#92: Dustin Moseley - How This Dad Went From MLB Pitcher To Inventor
"You want your kids to play every sport that they want to play. But, they're kids. They're not going to want to do anything sometimes, because that’s comfortable."
-Dustin Moseley, talks about the importance of encouraging your kids to play all sports

Dustin Moseley
in 10 seconds
- Dustin is a former MLB pitcher
- Dustin invented ProBoardz
- Dustin is a father to 2 kids (10 & 6)
- Dustin and his family live in Little Rock, AR
In today's conversation, you'll learn 3 key things:
- The impact Dustin's father had on him
- Why your kids should play different sports (and not specialize too young)
- The story behind Dustin inventing ProBoardz
Clip: My Dad’s Influence On Me
Watch Time: 2 minutes
YouTube Link:
https://youtu.be/iYAXln_L7LU
Dustin: I started to pitch when I was 10-years-old, but I was a quarterback. I played until my junior year of high school. I played basketball all the way through to my senior year. We played golf, we played soccer. We did everything, sports-wise outside that we could. That’s just what we did.
My dad was super hands on with us. And I talk about this, trying to find a balance for parents, and even for myself, sometimes it was very performance-based, which can be really tough on a kid. It can create real resentment between him and a parent or her and a parent. And you have to be careful with that.
There has to be a balance, and the way you balance that, is that, if you’re holding me accountable and you’re staying on top of me and you’re doing all those things and I’m putting the work in, you also have to affirm me at some point in time. It can’t always be “I told you so. Or if you did as I told you to”. There has to be that place where you feel that they’re proud of you. That you’re making headway.
My brother and I were a little bit different. I wanted to do anything and everything I could keep my dad off my ass. My brother would purposely do stuff to keep him on it.
My dad asked me:
“Hey, did you work out today?”
“Yes sir.”
“Did you throw today?”
“Yes sir.”
“Did you dribble today?”
“Yes sir.”
I didn’t want him to judge me in any form or fashion.
And when I talk about performance based, it could be how I mowed the yards, how well it was weeded, that I washed everything off, was the water hose rolled up, all of those things.
You think he’d been a military guy, but he wasn’t. But that’s just how he was looking back at him. And I’m eternally grateful for him raising me that way. Because now I’m mentoring young guys, and have people working for me. And they were raised the opposite way and it’s really, really tough for them to take any criticism. Any type of information is tough for them to take on. They take everything personally.
So growing up that way, I figured out it wasn’t personal. It was just something that he wanted us to do. There was a standard and we lived by the standard. You dealt with repercussions every single day. So I decided to take the easy way out, and do everything I could to keep him off my ass.
And for me, being an athlete and developing that work ethic was due to my dad being extremely tough on me.
But then I had my mom where she was super compassionate. It was like yin and yang. She would love on you, pick you up, affirm you. So I had a great balance with my parents. and it’s interesting how they say opposites attract.
My mom and dad were very, very much opposites, but it worked. And then everything just came together.
You take all those pieces of accountability, plus the work ethic, plus I ended up being six foot three, and pretty highly coordinated. You put all those pieces together and God having a plan for my life, and I ended up being a first round draft pick.
There are a lot of pieces that have to go in there, and for me, they all came together.

Clip: Should Our Kids Only Play One Sport?
Watch Time: 2 minutes
YouTube Link:
https://youtu.be/UEC-YW4fhaE
Dustin: You want your kids to play every sport that they want to play. But, they’re kids. They’re not going to want to do anything sometimes, because that’s comfortable. They’d rather stare at the iPad or the TV because it doesn’t take any energy.
So you have to motivate them to go play. You’re not being that dad who’s dragging your kid out there by the ear and hitting balls at him.
You have to hold people accountable. We need accountability. Our wives hold us accountable to not go out and hit the streets and do what normal men do. The same goes for your kids is that you want to keep them on the right page and you’re going to have to motivate them and get them going.
But when it comes to sports and specialization, it’s something that hurts our business for about three months every single year, when baseball season ends and football seasons begins, and that’s okay. And I’ll continue to make it okay because I want kids to play other sports.
Most businesses like ours that are predominantly baseball athletes, they don’t care. They want to tie you into a year round program. They want to talk you into this because it’s just about a dollar. It’s not about the wellbeing of your child. It’s not about truly taking care of them. There are a lot of programs that are starting to lean more our way, which is good.
You’re having guys come back who retired or finished up coaching for many years in college, and they’re seeing it happen to their own kids. They don’t want it to be done to their kids. And once that happens, it becomes a little bit more personal and you understand a little bit better.
Clip: How Do You Choose Which Sport?
