Simeon Woods Richardson, in addition to being a pro athlete, also is a sports fan. Before a recent St. Paul Saints game, the 24-year-old pitcher and an elderly sports reporter swapped stories of games we attended in our respective lives.
Woods Richardson hasn’t been to a Minnesota Lynx game but has kept up with the local WNBA club’s fast start to their season. Staying unbeaten “is extremely hard to do,” he noted. “That’s why I think I love sports.”
We talked hockey, a sport I first started watching as a grade schooler in Detroit and have covered for decades. “I went to my first [Minnesota] Wild playoff game a couple months ago,” Woods Richardson continued.
We both have been to at least one Super Bowl, but the Black pitcher had me on attending baseball’s fall classic: “I went to the World Series,” said Woods Richardson. “I went as a fan, but I actually didn’t like the experience. I’d rather be in it, you know – it’s the competitor in me.”
Like hockey, I first started watching baseball around the same time — I began covering the Twins in 2000 and the Saints shortly thereafter. Also, I’ve done my share of Gopher baseball and softball games over the years.
“I’m a fan of the game,” confirmed Woods Richardson. “I’m a student of the game. I love playing the game. I’m a Houston Astros guy. That’s the only team you could go watch when I was in high school [in Texas].”
Now, for at least a year, Woods Richardson has added emerging Black businessman to his life resume. He started a cookie business, and this season The Cozy Cookie is at the Twins ballpark for fans to buy at five sections inside the park.
“It took a lot of trial and error with the cookies,” he pointed out of his brand’s five signature flavors. “We got golden Oreo — I’m a big fan of Oreo; chocolate chip, butter brown, velvet, gluten free, and the “Deuce Monster,” a colored blue cookie with white morsels.
“My golden Oreo is pretty good,” he said with pride.
Woods Richardson recalled after a pitching start with the Twins last season sitting around his room with his trainer and longtime friend Aaron Robinson, a Minneapolis native who now lives in Houston, snacking down on cookies.
“I said, ‘Man with all those cookies that we eat and all this money that we spend on all those cookies, [we] might as well just make our own,” said Woods Richardson. At Robinson’s urging he began putting together a business plan, using his mother as a main inspiration.
“I was so little,” Woods Richardson recalled, “and she would take me on trips to Dallas to go take care of her grandmother. In the meantime, she would always cook, and I would just spend hours just watching her cook, helping her cook. I learned a lot from her in the kitchen.”
What also helped was traveling across the country visiting cookie shops. Among the challenges of starting a cookie business is not doing what existing cookie companies are doing, but rather coming up with ingredients and flavors that set his cookies apart from the others.
Being successful in business is not a snap, even for a pro athlete such as Woods Richardson, and even more as a cookie maker “where inventing cookies and remaking cookies, and messing up cookies sometimes because you’re not going to get a perfect [cookie] the first try,” surmised the Saints pitcher.
“So, it’s like finding which one works for us, and then go from there.”
Charles Hallman welcomes reader comments to challman@spokesman-recorder.com.