What are the Waco Woolly Wranglers?
The Waco Woolly Wranglers is a collegiate baseball team that plays over the summer. It’s similar to travel ball, but it is at the collegiate level where guys from all around can come and play. We’re in the Cowboy Collegiate League. They had five teams before in the Houston area, and they expanded into the DFW kind of area. Waco was the perfect middle ground and they thought it was perfect place to put a team.

What type of players are going to be on the team?
These guys are playing college ball — they want to stay sharp and develop while also playing high-level baseball. These guys are all high-caliber players. This won’t affect their [college] eligibility. It’s a developmental league.

What is your history with baseball?
My whole life has been baseball. I’m from West, Texas, home of the greatest kolaches. I played shortstop at West High School. I played baseball [at Blackburn] all four years. I was a middle infielder, so shortstop and second base. A cool, unique thing about this college, it’s actually one of the only work colleges in the country, so whenever I was accepted to play baseball there and when I got onto campus, they gave me a job, and my job was being a coaching assistant, and I got placed with the baseball team, luckily. It was a pretty cool experience. I got to play the game but also coach the game and do a lot of work behind the scenes. Then I did an internship with the Gateway Grizzlies, which is an MLB partnership team. I worked with them for about a year. Then I came across this job and I talked to the owners and they said they would love to have me on. Someday, I would like to work with an MLB organization in the front office, kind of similar to the role I’m doing now.

What are you looking forward to with the Woolly Wranglers?
I’m really looking forward to just getting the season going with these guys. I’m super excited to watch college baseball and let these guys develop, be the best they can be, so when they get back to their colleges, they are top of the line, primed up, ready to go. We’ll have anywhere from 20 to 40 guys on the roster. It’s a 40-game season, so having numbers would never hurt. I’ll leave that up to the head coach.

Is this a wood bat or metal bat league?
It’s going to be a wood bat league. In college, they use metal bats, but this is a wood bat league.

I saw on the team website that you’re looking for host families. What does that entail?
We’ll have host families — local families that are able to take in this player for a few months and kind of live a little bit of a baseball world. They get to wake up and see the kid that they’re hosting go play baseball, work out, and they get to watch him develop. It’s nice to have a home away from home.

I worked in athletics for a long time, and running a baseball game takes a lot of people. Are you hiring?
We’re looking for interns to do all of our behind-the-scenes stuff. We’re still in the process of hiring, but we are going to bring on interns that want to work in a college [sports] kind of setting. The season starts in June and ends in July.

Are you going to have some cool merchandise?
We have a team store online. I’m still trying to talk to my boss and see if I can get merch to the ballpark itself. We’re not sure of it right now just because it’s a complex and we’ll have to figure out a merch stand and keeping up with money. But we do have a team store online where fans can buy jerseys, hat, shirts.

Were you part of the naming process?
I was not, but the Woolly Wrangler, the logo, looks like a mammoth. One of the things Waco is known for is the woolly mammoths that were there. So they named it the Woolly Wrangler and added a cowboy on it because it’s in Central Texas.

What can fans expect?
I want the fans to experience high-level, energetic baseball. I want the fans to come out, enjoy the ballpark, have good food, have good drinks, watch great baseball, be around family, friends and just enjoy the game.

Brett Lander is the general manager of the Woolly Wranglers, a summer baseball league for current college players. The team will compete in the northern division of the Cowboy Collegiate League with teams from Weatherford, Denton, Tyler and Wichita Falls. The team opens the season on June 1 with three road games and then plays its first game at Riverbend Ballpark on June 4, facing the Weatherford Cutters. Patrick Cootware, who graduated from China Spring High School and the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, will be the team’s head coach. Lander is a native of West and recently graduated from Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois, with a major in sports management and a business administration minor. He’s the son of B.J. and Michele Lander of West.