Former MLB pitcher Jason Berken expands his Impact Sports Academy

When Jason Berken opened his Impact Sports Academy in 2017, he believed there was enough local interest in baseball and softball coaching to make his new venture work.

The former West De Pere star and major league pitcher was right, as evidenced by the multimillion-dollar, 42,000-square-foot resort in Lawrence he opened in 2021.

Now is the time to extend the brand.

The ISA is opening a facility in Somerset which will be open for business by the end of July for athletes from surrounding areas such as Hudson, New Richmond and River Falls.

The facility is approximately 15,000 square feet and will include five 80-foot cages. There will also be 4,800 feet of open turf to work on everything from defense to pitching.

“We have an ownership group that’s part of ISA West, as we call it,” said Berken, who was drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in the sixth round of the 2006 Major League Baseball amateur draft and pitched for the Orioles and Chicago Cubs. from 2009 to 2012. “One of the owners of this group owns this building. We’re going to call it ISA West and we’re outfitting it for indoor installation.

“It’s going to be strictly ours. Cages, grass, open space.

Talk of the expansion began late last year when ISA baseball coach and former De Pere star Casey Kopitzke was approached by Sean Parnell.

The two were teammates at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and both played professional baseball after Kopitzke was drafted by the Cubs and Parnell by the Seattle Mariners in 1999.

Parnell asked Kopitzke about ISA and its vision. Berken and Parnell eventually met, and it became clear that what ISA does is what Parnell and his group wanted to bring to their region.

“They loved our plan, with our development philosophies being the main focus,” Berken said. “That’s what they wanted too. They saw a huge need for it, as we did here. The talks have continued to progress and he has a group of people he is friends with who are all connected to the baseball community.

“With our help and with their leadership there, we decided this was a good opportunity to move forward with ISA in the western part of the state.”

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It’s not just about lending the ISA name to a business partner.

While ISA West will have its own staff, Berken and his wife, Emily, will also devote their time and effort to helping the place grow.

Berken will attend tryouts in July — he was also there Thursday to put the finishing touches on the opening — and it’s important to him and his ISA team in the Green Bay area that the quality and standards are the same.

They will also help with the marketing and social media side of the business.

What people see when they enter ISA here will be almost exactly what they see when they enter ISA West.

Berken has already learned the process of building and developing an academy. The hope is that her experience will help her start over.

“I think so,” Berken said. “Even when I started ISA, we had help from people who were already in the travel business. It’s always nice to be able to lean on someone who’s been there, just to get rid of some of those growing pains.

“Now, from their point of view, there will be a learning curve. But we think that curve will be quite short and that we can be very involved in their operation. There are so many little things that you don’t even think about not that we’ll be able to get ahead of them. I think that was a big reason why it was attractive to them as well, because we were able to establish what we think is a great business.

There will always be people who scoff at the idea of traveling teams in baseball or AAU teams in basketball.

But there is no doubt that the ISA has become a popular place for local athletes to train and work on their skills.

ISA has grown from 23 teams roaming between baseball and softball its first year to 46. A big change this year is that it also has 120 practice players who practice year-round with ISA but do not play in one of his teams. This allowed instructors to work with more children without having to add more teams.

ISA has 110 baseball players and 30 softball players committed to colleges since 2018.

Yes, a lot has happened in a relatively short period of time.

Berken has always been confident in his business model and knew with the right people on board — including fellow former MLB pitchers Erik Cordier and Jeremy Horst — that it could be a hit.

He is optimistic that the same will happen in the western part of the state.

As for future expansion? He’s a dreamer and his wife a realist, so she does a good job of pushing him back when he likes to push the limits.

If a proposal is solid, they will always consider it. But neither wants multiple locations just to say they have them.

It has to be the right people and the right situation.

Former MLB pitcher Jason Berken expands his Impact Sports Academy

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