Jane Schwechheimer: ‘You wouldn’t want to trade places, believe me’

If you can imagine being a child’s punching bag, the kind with sand at the bottom that keeps bouncing back for another hit, you might have an idea of how Jane Schwechheimer feels.

The soft-spoken widow — she’s so quiet at times you have to lean in to hear her — of Wichita Wind Surge founder Lou Schwechheimer said she’s not looking for sympathy, but she would like for people to understand the position the ball club is in.

The pandemic not only erased the team’s first season at the new Riverfront Stadium, but her husband got COVID-19 in July 2020.

Schwechheimer said her husband “had no intention when he got to the hospital that he wouldn’t walk out.”

Except he didn’t.

“It was a blow to a lot of people,” Schwechheimer said. “And it was awful.”

She and team leaders Jordan Kobritz and Matt White were left to deal with the Wind Surge’s finances, its truncated first season in 2021 and negotiations with the city over development agreements around the park.

“It was so much,” Schwechheimer said. “It was such a scramble.”

Had her husband’s death instead come five years after the club was established, everything would have been different, she said.

“There’s just so many different things that you don’t have to worry about. Like, all those things are in place.”

Instead, the club is still putting those things in place at the same time as criticisms mount over pricing at the ballpark, attendance and a lack of events that were supposed to be held there.

“Literally, it’s like, really? . . . Punch me in the face again,” Schwechheimer said.

“We just opened, and we’re fighting these . . . things that we haven’t had the chance to try and fulfill,” she said. “There are certain things that yeah, like, our lack of communication, we should have done better here. We own it.”

Still, the criticisms are hard.

“We have a young staff, and they’re like, ‘We don’t understand.’ . . . It’s tough. I have a daughter on staff, when she reads some of those comments, much as I tell her not to, I mean . . . it’s personal. . . . You wouldn’t want to trade places, believe me.”

Without Kobritz and White, she said, “I don’t think I’d be standing. Truly.”

Schwechheimer said Kobritz “takes the bullets and takes the hits, fairly or unfairly.”

Each summer, Schwechheimer makes the 24-hour drive from her home in Rhode Island to her rental in Andover for the Wind Surge’s season.

Long before she met her future husband when she was an intern for the Pawtucket, R.I., Red Sox, Schwechheimer was an athlete and sports fan. Though she’s only 5’6”, Schwechheimer played basketball on a full scholarship at St. John’s University in New York, where she received a bachelor’s degree in sports management. She went on to earn a master’s degree in higher education from the University of Rhode Island.

As much as Schwechheimer was with her husband at each step of his baseball career, she said it was he who had vision and drive. She said she still finds his legal pads with lists of goals.

“He would have these huge goals. And . . . he would get there. It was this amazing thing. . . . It might be two years. And he’d go, look . . . I crossed that last one off.”

She said her husband usually attained those goals through a circuitous route, not a straight one.

There were “curve balls, whatever you want to say.”

She said she, Kobritz and White, among others, are the ones now taking those curve balls and crossing off those goals.

“The vision stays the same,” Schwechheimer said. “We will work every day to fulfill Lou’s dream and his vision.”

She said there’s already a lot of support for the team, and she’s going to continue to build on that.

“In the future, I see success,” Schwechheimer said. “We’re going to get there.”