Watch Time: 2 minutes
YouTube Link:
https://youtu.be/4b_kwRlhZ64
Chris: Dustin, I’m a firm believer, just like you are, in our kids playing multiple sports. I think it develops their hand-eye coordination. By playing basketball, it will help them in their baseball program. Playing baseball will help them in their soccer program and so forth.
One issue that I’m already experiencing with my 7-year-old daughter, is we’re bumping up into issues of which sport to choose. Do you want to play softball this season or do you want to play soccer? Or do you want to play lacrosse this season? You can play one of them, or maybe we could squeeze in two, but we can’t get in three. We have to be selective in what we choose.
Can you give us some guidance? How do we pick and choose? Because I know coming from Texarkana, back in the day when we were growing up, you really had one sport, one season. Once that baseball season was over, you rolled into basketball. Once basketball is over, you rolled into track or you rolled into football. What do you think?
Dustin: You have to find programs and get her involved in places that are going to do be seasonal. They’re not going to try to talk you into this year round stuff.
For our baseball team, and we try to motivate all of our affiliate team programs to do this, is that we play a max of 10 tournaments, and we go every other week and we finish up in late June, early July.
That way, it gives the kids a couple of weeks to take vacations. We don’t do anything during spring break. We let the kids have a summer, let them live and play.
Some of these people were playing 15-20 tournaments per summer. It’s every single weekend, and then they continue to play in the fall.
We don’t play fall baseball. We talk our coaches out of it. Now think about that: we’ve got 16 affiliate teams. I think we only had four teams play fall ball. There’s 12 teams leftover, 12 teams at 10 to 11 players per team, per membership. Now think about that from a financial place in our business. We lose all that revenue, right?
But it’s the right way to do it. And that’s what we do. So you just have to find the right program, and they’re out there. There are coaches that want to do it the right way. That don’t want to overload these guys. That want to teach the fundamentals and get the kids out there and get them moving.
That’s what you have to find, and if you can’t find it, you have to coach yourself, Chris.
Chris: That’s true, and I’ll tell you, what you just said, it’s about ultimately letting the kids have fun. Let them have fun, especially at that age. You want them to develop their fundamentals and develop their skill set, but ultimately let the kids be kids and let them have fun.
Clip: How To Coach Your Kids Differently
Watch Time: 4 minutes
YouTube Link:
https://youtu.be/kun56slBCbs
Chris: One of the things that stood out to me you mentioned earlier was your relationship with your dad, versus how your brother was with your dad.
I lost my dad at a young age too, but I was very much like you Dustin. I was always wanting to please him and do everything to make him proud.
Now that I have two children, ages seven and four, I’m already seeing how they both came from the same two people, but both of them are entirely different kids. My daughter, I think she’s going to have to be approached and handled a certain way, especially when it comes to sports, or activities, or just life in general in a different way than how we approach my son.
What are your thoughts on, not even necessarily raising a son versus a daughter, but your approach with kids in your business. You see some kids who need that discipline, they need that word of encouragement.
And then you have other kids who don’t necessarily need that or maybe don’t have that at home. Do you approach those kids differently?
Dustin: Yeah Chris. Every coach, every personality should be coached differently. Every personality is different. So me and my brother, 100%, my daughter and my son, two different people.
My daughter will literally see some gymnastics, and she’s working on these backbends and these pushovers and all this kind of stuff. And she will literally get in there and cry herself to sleep, trying to do it a million times. Now Coop would say, “Oh, I got some basketball lessons on dribbling right-handed. I’m going to go outside and try it.”
And he’ll try and go, “huh. I just can’t get it. Oh well.” It’s just the difference of mindset. So I had to really kind of stay on Coop. Create a plan. We have to practice. If you want to be good at something, you’re going to have to put in the time.
Then you’ve got Avery over here. I’m having to pull her back and go, “hey sweetheart. It’s okay. You’re not going to get it in one day.”
And she’s flipping out. So it’s about coaching people differently. It is about being aware of those kids, but it’s also about talking through situations and not getting so frustrated with them.
You can tell if a kid is giving you effort If he or she’s giving you effort, and they’re just not getting it, you have to back off of them a little bit. Give them a little space to figure it out. It’s a movement that they’re trying to master.
And for so many parents, they don’t understand that. If the kids are not giving you effort, feel free, bust his or her ass whenever you want to do that. We’re not going to get out here and waste each other’s time, and we’re not gonna spend money when you’re not going to give any effort.
We talked about that all the time on our team. Effort and attitude. You punch out, you give up runs, you walk guys, as long as you’re trying to make adjustments and you’re getting after it, and you’re keeping your stuff together, you’re not showing your butt.
