Dashawn Patrick has always been a fighter while constantly searching, it seemed, for a place to call home. He is a product of the state of Washington’s foster care system who went on to play baseball at a couple of West Coast junior colleges, got drafted and played professionally for three years in minor and independent leagues.
Today, the 47-year-old Patrick is still actively involved in baseball but has most certainly expanded his focus beyond the ball fields of his youth. He has used his life experiences to found both PREP LINKS, a business that is “committed to helping athletes and families become proactive in the recruiting process” and an organization called YOUTH IN CARE LAUNCHPAD which “encourages youth in foster care, specifically adolescents, to participate in extracurricular activities.”
These are not divergent pursuits. Patrick set both of them in motion based on his experiences and what he calls “the blessing of baseball” which helped him understand that the only thing that really matters is what a person can do for others.
“The mindset I have learned from baseball is a ‘we’ mentality, and if we approach life as ‘we’ the results are always fruitful,” Patrick told Perfect Game in telephone and email correspondence this week. “So, when I coach kids and they tell me they ‘love’ baseball, I just smile and say, ‘So do I’, but for an entirely different reason. Baseball saved my life.”
Patrick – whose full name is Otis Dashawn Patrick – resides in and runs his business from Mill Creek, Wash., which is about 20 miles north of Seattle. Mill Creek might be best known for its nationally prominent Little League Baseball program.
He has served as an assistant baseball coach at Mill Creek Jackson High School for the past three years and also runs a travel team program called Northwest Sting Baseball.
In the past, Northwest Sting fielded teams from 13u to 18u but last year Patrick decided to narrow the focus to only a 17u/18u group in an effort to help the kids whose high school careers were complete find a good fit for college. That, naturally, goes hand-in-hand with his work at PREP LINKS.
“We really turned it into, ‘OK, what can we do for you after this?’” Patrick said. “I really started to just narrow it down to helping kids move beyond their (high school) select teams.”
No Northwest Sting team has ever entered a Perfect Game tournament, but Patrick encourages his players to try to hook up with other travel teams that might be playing in a PG tournament simply for exposure purposes. He said he had seven players from his 2014 roster join other teams that played in PG WWBA events in Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere.
Patrick’s childhood background is complicated, but it is that upbringing that has directed his focus as an adult. He is also quick to point out that throughout his youth and teen years there was always just one constant, the game of baseball.
By Patrick’s own account, both of his birth parents were in an out of prison when he was just a toddler and he first entered the state of Washington’s foster care system when he was three years old (along with a brother and sister).
He proceeded to move in and out of the system until he aged out of it when he turned 18. There were times when Patrick was between the ages of three and seven that he would be returned to either his mother or father for brief stints, but ultimately end up back in foster care, and usually with a different family than the one he’d been with previously.
When he turned seven years old the state stepped in and decided the Patrick siblings were going back-and-forth far too frequently, and it was finally able to find a family that agreed to take all three for an extended time. The siblings stayed with that family for seven years and discovered a sense of stability for the first time in their lives.
“That was huge, because that allowed us to have the same home, the same teams with the same kids, the same neighborhood, the same schools; it was just huge,” Patrick said.
At age 15, Patrick entered what is called “kinship care” a foster care program that allows children go to live with a blood relative. In the Patrick kids’ case, that was their grandmother, and Patrick lived with her until he graduated from Seattle Ballard High School and turned 18 years old.
That 18th birthday marked a turning point in Patrick’s life. He was now really on his own and without parents to help him make crucial decisions – but he still had baseball to fall back on.
A scout from the Houston Astros organization – Patrick could not recall his name – had told a then-15 year old Patrick that he was a pretty darn good player and if he applied himself he might be able to play professionally someday. Patrick was only 5-foot-8 and weighed about 160 pounds, but he could run a 6.49-second 60-yard dash and he decided he would indeed do the work necessary to realize what to many might have seemed like an over-sized goal.
It had to start with college, but that wouldn’t be easy either. Patrick didn’t have the grades to get admitted to a four-year school but came to realize that junior college could be an option. He asked several Seattle-area high school coaches that he had played against for three years to write letters of recommendation to junior colleges across the country and he soon had seven offers in hand.
He first attended Riverside (Calif.) City College but he wanted to be closer to where he had grown up and transferred to Edmonds Community College in Lynnwood, Wash. After his freshman season, the Seattle Mariners drafted Patrick in the 25th round of the 1987 MLB amateur draft – the same year the Mariners took Ken Griffey Jr. with the first overall pick in the draft – and gave him a modest signing bonus, and he went on to play professionally for the next three years.
After his playing career ended, Patrick began working fulltime while also taking classes at the University of Washington where he eventually earned his degree. He then started both the YOUTH IN CARE LAUNCHPAD organization and the PREP LINKS business in 2012.
“I feel that at the very least, if the kid is an athletic kid, if he has a marketable skillset – meaning that some level of college is interested in him, whether it’s junior college, NAIA, (NCAA) D-I, D-II, D-III – somebody should be there to assist these families without charging them three or four thousand dollars for that service,” Patrick said of the PREP LINKS model. “It’s worked and it’s been great and I just feel like it’s the right thing for athletes and families.”
PREPS LINKS is very important to Patrick; it is his business and it is what puts food on his family’s table. But because of his upbringing it is YOUTH IN CARE LAUNCHPAD he is most passionate about. The organization partners with many other foster care organizations from across the country that share the goal of encouraging foster care kids to participate in extracurricular activities with its “GO PLAY LIFE” program.
“It can be sports, dance, music – anything that they can do to get them involved so they can understand structure, they can understand how to set goals and achieve goals, and more importantly how to complete goals,” Patrick said.
As if he didn’t have enough irons in the fire, Patrick also wrote a book titled “And Some RISE Above It” which Patrick said has "inspired" more than 30,000 readers. One review of the book read: “(This) is not just a baseball book, it is a life book. It will be remembered for its impact on the lives of young people.”
Patrick recalled for PG that when he was playing in his first minor league season in Bellingham, Wash., in 1987 – Griffey Jr. was with the same team that year – the other players would often ask him about his family and why they never came to watch him play, given that Bellingham is only about 90 miles from Seattle.
He would dodge the questions the best he could, but they did serve to get him thinking about his life and what it all meant, and how baseball had been the one constant in his life since he was eight years old.
“It was then I thought about helping foster kids who grew up like me,” he told PG. “I wanted to tell them that they would have to be stronger and more resilient but if they kept working and stayed positive and never assumed the role of a victim, they can make it.”