All photos courtesy of the Plymouth Outlaws

BaseballSoftballUK is highlighting some of the most successful clubs and leagues across Great Britain, sharing their knowledge and wisdom in the hopes that it can help others! For more information, or to have your organisation considered, please contact David here.

The Club of the Month for October 2026 is the Plymouth Outlaws! Club and Coach Officer David Turner spoke with Chairman Jack Parsons. (The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity)

DT: Jack, tell us a little bit about the Outlaws and how the last 12 months have been going.

JP: The Outlaws were formed in April 2025 by a small group of us. There's been baseball played in Plymouth since the Second World War, so there's a lot of history with the sport here. We're not the only club in Plymouth, but we were very much aware that the growth of the game supported more baseball activity and felt that there was an opportunity to really Introduce baseball as a sport to people, obviously, but more so as a kind of community. I don't want to be too cheesy but something me and the other people who founded the club felt; as a man in your, you know, in my early 30s, it's very easy to be quite socially isolated. I've been working remotely since the COVID pandemic, and that was six years ago now. A lot of people have had their lives really like altered and we've all just moved on as best we can. Sport is such a great way to bring people together and get you out of the house and get you feeling better. So that was a big motivation for us - it wasn't about forming an NBL level team to go and win it all. Winning is obviously more fun than losing, right? But it's not the sort of be all and end all of what we're doing.

The main sort of success metric for us was how many people can we introduce to baseball. And we really pushed the social media side of it. For better or worse, social media is here to stay and there's such an opportunity for people to find things they never knew existed. The amount of people who come to their first session and say, 'I had no idea that people played baseball in Britain.'  And then you say, 'well, yeah, there's two clubs in Plymouth alone. You know, it's not a huge city. This isn't London. This isn't Bristol or Birmingham, but within an hour and a half radius of us, we've got New Forest, we've got Exeter, we got Cornish Claycutters, loads of teams and a real community.

So, yeah, the last 12 months have been massive. We never expected that we would enter two adult teams into the league this year. Our development team, our Division 5 team, we've had 26 people play for that this year and 21 of them had never played a baseball game before this season. It's been a huge learning curve, but so exciting to see people really develop a love for the sport, that's just been been amazing. It's really grown very rapidly, and we've dealt with the struggles that come with that, with that rapid growth, but we've really, I think, shown the baseball. has a very bright future in the UK and in particular here in the Southwest.

DT: It sounds like like men's mental health in particular, and the social aspect of that, that's kind of been lost in society, not just because of COVID, because I think this has been happening for a long time, but it was certainly exacerbated. Has that been a motivating factor? 

JP: 100%. We've had a number of players who've come to me both privately and openly who have said just how much It's improved their mental and physical health. So many people who were like me, who felt socially isolated through, working from home or not even just that, people with young families who perhaps their life very easily becomes sort of work, home, work home, work home, you know, and you don't really get much time for yourself. So it's definitely been a massive outlet for people, I think, and one of the big, big motivators for getting people involved.

DT: What have been some of those big wins over the last 18 months?

JP: The amount of people playing the game who had never played it before has been a huge, huge win. We've launched our youth program, the Banditos, we call them - everything has a Wild West kind of theme, hence the Outlaws. So, you see some cowboy hats and stuff on our Instagram. The youth program is still very much in its infancy, pardon the pun. It's three or four months old and seeing the progression in these kids is...well, It's so good, it's almost depressing to see a 12-year-old boy who's throwing the ball as hard as some of our more veteran players  But it's super exciting to see!

At that age, children just absorb things and listen to what you say to them mostly. Whereas we - at times - are teaching grown men and women sort of how to throw a baseball, really getting into the fundamentals of the sport, the kids take to it like that and progressing rapidly. So that's a huge one as well. And - I don't necessarily want to make this about sort of results and on the field stuff, but I will mention it - our D4 team are in the finals of the BBF playing at Farnham this weekend come in, so that's super exciting. So yeah, you know, we've had some good on-field success. It's not the be-all and end-all of the club, but it is a lot more fun when you win than when you lose every weekend, right? That's been a real highlight as well, 45 different people represented the club and the vast majority of those are people who've never played the sport and probably didn't even know what baseball was 12 months ago. Super proud and excited about those things.