We do not care, win or lose. It’s about development and getting these kids where they want to be. So yes, every kid is different. I’ve been doing it with lessons. They’ll come in and you’ve got the helicopter parents, sometimes they get into it with me. Now those parents stay back.
I tell them, you might just want to stay in the chair during this instruction because it might make you feel uncomfortable or call you about a little bit. I don’t do it disrespectfully, because these people were paying and spending their hard earned money and I know that they want their kids to do better. Otherwise they wouldn’t have brought them.
But at the same time you brought them to me to do what I’m going to do. If my kid gets in trouble, I’m not going to walk into the attorney’s office and tell you how to do your job, to help my kid get out of trouble. But that’s the same thing that will happen.
People with a little bit of intellect think that they know everything about sports. I’ll do these little Instagram videos and kind of pick fun at them. And if people don’t know me, they get a little butt hurt about it, but it’s okay.
But I tell people all the time, we’re not here to give the parents what they want. We’re here to give the kids what they need.

Clip: Toxic Parents In Youth Sports
Watch Time: 2 minutes
YouTube Link:
https://youtu.be/d6yl95t4PfY
Dustin: A big question is: what is it you want to do when the sports end? That’s something that’s never talked about to these kids because the parents don’t think it’s ever going to end. They never did it. They weren’t very good at it. They admired all the athletes.
You have to think about in this country how men, we are admired by: how much money you have, how athletic you are, and how many women you can attract and date.
That creates this masculine piece of this country that can sometimes be toxic for a lot of people. So those three categories. Well, guess what? 95% of people are never going to be into those categories.
So are you not a man? No, that’s not it at all.
But those are the pieces that are broadcast. And women buy into that too. They saw the jock athlete in high school and now their son’s pretty good. And they remember how popular he was, and we want to be that too. And then the parents attach to it because maybe they weren’t super athletic, or super popular and they remember in high school and college how those people were seen or how they projected those people.
And now you have all these pieces attached to it that not only are their kids going to be able to be that, but they can also kind of be part of that whole thing.
Now we can be popular and we can be all these things and it can just create distance, kind of a terrible place for that kid, for the parents and, and becomes their identity as well.
As opposed to just letting kids do it and have fun, move, and see what comes of it. Not to ride their coattails, but that’s where we’re at, and that’s never going to change.

Clip: Why I Invented ProBoardz
Watch Time: 5 minutes
YouTube Link:
https://youtu.be/e2v8DyKavew
Dustin: Yeah, so proboardz started because of proformance and our 8 to 11-year-old group workouts. The kids have a tough time focusing, and so we wanted to create something to keep them in one place. That we can have different sets of dumbbells, or some kind of squat rack.
And so you start putting the numbers together and you’re trying to be smart with your money because it’s a small business. It’s sports training, so there’s not a ton of money to be made in it. And so you’re sitting there going, all right, well if I buy this, this, and this, and have a station for 25 kids, and next thing you know, you go, man, I can’t afford to do that.
And I just had this idea. I said, I’ve been using bands for a while for my resistance. Think more like the pull-up bands, the really thick ones, you can get them in different widths. And I said, what if I just built something that they attach these bands to and they just stand on it?
We have them attached to the wall where they can do stuff to their shoulders. What if we did that? What exercises could we do? And so it started there. It was just a couple pieces of plywood. We cut holes in it and put a little wire in and you could clip your little, carabiner or your clip on there and connect your bands. And I had some handles I bought on Amazon and some straight bars that you can connect with ends on them.
And then, parents are asking me, what is that, man? That’s pretty cool. And, one day we needed some extra sleds, so we put some weights on one of them. It didn’t have a back on it at the time. And we could push a sled, we could pull it. And I thought, there’s something to this.
You can do every exercise with this. It almost looks like a skateboard where there’s two different sizes. And one day we built one a little bit bigger and we put some weights on the side to keep it on the ground, and we were doing vertical work like a Vertimax, which cost like four grand and I’m like, wait a second, we’re onto something here.
We train with the college summer group. And we had them use the boards and got their feedback from it. I’m using the bands, I’m getting stronger, my body’s feeling better. I had four surgeries.
All of these things are happening. And then I said, man, I think I can find a little shop that can engrave these. I need to come up with a name. I thought what, about proboardz. I got on this website called 99 designs. And, I had all these people create logos based on some ideas that I had.
And we came up with the logo. I found a CNC shop. They were able to engrave my boards. I then moved in, I rented some space from them, so I’m not having to transport boards back and forth to finish them. And then I was like, well, I can stain them colors. I can put people’s logos on them and I can really personalize these things and I can make it pretty affordable for people where they literally have a gym right there in their board they can take anywhere.
