Meet the Gnarlies, NSB's summer baseball team

Juan “JT” Tejera, Jr. ended his days on the baseball diamond in 2023 when a family matter forced him to leave college in Jacksonville and move back home to Homestead.

Eric Torres loved being the clubhouse manager for the Daytona Tortugas, the single A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds, but Covid and a restructuring of the clubhouse manager system drove him out of baseball in 2020.

Ryan Webb was assistant athletic director for football at Florida International University in Miami but he left in 2024, spending the next year working for an in-person networking company that was establishing operations in multiple cities.

Now, Tejera, Torres and Webb are back in baseball, or sports in Webb’s case, having signed up for part-time or summer gigs to bring collegiate summer ball to New Smyrna Beach and three other towns on our coast starting in about five weeks.

The NSB team doesn’t have a roster yet but it has a name, the New Smyrna Gnarlies, and a matching logo that depicts a narwhal marine mammal playing on a gnarly wave. As of last week, players were still being recruited, a van was needed for away games, host families needed to be found for players, and sponsors were being sought.

Once things come together, and organizers are confident they will, the Gnarlies will play 20 games in June and July against three other newly formed teams: the Cocoa Tailgators, Palm Coast Big Buoys, and St. Augustine Sardines.

Baseball in New Smyrna Beach has for years centered mainly around the Cudas, the high school team with a rich history tracing back to at least the 1930s. For a time, the Cudas were joined by a men’s team, the Crackers, which started out as a semi-pro team that played, for example, the Cocoa Indians, before shifting to amateur ball in 1949. For at least one spring, 1948, a minor league team, the Roanoke Red Sox, managed by former Sox third baseman Pinky Higgins, trained in NSB. That same year a baseball diamond was opened on the North Causeway with front page fanfare.

If those were the glory days, they did not last long. The Crackers are gone, and so is the field on the North Causeway. Games are now played at the Sports Complex on the city’s fringe, where the Gnarlies will play on the same field that the Cudas use.

“I would say there's a lot of communities that had better baseball days in their past, and that's part of why I want to do what I do,” says Alec Allred, 31, a former professional independent league player and the engine behind bringing college ball to this area.

The history of that endeavor is a short one: Allred and his father, Reggie, decided to start a college summer league in North Carolina in 2018, called the Old State League. Alec helped set up the teams during down time while playing independent league ball as a utility fielder. “I did most of the stuff that you could do remotely. I hired the coaches, helped recruit the teams, I would, for the most part, do the majority of the scheduling. I would order all the uniforms and the bats, the equipment,” he recalls.
Those two roles lasted for a while, but in Gastonia, Georgia, Allred’s four-year pro career ended with a conversation. “I was there for, I felt like 37 seconds, before they told me that I sucked and I needed to go home,” he jokes. After a couple tears on the drive home, “it was time to move on.”

Being a high energy guy and very much a people person, he created The Players League with the goal of expanding collegiate summer baseball from North Carolina into other states. The Players League now has member leagues in six states with the addition of the newly formed Orange State League, of which the Gnarlies are a member. The Old State League formed by Alec and his father continues to operate under The Players League umbrella.

Flash forward to this year, and Allred concedes that negotiations with the City of New Smyrna Beach for use of the Sports Complex took longer than expected. The City Commission approved the agreement on April 14 as part of the consent agenda, leaving just 45 days to recruit players and field the team.

“I'm not going to lie to you and say I wouldn't have liked to start New Smyrna back in September or October. Of course I would have, but I feel like we've got a good staff in place, and we've got a system in place,” Allred says.

At the moment, the New Smyrna Gnarlies are owned by a subsidiary of The Players League, New Smyrna Beach Baseball, LLC, which Allred says is typical early on until a local, private ownership group forms.

Webb, 28, was hired in February to be commissioner of the Orange State League. It’s a part-time role that he will fulfill from Denver while also making trips to Florida, where he and his wife have roots, family and friends. “It's not every day you get to be a part of inaugural baseball season, which is huge,” says Webb. In April, he also took a full-time job as operations manager of the professional Premier Lacrosse League.

Tejera, 24, is on contract to come up from South Florida for the summer to coach the Gnarlies. He is a physical education teacher and athletic director at South Prep Scholars Academy in Princeton, Florida, near Homestead.

Torres is from Deltona and is the general manager of the Gnarlies. He views Tejera as the right guy to lead a group of highly competitive college players living in a beach town for the summer. In addition to growing their baseball skills, he wants Tejera to focus on showing them how to act off the field. “People think that when I say that, I'm talking about behaving and not breaking the law and not getting into trouble. And I do, but I also mean engaging with the community, reaching out to local organizations and making yourself available to them, even if it's just as a speaking role, because believe it or not the connection made with the community really, really makes a difference during game days,” he says.

At 24, Tejera is not long removed from college. A catcher and first baseman, he initially played for a college in Pennsylvania but struggled with being so far from his family in South Florida. “I'm in college playing baseball. I'm the first person in my family to do this, but yet I look around and there's no one to celebrate it with me.” On top of that, he didn’t gel with the team. “I think my specific class of guys was just a bit rough,” he says. So he transferred to Trinity Baptist College (now Trinity College) in Jacksonville.

For a time, he was bitter that his college experience and playing days ended abruptly with a family matter that he doesn’t want to discuss. “It’s taken me about two years to fully process and heal over not playing anymore,” he says. “I found a more holistic version of myself. I found a more wise, calm, confident person that people want to be around, and that does good things, you know?”

Those are among the experiences that have shown him the kind of coach he wants to be. “For me, it's not inherently homing in on their talent. It’s homing in on, like, who they are,” he says. “A team that has good chemistry is going to play a lot better than a team full of egos. So for me, my coaching mentality and philosophy is very player oriented, and it’s getting the best out of who they are as a man, as a person, because when you can kind of get them at that level, the game feels like a game again.”

As for his age, Tejera thinks it’s a help, not a hindrance. He won’t be a “back in my day” coach. “I understand the game how they understand it,” he says.

Meanwhile, up in North Carolina, Allred is presumably keeping an eye on the business aspects of the Gnarlies and the other teams forming up. “All good is driven by money and all bad is driven by money,” he muses. He’s sure that growing grassroots, community baseball is one of the good things. “We want our teams to be good stewards of the game and be good stewards in their community,” he says.

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