DT: So in terms of the club itself, you've had a lot of success with people that maybe haven't had any baseball experience. What sort of advice have you got to reassure clubs that are looking to set up but maybe don't have a big community of people that have already been involved with lots of expertise in baseball? How have you reassured people to say, right, get involved?

JP:  This is, I think, probably the biggest advice I would give to any club, is to show the world to your members. If you want to attract more people, you need to show them off on social media. You need to be sort of quite crude and pragmatic about it. If you have older players, for example, and you show them that they are just as much a part of the team as your 19-year-old kid who's throwing crazy, then that is how, words don't really mean anything. We can all say we're an inclusive club and yada, yada, yada, yada. But if you only show the top team,  the most athletic people, you're not gonna get those other people who think it can't be for them. We've seen people who would turn up and quite frankly, they're terrible, right? You know, like I was terrible when I first started playing. I couldn't throw a ball. You know, I'd never played a sort of throwing sport before. 

It takes time. Baseball physically can be a difficult sport to play. We've seen people who've really taken to it rapidly and the amount of improvement they've made is massive. In terms of women's recruitment, we've got a strong core of women's players which is something we were really keen to get. We really show that off. Same with the youth stuff. You have to show people who look like you as the audience. So if you're a  guy in your 50s thinking I haven't played sport in 20 years, if you see someone else doing it, you think, 'oh, he looks like me, I could do that.' And that's been something we've really championed, getting people to speak about their experience on camera to our audience. And we don't take it too seriously - one of our videos that got like hundreds of thousands of views, we have a radar gun and we were just doing a bit of a 'how hard can you start a challenge'. These are like our rookie players, so the speeds are really low and the comments on Facebook and Instagram, a lot of Americans were just completely ripping us for being terrible. But -  it really kind of got us out there. And we don't take it too seriously. Again, I think the level that most clubs are playing at, there's no need to act like this is the MLB. If you're an NBL-level Club or Division two, three, fine, but at the level of baseball we're playing at, It's not crisp and precise. It's messy. There's a lot of errors. So we don't shy away from trying to make it look perfect. You know, we keep the scruffy, bad hits in the videos. We keep the drop catches in the videos. We make it so everyone can see that, 'okay, I don't have to actually be some sort of super athlete to play this.'

DT: I guess that's more authentic, isn't it? In fact, that leads us beautifully on to the sort of question about you are very strongly in the social media side of things. It has certainly been a success, you know, how have you managed to do that? And have you got any advice for other clubs in that area?

JP: The main thing is showing the the real side of baseball, whether that's like it's a January and we're indoors in a small little cramped sports or throwing balls around. That's been really good and authentic. We're not trying to present sort of too much, and we are very lucky here at the Outlaws. We've got a lot of talented people who make sure our graphics look good, our videos are quite polished. But the actual substance of the content is pretty basic. A lot of what we've done is just get people in front of a camera and say a bit like what we're doing now, 'what's been your experience effectively?'

Put that out there. And again, to go back to my point - show people who look like them [the audience] and they'll find it. So, and again, people are a little bit reluctant at first, a little bit camera shy, don't want to do it. And then once one or two people do it, then people think, 'oh, actually, like that was quite cool.' That video got like 5,000 views or something and loads of like really nice comments, so then people are like, 'Ohhyeah, I'll do one of those videos.'  We do really simple content - like what's in my baseball bag video? I see these things on Instagram, and you sort of watch them, just you think, 'oh, what was that gloves that guy using?' 'Oh, what bats, you know, does he use?' So we do stuff like that, and again, we show most people haven't got some like £400 Heart of the Hide custom glove - some people do, great. But a lot of people have got like a £50 glove and they're using one of the club bats and whatever. Baseball is really good for that. You don't really need a lot of equipment

Not everything has to be perfect. Just put it out there. The amount of times I see clubs throughout the season that are always struggling for players; they come and say 'it's like bare bones.' I think, but I've not seen you post anything on social media apart from maybe the results. The only people who care about the results are people who already know about your team. Nobody else cares about that stuff.

