Driven to Succeed : Paula Pyers Is Learning a Lot as General Manager of the Vigilantes

She is a baseball owner who wears toe rings and Doc Martens and has her eye on a Harley-Davidson.

“Look at my CD collection,” Paula Pyers said, “and you’d think I’m Sybil.”

Multiple personalities could come in handy for Pyers, who has wide-ranging duties as the Mission Viejo Vigilantes general manager, one of only a handful of women GMs in minor league baseball.

She grapples with her future. Should she stay where she is, extremely happy, or try to move into big-time sports, following in the footsteps of the NFL’s Amy Trask or Susan O’Malley of the NHL and NBA?

“It’s definitely an ongoing debate, but I can’t imagine a better training ground,” Pyers said. “I can count on all my fingers and toes the lawyers I’ve met who said, ‘Wow, I dream of having that job.’ And these are senior partners at big firms.”

A former USC basketball player armed with magna cum laude honors and a law degree, Pyers loves competition but hates confrontation, so she eliminated litigation as a career choice. She ruled out becoming an agent, she said, because, “I didn’t want to compromise my integrity” to keep pace with some competitors.

While working as a clerk in the Raiders’ legal office in 1993, Pyers was inspired by Trask, the club’s chief executive.

Pyers discovered she liked the corporate side of sports. As a law clerk in the hockey division at International Management Group, she analyzed endorsement and player contracts for the likes of Jaromir Jagr and Brett Hull, as well as off-ice insurance issues.

“Paula brought a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm to every project she worked on, and clearly was an individual with a dream,” said Trask, who began as an intern with the Raiders in 1983.

“I can recall when Paula was with us of telling her she should pursue her dreams with all her strength. Clearly, she has done that.

“From my perspective in business, passion, commitment, tenacity, hard work and dedication are vital,” Trask said. “Whether Paula continues to apply those traits in her current endeavor or move elsewhere in the business world, those traits are priceless.”

Pyers, the Arizona Republic’s 1984 state athlete of the year as a senior at Tucson Santa Rita High, says she has “sports in my blood.” She had already accepted a job at a law firm during her final year of law school, but left it to join the Long Beach Barracuda as its general manager.

“Four years ago, I was right out of law school without a ton of business experience,” said Pyers, who took the job at that time for about $55,000 plus commissions.

“Six or eight months after that, the original ownership group folded. I was lucky enough to have a partner like Pat Elster who had a vision and the talent to put together an ownership group. Well, there you are, you’re 28, you own a team. Now what?”

Pyers is one of two principal owners, along with Elster, who raised $400,000 in a month’s time to form P&P; Enterprises and take over the Barracuda with 10 games remaining in the 1995 season after its charter owners filed for bankruptcy.

The franchise was renamed the Riptide in 1996, and moved to Mission Viejo in 1997 to be close to its desired demographic--the recreation-minded young families of South Orange County--and play at Saddleback College.

Baseball has consumed Pyers’ lifestyle.

“In my wildest dreams, I didn’t think about baseball,” she said. “I grew up on basketball and soccer and loved football. Lo and behold, I had this opportunity in baseball.”

So Pyers, 32, spends her summer nights unlocking gates, making cash drops, turning on the scoreboard lights. . . .

She does not play with an open wallet. Pyers disdains numbers and is sorry to say she’s gotten pretty good with a calculator. “But until we can put 3,000 butts in the seats and hire a secretary and bookkeeper,” she said, “until then . . .”

Until then, Pyers pores over the office’s everyday minutia, a self-described “human sponge” trying to soak up as much knowledge as she can.

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Pyers majored in the business entrepreneur program at USC, where she helped the Trojans win a women’s basketball national championship in 1985. She later became team captain as its senior point guard, setting a single-season record for minutes played. She competed one year professionally in Switzerland before beginning law school, and is an inactive member of the California Bar.

“I knew whatever Paula put her mind to, she was going to be successful at it,” said former USC teammate Karon Howell, now an assistant basketball coach at Cal State Northridge. “She was a great leader, very focused.”

But when it comes to overseeing baseball operations for the Vigilantes, that duty falls to Buck Rodgers, the team’s manager who is in his fifth decade of pro baseball. Bobby Grich, former Angel second baseman, is the team’s assistant general manager.

“There are really two businesses going on here, operations, marketing, and revenue against expenses, and then building a team and being competitive on the field,” Pyers said. “When you hire baseball talent like we’ve hired, I don’t have to sit around and make baseball moves.

