that thing.

He spent 26 years at Best Buy. That wasn't wasted time. He learned how to build teams, how to put people where their strengths are, how to lead. And then he went and used all of it in service of something he cares about more than quarterly numbers: kids playing baseball without pressure.

The future resume is the sharpest idea in this episode, and it's the most exportable. Most hiring processes ask people to justify their past. The Bananas asked Aaron to describe his future. That one change tells you everything about whether someone's going to show up excited or just show up.

Banana Jake climbed from robotic intro video to interviewing coaches at Prospect Wire. Aaron went from Best Buy to the Field of Dreams.

Both of them got there by being put where their heart was.

Recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat. More at startupswithstu.com.

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