DT: If you're only filming videos where every drill is executed perfectly and you're probably not going to post very much at all.

JP:  If you're waiting till you get to go to Farnham Park to see a real baseball field, that's not going to work. We play at a school, on a school field, like so many clubs do. That's absolutely fine. I don't think care about the facilities you have, or how shiny your equipment is, or how new your band helmets are, or how good your logo is, or any of that stuff. I don't think people care at all. You know, people want a club where they feel they can be a part of it. Something we always say to people is, 'how much you give in is how much you can get out,' right? So that's, if you want to improve physically, the more training you come to, the better you're going to get. The more you take the advice of the coaching, the better you're going to get. The more you want to be involved with the social aspect of it, the more you can get out of it. And that's something that I think has been really good from as a new club, building that sort of culture and ethos from the beginning, you can do whatever you want. We're very sort of open to people getting involved with things. But yeah, however much you put in is how much you're going to get out. And that's up to you, whether it's a lot or a little, that's okay.

DT: In terms of the brand itself, how did you go about deciding on and establishing the brand? Is that a really important part of what you do?

JP: Yes and no. There's already a club in Plymouth, the Mariners, who've been here for 20 years, great club, I've played there, and they've got a real strong identity. So obviously Plymouth's a very naval city. So we thought, well, we can't have another one like that. And it was a bit like, oh, well, what can we be called? Because some names are better than others, aren't they, in British baseball? And to be honest, I think we were just like, Cowboys are really popular at the moment. I think we'd all watch Yellowstone. And like, we're really into that. Honestly, it just kind of came about from that and we were sort of like, 'If you got the Wild West, somewhere in the Southwest, we were kind of like the Wild Southwest!' There's a bit of a bit of a reach.

DT: Okay, so there's no there's no specific Plymouth link to cowboys?

JP: If there is a link to Plymouth Cowboys, I would love for someone to tell me.

DT:  Well, there'll be somebody on the internet that knows.

JP: Yeah, and I guess perhaps a little bit because there was already a team here and we were a new team. It was like something a bit different and maybe stuff like that. Kind of fit the zeitgeist a bit, and we've had a lot of fun with the cowboy hats and stuff like that. I think more broadly, since the club formed, there's a bar down on the waterfront here in Plymouth that's opened called Montana Saloon. They've now become, effectively, our local. So it was like when they opened, we dropped them an e-mail, like, what?

DT: That's your new clubhouse. If it doesn't have doors that swing open, then I'm not interested.

JP: Unfortunately it doesn't - but It does have saddles; instead of like a bar stool at the top of the bar stool, it's got a saddle. So that kind of makes up for the lack of swinging doors. For us, you know, it's a business opportunity as well. They sponsor us from a practical level and that's money for the club, right? You know, it's somewhere for us to organise social events, we get a discount in there, all that good stuff. And we've got a big poster up of our club in there, you know, and this is like one of the main, on like the main strip of bars and restaurants in the city. Forging those sort of local connections has been a really good thing for us.That kind of community partnership with various other sort of clubs and sort of small businesses.
You know, to be mutually beneficial, maybe I'll give you another brief example. There's a shop here that do trading cards, baseball cards, pokémon cards, that sort of stuff. And that's something that has massively exploded in popularity in the last few years. Everyone my age says, I had loads of pokémon cards when I was a kid, and I gave them all away - now they're worth a lot. Anyway, they work with a few other sports teams, sponsorship-wise and they came on board as a sponsor for us. They put on a big event ar the big leisure centre here,  a trading card, collectible show. They asked us, would you come and do like an activation? So we had a pitching challenge,  we took the radar gun. We had like members of the public having a go, throwing a ball. We actually got quite a few people who've since joined the club because they were interested in the trading card hobby. They came along, they tried out our our little challenge, and now they're part of the club, so putting the work into those sort of off-field partnerships has been has been really big for us not just in terms of money - obviously that that always plagues any any sports club trying to, you know, finance things -  but bringing people through the door, and again, using their platform to reach a whole new base of people, and and it's good for them, you know, because baseball's a it's a bit of a niche thing. It's something a bit different for their like, for their algorithm sort of thing. So, you know, the point I'm trayuing to make is that if it's mutually beneficial, embrace the community for mutual gain - they they get they got us to run this activation for free, right? But that's OK, because they already sponsored us and we got two or three new players out of it, so it was all worth all worthwhile.