We could be doing curls and shoulder press and squats and lunges and anything you can think of right now while we’re doing this podcast, standing on this board and your body weight keeps it down and that’s how it took off.
We sold 150 last year from August on. It’s something that’s taken off and we got pro players getting them. We’re putting their autographs on them. We’re doing the color of their teams because we don’t have any licensing agreements yet.
And it’s grown into something out of nothing, and become its own little business.
Chris: Dustin, it’s really cool. I’ve been following on Instagram and I remember when you and I met, you had just moved back to Little Rock and you were thinking of your next move, and you hadn’t even come up with proformance yet, and definitely hadn’t come up with pro boards. I’m so impressed with what you’ve accomplished after retirement.
Where can people want to check out your proboardz? Do you have a website or is there a phone number they could call if they want to buy one?
Dustin: Yes, Chris. It’s pro boardz.com so P, R, O, B, O, A, R, D, Z. Everything’s with a z.com. We have pro boardz and we have pro bands. We have pro bagz, which are these bags you fill with sand and there are different weights inside of the little bags so you can make them lighter or heavier.
You can go on there and you can see everything that we have. We customize the colors for you. And then if you want to do more than that, we can do whatever you want and we can get as expensive as you want to get it. I’ve got a high level artist who’s, my brother in law, who is one of the best in the country, if not the world, in my opinion.
You’ve probably seen some of Tyler Arnold’s work. Chris.
Chris: I have. It’s unbelievable.
Dustin: Tyler made Coop one, a major league baseball board, so we wanted to look like the front of a baseball, on the board. Tyler hand painted that for him. The best way to do it is go to the website proboardz.com and you can check us out.
Our facebook, twitter and instagram is @pro__boardz. Any of those ways you can communicate with us and we’ll send you to the website or if we need to call you and talk to you and we can handle it that way as well.
Rob: Chris and I talk about going to the gym, way more than we actually go to the gym. I think we need to just pick up one of these boards and work out.
Chris: What I need is someone like Dustin slapping me around going, “get in the gym, get in the gym!”
LISTEN TO DUSTIN’S DAD TIP
Sponsored by: KickstartReading.com
Watch Time: 2 minutes
YouTube Link:
https://youtu.be/AIAtfhizXfE
Something that we started doing about two years ago with my son, and soon I’ll start with my daughter, we have what I call, “boy’s day”.
On Tuesdays he comes home and I say, “hey it’s boy’s day, what do you want to do?”
And we just hang and I try not to put any anything on it.
And most of the time, we end up at the baseball card shop, which is kinda cool because that’s what I grew up doing. We’ll go grab some food, we’ll just hang, wherever he wants to go. We might end up at a movie, and my wife understands it.
At first she was like, “I want to go. I want to go.” I said, “Hey, he’s getting to a place where he and dad need to hang out.”
We talk through things. Just go out to eat and sit there and talk. Leave your phone in the truck, just throw it in there and tell your wife or whoever, essentially, “Hey, I have 2 hours, I’m turning my phone off.
That’s one of the biggest things, especially with businesses, is that there’s always someone who needs you and needs you to solve a problem for them.
You just try to turn that off and just spend true time together. You could end up at the park. You can end up anywhere, but just take a day out of the week or every other week, and just push it aside because all the other stuff in this life that we’re chasing and try to do that we think is so important, it’s not that important. It really isn’t.
You know, that you’re your biggest reward one day, your biggest accomplishment is that one day when your kids are successful, and doing what they want to do, and you’ve raised them the right way, and you’ve taught them how to be polite.
And they’re giving back and they’re going to leave the world better than they found it.
Clip: Rapid Fire Questions with Dustin Moseley
Watch Time: 2 minutes
YouTube Link:
https://youtu.be/jiAN2zMrQA0
Rapid Fire Questions with Dustin Moseley:
– What was your first car? Toyota Truck
– Favorite meal to eat for dinner? Chicken Tenders, Mashed Potatoes & Gravy, Creamed Corn
– Favorite dramatic movie? 300
– Favorite comedy movie? The Hangover
-Favorite live concert you’ve seen? Garth Brooks
– You were a major league baseball player, what would was your walk-up song? The Dirt Road Anthem (by Jason Aldean); and if I was a closer: Welcome Home (by Coheed and Cambria)

Thank you Dustin, for sharing your story about your rise to the major leagues, why we should encourage our kids to play multiple sports, and the importance of carving out 1-on-1 time with your kids.
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