 Okay so our baseballlife.com was started in 2010. I thought of the idea after my husband Rick was traded from the Royals to the Braves. I was newly pregnant. We had two big dogs. I knew nothing about Atlanta and I thought there should be something like this for families so when players are traded they have a resource. You know up until this point there was really only an email group that kind of would go around and it was always the same questions being asked and things like you know I need a car ship or I need a doctor here. I need a realtor here and I said why don't we just put all this information in one place and that way when guys sign with new teams they can just click on the city and get all the information and so that's kind of how the concept for the website was born. And then a couple gosh we've been working together what now Alyssa? Three years? Yeah so Alyssa and I came together after I let her tell you a little bit about where she how she got started in this but her and I started doing a podcast together a couple years ago and so we decided to kind of join forces because we were doing the same thing pretty much in a different capacity trying to support our communities and so when we came together and now it's kind of just taken off and exploded even larger than I think we any of us could have imagined so but I'll let Alyssa tell you how what she did and how we kind of came together. Yeah so I started um it basically started with a hashtag when the reality show Wags came out there were a lot of girls that were frustrated by the you know portrayal of what life is like and you know this is not reality right reality TV is not reality so it kind of I came up with the hashtag Wags in real life so let's you know let's show everyone what our real life is like and it kind of became this community it feels like overnight but you know it just was a way for women in this lifestyle to be able to connect with each other and recognize that this life is crazy and you know to be able to have kind of a platform to tell their stories and so I was kind of you know like Lori said we were serving the same community I was doing it more in a way of kind of bringing everybody together and helping women not feel alone and also give them just a chance to tell their story. So I jumped on to originally to help Alyssa after things started you know really growing for her I jumped in to to help her just with some of the you know back end stuff that no one really sees just sort of the administrative stuff and then that when we decided to join forces with Lori that sort of turned into this like I don't know what you call it this little trio so now we're a team and we sort of have just come together to make this one big team and to serve the baseball community and it's been awesome we're able to bounce our ideas off of each other they are literally the idea of people I'm just the one that's like all right guys how we're going to get this done um that's that's what I do but uh I kind of call my I'm like the mean one I'm like the I snap the whip they need it um but no it's we all do work really well together um it's kind of cool each of us bring something different to the table and we're able to accomplish all of our goals that way so when the coronavirus stuff happened you know there was just so much out there and so I think you know we've provided this I guess we built up a level of trust over the years where they know if they come to us they're going to get the the correct information they're going to be heard um and yeah I love that I I'm so grateful to be able to provide that sense of community for everybody you know if someone comes to us with a question that we don't know the answer to we will go out and seek that answer for them because we want to make sure that we are providing that information but that we're giving them the right stuff so we will you know we'll spend time going out and seeking the correct the correct answer especially something like this you know there's so many questions and we don't necessarily know everything um but we will we're happy to go out and try to figure out what what the solution is for that particular question or problem um and we really do take it seriously that that they trust us um and uh it just means a lot that that we're able to give back to the community that we spent so much time in as you know our husband's careers were as they're playing and now that their coach you know some of us are still in it as coaches wives um we're just you know grateful to be able to give back to them and and to do it that way I think it's great that we've been able to build this area where people can say hey I'm going through this or this is gonna even from even emotional standpoints of saying like I feel really alone is anybody out there and we have a pool of you know Facebook groups and and places that they can come and get um reassurance or support for whatever they're going through um as far as wanting to help the minor leagueers that was sort of an immediate thing where we were like when we realized that you know these guys might stop getting paid um we were like okay what what can we do um and almost immediately we had we had an outreach of women that are married to guys that are in the big leagues who express interest in wanting to help and so we thought okay we gotta get we gotta get our website and get this platform for them to be able to jump in and help in the way that they're wanting to do that financially so um we basically created a area of our website where um big league the big league families could go in and say we want to help they could enter in all their information and then the big league family or I'm sorry the minor league families that need assistance are able to go in and apply so it's sort of our we call that the MILB sponsorship program and it was sort of our the fastest way that we could figure out how to you know get these people connected so essentially we were just taking the big league family that wanted to provide assistance and the minor league family that needed assistance and pairing them up and then they sort of ran with it from there and decided how they wanted that to look and how much money they were going to give and what what the needs were um and it and it was fine obviously you know we weren't getting we weren't getting a whole lot of families paired as quickly as we would like to um when we had far more minor league applicants than there were major league sponsors to help them not to say that the major league people weren't stepping up because they absolutely were but um there's just so many minor league families that were in need and so we sort of ran with it did the best that we could got as many families paired up with as we could and so many people did stuff up and just I mean they were literally texting these minor league families saying what do you need and the minor league family would say you know we've got this thousand dollar bill that we need paid and they were sent they were Venmoing them and paying it um and so it was just really amazing to see complete strangers reach out to their baseball family and say what can I do and just no questions asked sending the money major league baseball is paying them per week it's just not enough to survive on and if you have kids and a wife or if you know a lot of these guys support families back in other countries things like that it's just not it's you know it's just not going to be enough so that's kind of the goal and the mission of this new fund is to collaborate with more than baseball there are 501c3 um and bring in all the donations to one place and then they can take in all the applications and then they can grant um or send out these grants to these players in order to help them with whatever they need groceries rent you know whatever it is um so that's kind of the newest thing it's our we're transitioning from the original sponsorship program that we had started to this new fund and it will just be faster uh we've had guys um like if you've heard of Daniel Murphy who donated a hundred thousand dollars to get it going um and then the Wayne rights from the Cardinals donated so that's our goal now it's our mission is to get word out about that so that people can donate to that and these big league players who wanted to step up and help can give bigger amounts of money um that will help more people when baseball was suspended I was with some girls the next day and one of them um was just so so worried because they had just gotten their first house and um they had a mortgage and they didn't know how they were going to pay their bills um another girl texted me and said what do we do they just kicked us out of the team hotel we don't know where to go and they haven't given us any money and so it was just right away it was um it was something that I knew that we needed to jump into and figure out a way to help and the great part is that we didn't even have to like I mean we we barely had to open the door and you know major league families were flooding like flooding in like hey how can we help what can we do you know the Murphy's were right on it hey what can we do and um so it's just been really cool to see um the way that this community steps up you know time and time again if there's a need there's somebody to fill it and um I'm just really grateful that we're able to kind of be that conduit so I mean there's so many ways in which the the community really helps support each other and this is just another probably just a little bit more public way that you know people can see how much that the the community can rally around each other when when this happens because everybody's been in the minor leagues um so they all understand that lifestyle coming up and so it's glad you know it's great to know that they don't forget where they came from you know that they came right through those bus trips and those you know not great hotels and uh can give back to them so so if anyone wants to to donate to the MILB family fund um this can be players fans anyone um you can head on over to our website it's uh our baseballlife.com and there will be a link that says MILB family fund and that will take you to the donation page and you can choose any amount um anything helps obviously and your money goes directly to helping these families um through the MLB shutdown