DT: You've had some great success on social media.

JP: We've really fortunate that it's sort of taken off in a massive way. And in the, since the club formed at the end of April 2025, we had over 5 million views across all platforms. So yeah, which is pretty significant. From a really practical level, that's something you can go to potential sponsors with and say that we have an audience here of people in our city and that can open up those conversations for you. That really helped us. 

DT: What is your current situation in terms of coaching and how do you see that evolving and having an impact on what is happening at the club? I know you said that it's not all about performance and on the field results, but there's more to coaching than just getting better. There's the social aspect and the camaraderie that goes with coaching as well.

JP: Absolutely, and that sort of the personal development is something that we're really keen on. We surveyed our players and pretty much everyone said that personal development was more important than on field results. People would rather feel like they've had a positive impact in the game, even if the game doesn't go their way kind of thing. But yeah, coaching has been one of the biggest challenges for us, purely because we've had such a large influx of people who've never played before, and we've had then a smaller group of people who are quite experienced, so we really had to lean on those people to show the new people.; It's almost  a sort of iterative process; we're training the new people to train the new people to train the new people on the basics. And that's really helped, I think, to keep people engaged because we can sort of say, 'oh, you've been playing for two or three months now and you've really like improved your throwing mechanics,' for example. Then when a new person comes, we can pair them up with that person who's still quite new so people don't feel overwhelmed by someone throwing like really well or really hard or whatever.

It's definitely been a big challenge for us to bring people up to speed, and we we saw that in some of our pre-season games - we really sort of had to throw people in at the deep end into games. And that is just kind of the best way to learn as well by doing it. We've been really fortunate. Our head coach, he played as a youth player and he played in the GB programme. So he and then he kind of aged out of the sport. There weren't opportunities for him to play as an adult. I spent 20 years doing other things and he's come back to the sport and really
championed our coaching programme effectively. But, for the most part, it's been just bringing people up to speed with the real basics. Coaching for us is only going to be more of a priority next season because we now have this massive group of people, 60-70 percent of the club who have the basics down now. They can throw the ball, they can catch the ball, they can hit the ball. They mostly know, you know, the intricacies of tagging up on a fly ball or running on a dropped third strike, those sort of things. The challenge for us now is how do we get those players from that sort of very basic level to the next level to really push from our development team into our more competitive team and our competitive team has performed really well. We've got a D4 and a D5 team this season. Our D4 team was in the national final this year. So we've got quite a big gap between our Division 5 team who finished bottom of their division and our Division 4 team who finished top of theirs. There's quite the the gulf in experience that we need to really bridge that.

What we don't want to do is have players feel like they're sort of stuck at the level that they came in at. One of our real key aims for the club as we grow is for there to be that progression  and longer term, we'd love to have teams at , at every level effectively, so that everyone can play at the level that suits them. But more important than that is having that ability for people to move up and down when they need to. So people don't feel like, 'oh, I've been stuck in the like worst team for five years' kind of thing. So yeah, the coaching, how we get those people from the level they're at to take the next step to the level of our experienced players. Coaching is gonna play a massive part of that.

DT: Looking forward, what are you really excited about for the next 12 months?

