When the head coaching position for the University of Maine baseball team opened up last year, Mike Coutts was a natural candidate.

He played at Maine for four years and then coached there for 12 more as an assistant. In 1997, he opened a Frozen Ropes baseball training center in Massachusetts, then another, before selling them both and moving back to Maine in 2002.

At that point, Coutts teamed up with another UMaine guy, a former player of his named Mike Bordick – who was about to begin the second-to-last season of his 13-year major league career – to buy what is now Frozen Ropes in Portland.

Coutts is a baseball nut with plenty of coaching experience, so, yeah, he thought he had a decent shot at landing the Maine job. When it didn’t happen, though, he moved on and refocused his attention on the mission of Frozen Ropes.

“I’d like to coach again,” said Coutts, a Scarborough resident. “I still have a passion, but at least I’m able to stay involved with baseball and softball, doing this stuff day in and day out. Our goal is to really build and develop baseball and softball in the state of Maine.”

Not just the Portland area, the entire state.

According to Nick Caiazzo, the director of player development at Frozen Ropes, athletes travel from as far away as Ellsworth and Fryeburg to work out at the Portland facility, which was built last year.

Coutts previously had been renting space from the Portland Sports Center – and he still does when the larger complex is needed – but last year he bought some neighboring land and built his own facility.

“From all the players that come into the training center – from September to April vacation – there was probably about 9,000 people from Little League to adults that came,” said Caiazzo, a Deering High grad and Windham resident who spent five-plus seasons in the Milwaukee Brewers organization. “There are other places to go to, but I think it’s a matter of Frozen Ropes and what we’ve been established as as a business.

“We’re a little bit different here. We’re much more into the instructional part of everything, from instructing, fielding, hitting, throwing, catching, different things of the game.”

Caiazzo, Coutts and Dave Fazinna, the director of operations at Frozen Ropes, regularly travel to the company’s headquarters in New York – Coutts is a licensee – for clinics.

“We go to our corporate headquarters and learn,” said Coutts. “We try to stay ahead of the curve with the latest things that are being taught, not just physical stuff but the mental things we can talk to kids about to help them enjoy the game.

“What’s good for us is they work at a corporate level to give us new drills and better ways to market. We’ve got relationships with the Red Sox and the Mets and the Yankees. It’s not just Nick, Dave and I – and we have a baseball passion so let’s open a training center and say we can teach kids – because we’d be cheating parents and kids if we did that.”

Frozen Ropes welcomes all comers. According to Coutts, the youngest athletes are 5 years old and oldest are in their 50s. The “training tunnels” (cages) are available to rent, but Frozen Ropes also offers individual, 30-minute training sessions.

There are also camps and clinics in the summer – Bordick, who lives in Maryland, travels north to help out a few times a year – and winter leagues in the Portland Sports Center complex for younger players, as well as a college prospect team and “diamond strength” fitness program for high school-aged kids. In addition, Frozen Ropes sponsors and organizes high school all-star games played at Hadlock Field.

Right now is the company’s busy time, when everyone is cramming to get ready for the upcoming baseball and softball seasons.

“We have the people that come in from September going all the way to the beginning, or during their season they’ll come in weekly, two times a week. Or you’ll have the people that come in one time a week or one time a month, or once every other week,” said Caiazzo.

The lessons are always the same, though.

“We have to teach them to deal with failing because it is a game that you’re not going to be successful at the majority of the time,” said Caiazzo. “You’re going to fail, and now how do you deal with it?”

As the director of fast pitch softball development for Frozen Ropes, Casie Runksmeier, drills home the same lessons to the female athletes. Runksmeier, a four-year college player at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., stumbled across Frozen Ropes when she moved to the more easterly Portland.

“I said, ‘This is a place that I need to be,'” she said.

Runksmeier would likely coach a college prospect team as the softball side of things continues to grow. For now, though, she works with players like South Portland’s Kristin Kill, a part-time employee at Frozen Ropes, and her teammate, left-handed pitcher Julie DiMatteo.

“As disappointing as it was (to not get the Maine job), I think it opened up some opportunities for me to do the stuff that I’m doing here at Frozen Ropes,” said Coutts. “And I’ve been able to some things that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to do if I was coaching.”