What Baseball’s Spring Training Teaches Insurance Carriers About Hurricane Season Preparedness

Every February, Major League Baseball’s 30 franchises pack up and head south. The games do not count. The standings are meaningless. Nobody is watching the box scores in late February with any real urgency. And yet every serious organization sends its full roster, its coaching staff, its development prospects, and its front office decision-makers to Florida or Arizona for six weeks of deliberate preparation before a single pitch is thrown in a game that matters.

Spring training is not theater. It is infrastructure. It is how the best organizations build the depth, conditioning, and operational flexibility required to perform across a long, unpredictable, grueling season.

Insurance carriers should pay close attention now, as the parallels are nearly exact and the stakes are considerably higher.

The Season You Are Actually Managing

The insurance calendar has a season. Every carrier executive knows it, even if the industry rarely frames it in those terms. The Atlantic hurricane season officially opens on June 1 and runs through November 30. But the operational strain that accompanies a major CAT event does not arrive on a convenient schedule. It arrives fast, it peaks hard, and it exposes every gap in your organizational readiness that you chose not to address when conditions were calm.

The 2024 hurricane season was a reminder that the forecasters are not exaggerating. Helene and Milton arrived within two weeks of each other, generating surges in claims that overwhelmed response capacity across carriers of every size. Adjusters were stretched, cycle times deteriorated, and policyholders waited. The carriers that felt it the hardest were not necessarily the ones with the most exposure. They were often the ones who had built their operations around steady-state assumptions with no meaningful plan for when volume spiked far beyond the average.

It is now April. The 2026 season opens in approximately 60 days. That is your spring training window.

The question is what you are doing with it?

Building Depth Before the Season Starts

In baseball, spring training is about adding players to the permanent roster. It is also mostly about conditioning the core team, evaluating who can step in when a starter goes down, testing the bullpen under different scenarios, and making sure the bench is ready to contribute when the lineup needs relief.

The roster that shows up on Opening Day is not the roster that wins in October. It is the roster that was built and conditioned in February.

Carriers that size their underwriting, claims, and operations teams exclusively for average volume create an almost inevitable problem. Average volume is not what hurricane season delivers. What arrives instead is a convergence of submission surges, large-loss notices, complex commercial claims, file-management demands, and relentless pressure for responsiveness from every direction at once.

If your claims team is running near capacity in April, it will be under serious strain by September. If your underwriting function has no depth behind its senior leadership, a single absence during a critical renewal period can create a bottleneck that affects months of pipeline. The organizations that understand this do not wait for the pressure to reveal the gaps. They look honestly at their capacity before the season starts and make deliberate decisions about how to fill them.

The Bullpen Is a Strategy, Not a Backup Plan

There is a tendency in insurance operations to view supplemental capacity as something you arrange only after a problem becomes visible. That is the equivalent of calling the bullpen because your starter is already in trouble in the sixth inning. The best managers do not work that way, and neither do the best carriers.

Managing a rotation intelligently over a long season means knowing in advance which resources need protection and which scenarios require different deployments. A closer who enters a tied game in the ninth inning is not a remediation. He is a precision instrument used at exactly the right moment because the manager planned for that moment before the game started.

The same discipline applies to carrier operations. Pre-identifying the functions most vulnerable to surge conditions, whether that is first notice of loss intake, field adjuster deployment, complex commercial claims handling, or underwriting capacity during a new product push is not a reactive exercise. It is a strategic one that must happen before the season begins, not during it.

Some carriers address such vulnerabilities through accelerated hiring. Others cross-train existing staff to flex across functions. Others build relationships with specialized talent partners or explore fractional leadership arrangements that can be activated quickly when conditions demand it. The specific solution matters less than the discipline of having one ready before it is needed. Elastic staffing is one legitimate tool in that planning process, particularly for surge-sensitive functions where specialized expertise cannot simply be improvised on short notice, but the broader point is the planning posture itself.

Rehearsing for Volatility Before It Arrives

Beyond roster construction, spring training is about scenario rehearsal. Pitching coaches work on sequencing. Infielders rehearse cutoff plays. Managers run through lineup configurations against different opponents. The organization stress-tests its assumptions before any of it costs them a win.
The operational equivalent for carriers is surge-scenario planning, and most organizations do not do it with sufficient rigor or lead time.

When was the last time your claims operation modeled what happens if new-file volume triples for 30 consecutive days? When did your underwriting team last assess whether its current depth could sustain turnaround standards if two senior underwriters were simultaneously unavailable? Has your operations leadership mapped the workflow changes required to stand up a dedicated CAT unit within 72 hours of a major landfall?

These are not edge cases. They are the conditions that active CAT seasons reliably produce, and the carriers that navigate them with the least disruption are invariably the ones that rehearsed before the pressure arrived. Scenario planning surfaces the specific vulnerabilities that general capacity assessments miss. It forces honest conversations about which functions are brittle, which processes depend too heavily on individual knowledge, and where training or cross-functional preparation could meaningfully reduce risk.

Fundamentals and Conditioning

Spring training also includes work that has nothing to do with roster depth. It is when teams rebuild fundamentals, sharpen communication between units, and condition themselves for the physical and mental demands of a long season. The pitching coach does not assume a strong arm from last October will still be sharp in April without deliberate work between seasons.

Carrier operations have an equivalent in the work that gets neglected during peak periods because the volume leaves no room for it. Workflow reviews that would identify bottlenecks before they become failures. Quality standards that need reinforcement. Technology integrations that were implemented mid-season and never fully optimized. Training on updated guidelines or coverage changes should have been completed before the renewal push.

The carriers that consistently outperform through difficult seasons are the ones that treat the pre-season window as a genuine operational priority, not as the quiet period before the real work starts. That window is when fundamentals get sharpened, not when they get deferred.

The Window Is Open Right Now

Hurricane season is 60 days away. The carriers best suited to handle it will not be the ones making decisions in late August when the National Hurricane Center is tracking a major storm in the Gulf. They will be the ones who use this window honestly: assessing where they are genuinely underprepared, building the depth and flexibility their operations actually require, and conditioning their teams before the first test arrives.

Spring training is not about playing games that count. It is about making sure you can win the ones that do when it really matters.

The season is coming. Is your roster ready?

Peter Crowe began his career in technology consulting, in
many cities and a few countries, doing system implementations, upgrades and conversions. A tech project he worked on led to an opportunity at RE/MAX, a real estate franchise company. Crowe joined RE/MAX in 2013 and while there, served in various capacities including senior vice president of marketing, communications and investor relations and executive vice president of business and product strategy.

While looking for strategic opportunities for RE/MAX, Crowe found We Insure, an independent insurance agency network. In 2019, he joined We Insure as chief revenue officer. In this role, Crowe led the expansion of We Insure into 25 new states, growing the agency footprint from 90 to 190 offices in just over two years and supported the founder in a successful exit.

In 2022, Crowe took on the role of president of Team Focus Insurance Group. As president, he has been excited to get back to his tech roots and expand one of the insurance industry’s best core platforms and BPO service organizations. Crowe holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Indiana University and an MBA from the University of Denver, Daniels College of Business.