JP: A lot! More things than I could list here. At a basic level, I'd like us to be building the foundations for another team so we have two adult competitive teams. I'd like us to be getting to the point of another one to again really help that sort of progression system, get people playing in the right team. The thing I'm probably most excited about is our youth programme. We are really hoping and helping to drive some plans around putting a bit of a mini youth.... league is a strong word, so I won't say league, but some formalised playing for our youth programme because there's a lot of clubs around us doing a really good job, Exeter being one of them in our region, along with Taunton, Bristol; these teams that have some really good youth programmes. That forms another layer of our development pyramid, if you like, that once these kids age out of our youth programme, we need to have somewhere for them to go and the way that some of them are looking, they'll need that. Back in the day, there was only opportunities for youth baseball in Plymouth. There wasn't that adult game, there wasn't a league, there weren't teams nearby. So they kind of aged out of the sport and that was it.  I'm really keen to make sure that doesn't happen with our youth team. But equally, having seen the talent in that team, there's going to be people in there that it's not going to be like a linear, okay, well, now you're going to go into our development team, then our Division Four, then our Division Three team. Some of these guys are going to go straight to the top because they're so good and they're receiving proper coaching. So we need to put those structures in place.

So yeah, in 12 months time, I'd love to see, you know, participation increasing. I'd love to see some of our people who've been rookies this year really get their teeth into helping to develop the next wave. Because that's something I'm always so keen to highlight, you can't let clubs run just by the actions of like one or two people, just because we're all volunteers, right? Yeah, 100%. Sustainability is exactly the word to use. I want to make sure that the club can exist if I left or if whoever left, you know what I mean, that there would still be that structure in place.

There's so many clubs that you think, okay, if one guy gets fed up with doing all this, or he moves house, you know, or whatever, then that club could just kind of go bang. Really getting people to help shape that next wave of new recruits, and just continue to promote the sport. That's been the most exciting thing for us, seeing new players. And I'd love to tell you in 12 months time, like I have today, we had, 20, however many people played their first ever game of baseball this year. I'd love to say next year, again, we had another 20, 30 people played their first ever game of baseball this year. That's what I'm really excited about.

DT: That sounds fantastic and it's great to hear you trying to create that sustainability because one thing I certainly would advise is don't have all the pressure on you. You know, the more we can spread the responsibility and the roles, it is great. And with that being the case, final question from me is just if you have one bit of advice for clubs up and down the country,
What would it be?

JP: I would get your iPhone out or whatever phone of choice at a training session and I'd go up to someone and I'd say, can you just tell me why someone who's in your situation, your age, your gender, your background, whatever, why should they come and join this club? You know, don't just get ChatGPT to make you a cool looking poster and post it. Just show the human side of it, whether that seems really boring to you. It doesn't matter. If one person sees it and joins, it's already paid for itself, right and it hasn't cost you anything to do it, crucially. You don't need to be an editing whiz. You don't need to be some graphic design genius. You don't need anything. You just need decent fun, which let's be honest, everyone's got. Just go up, and let the players do the recruiting for you. Everyone has a friend, who has a friend, who has a friend. That's your network right there. Get people involved, get them to post about things on their own social media.

DT: People don't have to be from baseball, do they? You can bring in skills from the community, from the local area that doesn't necessarily have to be from people that have an interest in baseball. They might want to get involved because they're really good in video skills, for example, video editing.

JP: One hundred percent. Any volunteers are worth having, right? If you've got someone who knows, and you will, within a club, there'll be some guy who has a bit of an interest, who's maybe just been a bit too shy to put their hand up and say, oh, I can do that. You know, we really built a culture of, 'If you've got a talent. To be honest, we kind of rely on you for it.' The minute I see someone say, oh, yeah, I used to take a few photos. Oh, I did a bit of graphic design, I think. Okay, let's, we're going to chat after training and, yeah, exactly. So yeah, don't be sort of too possessive of things, I think is the main thing, use the talents you have. To boil it down to one sentence, show people real people, and you will get more of those people. If you want more youth people for your youth program, show the kids, you know, within reason. You want more female players? Show the female players you want. It's kind of prescriptive, but we found that that's really worked. So if it works here, I'm sure it can work anywhere.