Kade grew up in a house that talked sports before he could talk back. His father played competitively and is an NCAA baseball umpire, and coached him coming up — so by the time Kade could walk, sports were already the family language. One Christmas, he was even gifted stock in his favorite football team, the Green Bay Packers. Baseball, football, basketball, whatever had a ball, a bracket, or a scoreboard — he never met one he didn’t want to play.
“DOC”
The nickname his JV coach at Hagerty High School in Oviedo, FL gave him — not for anything he did on the field, but for the way he saw the game: rosters, matchups, and the front-office decisions most teenagers never think twice about.
It showed up everywhere. Watching games with his dad, Kade was the one pointing out that a trade didn’t add up before the ink was even dry. At the ballpark, he wasn’t just watching the game — he was already redesigning how the event around it should run.
That instinct had a training ground. His father served for years as the volunteer president of the largest Babe Ruth Baseball & Softball league in Central Florida, and Kade grew up in the middle of it — helping run fundraisers, working events, and learning firsthand what it actually takes to keep a league, a team, or a tournament running. Somewhere in those seasons, his love of playing the game grew into a love of building it. So while his résumé may just be getting started as he closes out his final year of college, his real experience in sports management goes back much further — it’s in his DNA. A lifelong passion. It’s who he is.
That’s the career he’s chasing now — the business and operations side of sports, not just the stands but the front office behind them. Kade is humble about how much he still has to learn, but confident in what he already brings: faith, honesty, integrity, and hard work in everything he does, paired with a passion for the game that has never needed convincing.
None of that guarantees Kade anything, and he wouldn’t claim otherwise. But sports has a long memory for stories like this one. Tom Brady went 199th overall in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL Draft and, by his own account, simply told the Patriots they’d never regret picking him. Albert Pujols lasted until the 13th round, 402nd overall, in 1999 — and one Tampa Bay scout, Fernando Arango, believed in him so strongly that he resigned in protest when his own team passed on him. Pujols went on to become one of the greatest hitters the game has ever seen. A thin résumé at twenty-two has never been the whole story for someone with the work ethic, the confidence, and the humility to back it up — and given the chance, that’s exactly the story Kade intends to write.
