Steve Kruse is founder and president of Blue Wave Baseball, having served as its general manager since inception in 2004 when he retired from a successful business career and started managing club baseball teams as a “hobby” and way to work with youth and give back to the community.
In less than seven years, Blue Wave Baseball has become one of the largest and most respected club baseball organizations in California and the nation for advanced youth baseball players between the ages of 9 to 18 years old.
During this timeframe, the non-profit organization has captured more than 70 league and tournament championships as well as four national event titles.
More importantly, more than 80 Blue Wave alumni are now playing collegiate baseball at some of the top programs in the country, including UCI, UCLA, USC, Cal State Fullerton, Penn, Gonzaga, University of Miami, Pepperdine, Long Beach State, Fresno State, UCSB, Santa Clara, LMU, Chapman, and more.
And, several of its former players and coaches are playing with MLB organizations, including the Arizona Diamondbacks, New York Mets, Seattle Mariners, Okland A’s, New York Yankees, Phillies, L.A. Angels, and more.
“Most great baseball coaches are not that good on the business side of running a single baseball team, much less and entire organization,” Kruse notes. “The key to our success has been to take all admin and business chores away from our coaches and let them do what they do best – coach players.”
Though he has more than 40 years of coaching or managing youth sports teams for baseball, basketball, and football, Kruse leverages his impressive background in management and growing startup companies in both the publishing and computer industries.
Kruse started his career as a successful Journalist, newspaper Editor and Publisher in the Pacific Northwest, where he garnered 16 national awards for writing, editing, and Journalistic excellence from 1974 to 1982.
He became one of the pioneers in the PC software industry in 1982 when he left his position as editor and publisher of a newspaper in Seattle, WA, to become a founder and Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Cosmos, Inc., one of the original PC software industry success stories.
Cosmos, Inc. was the developer of the Revelation RDBMS, which was regarded as the best database software in the industry at the time. He became President and CEO of Cosmos, Inc. in 1984, helping bootstrap the company with only $500 in the bank to more than $20-million per year in sales by 1987, when the company was sold to a private investment group from New York.
Kruse was then named President of PICK Systems PC software division in Orange County, California, where he migrated to in 1987 to help PICK become the third-most installed RDBMS in the world and third-most installed Operating System at the time.
After leaving PICK in 1992, he became a founder of Versata, where he authored the company’s Business & Operations plan and secured $12.5-million first-rounding funding from The Paul Allen Group, H&Q, Charles River, Bay Partners and other leading VC firms in Silicon Valley. Versata went public in three years with a $3-billion market valuation at the time.
He is the founder and first Chairman of the Software Council of Southern California and the Washington Software Association in Bellevue, Washington. PC Magazine has also named him one of the “Top Marketing Executives” in the industry early in his career.
Contact Info: P: (949) 743-2335 C: (949) 202-7748 E: steve@bluewavebaseball.com