Ex-baseball star Strawberry opens treatment center near DeLand – Daytona Beach News-Journal

Many people know the 6-foot-6 inch former right fielder Darryl Strawberry for a series of blunders outside his usual role as a standout Major League Baseball player. For a time, Strawberry was in the public eye for all the wrong reasons, dogged by a well-chronicled struggle with drugs.

Fast forward 10 years and Strawberry, who now resides in the Orlando area, has channeled those experiences into an enterprise focused on rehab programs for others still on a similar path.

“We know we can’t save everybody but we know we got a message to carry to help someone who’s still suffering,” he said Friday evening at the grand opening ceremony for the latest facility in his new line of work: helping others overcome addiction. Located just outside DeLand, the second Darryl Strawberry Recovery Center will officially open in January 2016.

From the early-1980s until the late 90s, Strawberry played for the New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants and the New York Yankees. He was known for his big swing and tape-measure home runs, which helped his teams win four World Series.

Off the field was a different story. In a biography, Strawberry described his life from 1994 and into the 2000s as “falling down a long, long flight of stairs.”

“Of course, I went to several treatment centers myself and struggled with addiction for such a long time,” Strawberry said. “I know that treatment works, it’s just a matter of a patient getting to the place of coming out of denial. I was in denial for a long time, and, probably, I think a lot of us are like that.”

For his second center, Strawberry and business partners Oglethorpe Inc., a Tampa-based health care management company, have chosen a location at a familiar address. It was one of the facilities operated by Windward Behavioral Care.

Windward facilities were abruptly closed in May after the nonprofit’s board said it would be too difficult to pay money it owed back to the state. Although many services were picked up by Stewart-Marchman-Act Behavioral Healthcare, the shuttering of the facilities left a void in Volusia County’s substance abuse treatment community.

Oglethorpe CEO John Picciano, who co-founded the chain of recovery centers, said they saw a two-fold opportunity in the nonprofit’s closing. The Darryl Strawberry Center could expand in the region and help fill the need for treatment services at the same time.

“I called up the (Windward) CEO and told her we were interested, we were in the business and made an offer to her to purchase the property in a week,” Picciano said.

The property at 2775 Big John Drive was purchased in August for $605,000, county records show. Picciano said they invested about $350,000 in renovating the 33-bed facility located in a forested patch between DeLand and Daytona Beach. They’re also looking to hire as many 50 people, including nurses, therapists and recovery technicians, a company official said. 

Like the first Darryl Strawberry Recovery Center, which opened two years ago in St. Cloud, the Volusia County treatment center will offer a 28-day residential treatment program for substance abuse and prescription medication. The program will include medical detoxification, primary treatment and a 1-year “continuing care plan” tailored to a patient’s needs. Initially, the center will offer 12 beds and officials hope to ultimately provide services to 50 clients. 

Picciano said he and Strawberry are mulling the possibility of expanding into the Detroit area, Ohio and farther south into Florida, maybe Sarasota. “We’d like to go to the west coast,” Picciano said.

As recovery centers go, the location in an unincorporated area is ideal for drug treatment, Strawberry said.

“It’s a unique area because it’s off the road,” he said. “That’s where you want to put facilities where they’re off the road and away from everything, where one comes to treatment and there’s nowhere to go.”