Jernigan doesn't imagine that NBA, NFL, or NHL franchises will start converting themselves to operate like the United Way or the Red Cross. He suspects, at least at the highest levels of sports, it will take a very long time before a community-centered attitude returns. But he stays focused on his town's new ballpark, he fishes for more stories about his kids, and he doesn't fret too much about the sports world beyond. "It's enough for us," he says, "that we've shown there is another way."

Geoff Calkins (calkins@gomemphis.com) is the sports columnist at the Commercial Appeal in Memphis. Contact Dean Jernigan by email (dean.jernigan@sus.com), or learn more about the Memphis Redbirds on the Web (www.memphisredbirds.com).

What's Fast

What does it take to build a different kind of sports franchise?

A vivid imagination, an open mind, an iron will, and an appreciation for youth baseball. Here are some of the core principles of Dean Jernigan, owner of the Memphis Redbirds Triple-A baseball team:

Just because something could be a business doesn't mean that it should be a business.

That idea was Dean Jernigan's central insight. A baseball team is, and should be, part of the soul of a community. A maximum return to owners shouldn't be the goal -- maximizing returns to the community should be. So Jernigan registered it as a nonprofit 501(c)(3). All income above expenses goes to two charities that organize youth baseball leagues.

Just because something isn't a business doesn't mean that it can't be run like a business.

This season, the Redbirds drew 850,000 fans and did about $20 million in business, from tickets and luxury boxes to barbecue nachos and apparel. The Redbirds are aggressively marketed, and Jernigan just hired a director of analysis and development to, as he describes it, "take our existing cost centers and create more revenue."

Predictable plans lead to expected outcomes. And doing the unpredictable often leads to extraordinary outcomes. Dean and Kristi Jernigan could easily have followed conventional wisdom and then built their new, beautiful baseball stadium in the heart of Memphis's eastern-suburban sprawl. The park (yes, they did build it, with only about 10% public money) would have been a success and would have had little more impact on its surrounding community than a new shopping mall. By taking the risk of putting the stadium in the heart of downtown Memphis, the Redbirds have sparked a central-Memphis revival.

Good ideas don't always win -- at least not at first.

Jernigan had two interesting structural ideas for his baseball team -- one was its nonprofit status, the other was to finance the team with $72 million in bonds with contractually obligated income from the stadium. That second clause gave Jernigan's financiers at NationsBank some hesitation, enough that he had to postpone construction of the stadium by a year and find new bankers.

What is least glamorous is often most gratifying.

Jernigan had a chance to own a franchise of the Hampton Inn hotel chain. Instead, figuring that there would be plenty of competition, Jernigan founded a self-storage company. No glamour there, but plenty of demand -- and plenty of money. Jernigan's Storage USA is now the second-largest self-storage chain in the country, and Jernigan is a wealthy man.