Soderholm was traded to the Texas Rangers during the 1979 season and wrapped up his career with the New York Yankees in 1980.
With his family settled in the Chicago area, Soderholm remained connected to baseball for years after retirement by working as a scout for the Cubs, running youth baseball camps and offering private hitting instruction. He later found financial success with a ticket brokering operation called Front Row Tickets.
But SoderWorld brought him peace, helping him to move beyond the greed he now admits drove his previous enterprise.
“I wasn’t happy in the space I was at,” Soderholm said. “(SoderWorld) transformed my life.”
Soderholm created the business that bears his name in 1997 with his daughter, Misty, who had been working as a therapist at author and alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra’s center in California. One day she called her dad and said she wanted to run that kind of business in Chicago. After an exploratory trip out west, Soderholm was in.
“We started SoderWorld with no business plan, just a ‘build it and they will come’ belief,” Soderholm said.
Initially located in a Willowbrook shopping center, the business took off. The center expanded twice and then in 2004 relocated to the current facility at 16W501 Neilson Lane, just off Route 83.
