Ryan Wardinsky considers himself fortunate: A standout for the American Legion Kalispell Lakers, he was recruited in 1998 by baseball coach Ken Johnson of Walla Walla Community College.

"He told me, 'Play one year with me and I'll get you to any school in the country,' " Wardinsky said. "It was one of the best decisions I ended up making." 

That one year with the Walla Walla Warriors became three seasons at Texas A&M, where Wardinsky started 132 games for the Aggies. He was good enough to get drafted, too, by the Philadelphia Phillies, and after playing pro ball for a few years he spent 20 years as a baseball scout. 

"When I finished playing I actually moved back to College Station to get my Masters degree in sports management," he said this week. "Then I was pretty quickly hired as an area scout with the Marlins." 

A couple decades later has a new hat to wear — he's the director of player development and operations for the local Sluggers Academy. 

So says a press release at abspark.com; ABS Park is where the Sluggers sprouted and seem to be taking hold. That's if sending a handful of players — Jett Pitts, Ryan Gillette, Carter Godsey, Logan Stewart and Drew Queen — to the invite-only Pathway Showcase in San Diego last week is any indication. 

"Chris Gillette and Frank Garner have done a tremendous job of building this from the ground up," Wardinsky said. "It's grown rapidly. ... I'm going to try to take as much off Chris' and Frank's plate as possible." 

The overall goal is to build a premier development academy for baseball and softball in Montana, and Wardinsky can help with logistics in a number of ways: programming, technology, setting up sports science. He'll go back and forth from The Woodlands, Texas, where he lives, to the Flathead Valley.  

So there's some travel ahead, but nothing like his Marlins days. By the end, Wardinsky was their Central-US scouting director, overseeing 16 states. 

"I mostly enjoyed the job and didn't mind the travel," he said. "But I was spending easily over 100 nights a year in hotels." 

It was too much time away from the former Jodi Hagestad — a multi-sport standout at Flathead who played volleyball at Carroll College — and their two daughters, so a couple years ago he got out of scouting. Which pretty much brings us up to speed. 

"Chris and I have kind of been having discussions about this for a couple years, now," Wardinsky said. "We decided it was time to move this whole operation to the next phase." 

Wardinsky's parents still live in Kalispell, as does much of his wife's family. The Woodlands is home but the Valley still beckons. More college baseball exists in this state than in 1998; now there's a baseball academy, and Wardinsky wonders what could have been. 

"I feel like this would have been a game-changer," he said.