Meet Steve Morris | Coach Steve – Youth Sports Czar

We had the good fortune of connecting with Steve Morris and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Steve, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
The question assumes there was a thought process. Actually, my business owes more to happenstance and opportunity. I was an aspiring screenwriter, with just enough success and encouragement to keep writing but not enough to eat. My four year old jumped on my bed one morning and demanded soccer lessons = and not with me in the backyard. So I found him a class, and within the first few minutes of watching the coach browbeat the kids and humiliate the parents, I realized that there had to be a better way. So I took my high school soccer skills and read a few manuals and gathered my son and a dozen of his friends and brought them out to the local park, where we ran around and played once a week for six months. All of us then joined the recreational league, them playing, me coaching, and after the season, they and more of their friends wanted to resume the classes I’d started now a year before. Pretty soon there was enough interest for four, then five, then six classes a week. After about a year, my wife finally insisted I start charging for the sessions. Over the next two years, strictly on word of mouth and parents popping out kids, I was running about 15 classes a week. Three years in, at the urging of an associate, I began a day camp, with no aspiration of doing it beyond one year. This summer will be year twenty-five. But if you pin me down for an answer, I’d say the thought process had to do with seeing a need, loving working with kids, and selfishly using it to keep myself young. Or at least immature.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I learned early on that I was born without the business gene. I spent a decade producing television commercials and while I loved working with crews and directors, having to manage the money was a responsibility I never got comfortable with. I’ve always loved to write; there’s nothing more satisfying that coming up with a clever phrase. I wrote a book titled What Size Balls Do I Need, about youth sports. Out of the roughly 80,000 words contained within, the two I still remember are the ones I used to describe kids leaving recreational sports for club at an early age – premature evacuation. So yes, playing with words is a joy. I also get to express my creativity through the activities I devise for camp. The only parameters are that they have to be fun. Over the years we’ve blown past the traditional sports, games, arts & crafts and lanyards, all of which we feature. But we’ve added food fights and then “human car washes,” where we put the kids on scooters and hose them down. We feature flour pinatas, colored-powder dunk tanks, laser mazes, slacklines and ziplines over pools, haunted houses, mudslides and mud wrestling, paint Twister, all day water wars, and so much more. Within the limits of safety, and maybe budget (there’s that business gene problem again), if I can conjure it, we can do it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Growing up. I always fantasized myself working in the movies. I ran the film society at Yale and figured that would be a springboard to having a director’s chair with my name on it. I did get that chair but I sat in it while I was making yearly movies at camp. The lure of old Hollywood, though, has never gone away. And whenever visitors or guests who have never been to Los Angeles touch down, I insist on giving them the same tour an old friend of mine gave me when I first arrived. We go past the great studios, and sometimes with strings pulled, I can take them into the giant sound stages. It’s touristy as can be, but newcomers have to see the Chinese theater and gawk at how tiny the hands and feet of the golden age stars were. A stop at Musso & Franks for a martini and a waiter who will insult you is a must. Gotta take them to the Hollywood sign, drive them through the streets of Beverly Hills, maybe with a stop at the Polo Lounge. Ending on the beach at Santa Monica near sunset is the piece de resistance.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’d like to shoutout to all the parents that have entrusted me with their kids, all the kids who have bought into all the wild, wet and crazy antics that keep them and me young, and the combined communities of Brentwood and Pacific Palisades who have opened their hearts for everything I do. A further shoutout goes to my own wonderful kids – Evan, Dori and Griffie – who have been the inspiration, beneficiaries and, hey, dad is only human, victims of my passion and mission. And perhaps the greatest shoutout of all to my wife Marcy, without whose love and support the Coach Steve enterprise would not have been possible.

Website: https://www.coastsports.com

Instagram: @coachstevela

Facebook: Steve Morris

Yelp: coastsports