“The qualities that make a person a capable manager who runs Wahoo’s Fish Tacos or the Mission Viejo Vigilantes are the same qualities. . . . I think I could be the best store manager Wahoo’s ever had. You take those qualities, whether it’s baseball or fish tacos.”

Bill Bavasi, Angels’ general manager, agrees.

“A lot of what I do is managing people, which can be done by businessmen or businesswomen,” Bavasi said. “What sets me apart, hopefully, is my experience in the player personnel issues, the evaluation of players--and that can be handled in many ways.”

Bavasi mentioned Oakland’s Sandy Alderson, for example, who built the Oakland A’s of the 1980s despite a very limited baseball background but who surrounded himself with wise baseball people.

Pyers considers the Vigilantes a small-business venture. Though projecting losses this season, she said the Vigilantes have shown success.

“We went from a six-figure loss on a start-up year [in Long Beach] to a second consecutive start-up year [in Mission Viejo in 1997] in a new market and broke even in half a sales season,” said Pyers, who inherited a $52,000 debt to the city of Long Beach and more than $200,000 to Long Beach State when she became an owner. “[The team] left Long Beach debt-free.

“It’s a Catch-22. If you don’t have the cash flow to market the product, you can’t put fans in the stands. If you can’t put fans in the stands, you can’t get the cash flow. We based our projections on having a stadium here our second year; we’ve been financially crippled by that, for sure.”

Pyers says the key to eventual profitability is three-fold: having the right stadium, the right market and the right organization.

“Am I ever going to make a million dollars a year? Probably not,” Pyers said. “But my goal, first and foremost, is to be happy, have passion in my work, which I do, and to earn the kind of living to do the things I like to do. Unfortunately, I love a lot of the finer things money can buy, but by no means would I trade this right now for a six-figure salary.

“There’s immense worth in the training I’m getting right now.”

Pyers reasons if she can make the Vigilantes successful on a shoestring, she could be invaluable to a major sports franchise should she pursue that avenue.

“I look at it like law school,” she said. “I didn’t know much about legal jargon or the law, but I had a great deal of desire and a pretty serious work ethic, and if you apply yourself to any new trade with those tools, I think you can be successful.”

Trask said Pyers has something else going for her too, should she try to become the next Trask or Susan O’Malley, president of Washington Sports and Entertainment, which oversees the NBA’s Bullets and NHL’s Capitals.

“Remember, Paula is an athlete,” Trask said. “She has an understanding of competition and a desire to win. I absolutely believe she would be a valuable asset to an organization, sports or otherwise.”

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Pyers is in bed at midnight and up at 5:45 a.m. on game days as she tackles the less-than-glamorous administrative tasks of running a club: handling worker’s compensation insurance, accounting, payroll, correspondence, filing player transactions, record-keeping. You name it, she does it.

“She’s always on the computer or reading stats or on the phone,” says Pyers’ roommate, Melissa Nanini. “She never rests, never takes pleasure. She’s turned down two marriage proposals for this job. She just works too much. “She’s married to this game. This game is her life.”

Nanini and Pyers have been friends since they were 14 and Pyers “was so shy, she couldn’t even look at someone without her eyes watering.”

“And now, she’s so outgoing, she’s not even like the same person,” Nanini said. “She has blossomed so beautifully. She’s really balanced. She has no baggage, she’s not in debt, has no children and no ex-husbands.”

No social life?

“I wouldn’t say I’ve made a conscious decision to be single, but I’ve had a lot of relationships that have been the casualty as a result of my business,” Pyers said. “I think that’s a fair assessment for a lot of owners of young businesses.

“I still consider us very much a start-up company; we’re in our fourth season of play, but we’ve only been in this market 1 1/2 years, and that’s pretty junior.”

The Vigilantes’ announced average tickets sold is about 1,800 per game, though fewer are actually present. Pyers seems to know everyone by name and says hello a million times. If the smile on her face isn’t genuine, she should win an Academy Award.

Not only is Pyers general manager, but she is also an owner who has invested “every spare penny of [her] savings” into the team.

“It’s all relative, from baseball to hockey to football,” Pyers said. “We build a team, we sell tickets, we sell sponsorships, we put on events. I feel pretty blessed to have fallen into baseball because I love being outdoors and I can’t imagine myself today being around a hockey rink for six hours.

“If you had asked me to sit down after law school and write out my dream job, I don’t think I could have written one as wonderful as this. I truly love it.”