Batter up!

When the rules change, opportunities arise.

Case in point: In September 2008, the National Collegiate Athletic Association established a new manufacturing standard for aluminum and composite baseball bats.

The ruling meant that all the baseball bats NCAA players were using would become obsolete in 2011 when the new standard took effect. From 2011 forward, all collegiate bats would have to comply with a new performance measure known by its initials, BBCOR.

BBCOR, which stands for Bat-Ball Coefficient of Restitution, bats are designed to make them comparable to wooden ones when they strike a ball. The reduced batted-ball speeds promise to reduce player injury, among other benefits.

That change sparked Robert Coello and his sister Barbara Rodriguez to start a company based in Fort Myers called Carrera Sports. Coello is a relief pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team and Rodriguez is a Fort Myers entrepreneur who has launched and operated several medical firms, including her husband's medical practice and a manufacturing firm that makes gold markers used to isolate cancerous tumors.

Their plan now is to sell top-quality bats to professional and amateur players. Carrera sells 19 different kinds of wood and BBCOR metal bats ranging in price from $35 to $289.

“Selling a bat to a coach is easier than negotiating with United Healthcare,” Rodriguez laughs. But, she adds, working through the channels for Major League Baseball to win approval for Carrera's wooden bats proved much more difficult. “Think of it as getting a product approved by the FDA,” she says, referring to the notoriously lengthy approval process at the Food & Drug Administration.

For example, every bat that Carrera makes for a professional player has to be labeled with a serial number so it can be traced for safety and fair play. An undisclosed company in upstate New York makes the bats to Carrera's specifications.

Since Coello and Rodriguez launched the company earlier this year, Carrera Sports has sold nearly 1,000 bats. Rodriguez says she's negotiating a 5,000-bat order with an undisclosed customer. “We expect Latin America will be greater than 60% of our sales,” Rodriguez says.

That's because many of the sports federations that run youth baseball teams in Latin American and Caribbean countries are just now catching up to the new BBCOR standard.

With roots in Cuba, Rodriguez speaks Spanish fluently and has been targeting Latin American and Caribbean countries such as the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Guatemala, where baseball is hugely popular.

But there are also plenty of opportunities in the U.S. For example, through his career with Major League Baseball, Coello knows coaches and players on many teams who would be interested in using Carrera bats. Coello was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds in 2004 and played with the Boston Red Sox in 2009.

In addition, high schools will want to use the new BBCOR baseball bats so their players will be familiar with them when they graduate and go to college.

Rodriguez runs the day-to-day operations of the company while her brother focuses on playing baseball. But Coello is actively involved, especially in the off-season. Rodriguez says she makes sure her brother is there to lend some star power to the company by making personal appearances as often as possible. “It's getting your brand out there,” Coello agrees.