The Commish needs help

Stay with it! The bottom line is that parents do not like change, and if there is a way to buck the system they will. Heaven forbid these girls learn to make new friends and play with other people. Going through life without learning to handle change is not a good thing!You will also find that those that complain the most about playing with friends are often those who's friends are good, and they are use to winning all the time. In a league we used to be in many girls would request to play with friends and a certain coach so they could build a super team year after year. Funny thing is that many of the girls, and parents for that matter, didn't like each other or the coach. They just liked going into the season year after year knowing they were going to win. It's amazing what people will tolerate to have their kid on a winning team. Start losing however and watch the sheep turn to wolves.

Work towards the fairness of all, not necessarily the pleasing of all, and stick to your guns! Fairness is making things right for the kids and league, while pleasing everyone is pretty much making things right for the parents.
Is it possible to be fair across the board? Yes
Is it possible to please everyone across the board? Not a chance

Moved a few more, based on late-registering coaches. Nothing that has caused musical teams yet...

We re-asses and redraft every year.

Once you get past instructional ball friend requests are no longer honored.

IMO keeping girls on the same teams year after year is a mistake. Imagine being on a same losing team every year. Redrafting makes a balanced league and for competitive teams.

jppoker said:

We re-asses and redraft every year.

Once you get past instructional ball friend requests are no longer honored.

IMO keeping girls on the same teams year after year is a mistake. Imagine being on a same losing team every year. Redrafting makes a balanced league and for competitive teams.

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If you read all the way through, you'll see where I said that this is the least competitive league you can imagine. It is pretty much all social. I have one team of 14 who literally all live in the same neighborhood, all carpool their kids to practices and games. And I could have added 3 more to that one who requested it.

The stated goal of the league is to help the girls learn to love the game, and the best way is to make sure they have fun. We do get some teams who stink, but all the coaches stay 100% positive and basically help all teams. We do try to teach the girls, and the ones who are talented we have try out for our TB teams.

All that said, I am probably going to split 10U and 12U into 2 divisions next season: rec and competitive.

Ugh.

"My daughters O and G are registered to play summer softball. We requested to play on Luke Brown's team and were placed on another. My girls are new to Olentangy and we requested Luke's team because they know one girl on the team going in. My girls are not interested in playing now that they can't play with anyone they know."

Sometimes I just want to reach through the interwebs and strangle some people.

That's a bit ridiculous. If it was 5 or 6 of their friends on the team that would be one thing, but one player is absurd.

I always thought it would be best to find out who knows who and make sure they are NOT on the same team. Maybe get them to make some new friends and expand their social network.

After the first 3 or so practices, they are all friends and probably have everyone's phone numbers already, so the friends thing shouldn't be a big deal. Only time my league does the requests is for rides due to being neighbors, situations like that.

Haven't read the whole thread and probably missed something, but here is the issue I would anticipate with A and B divisions. Let's say you've got 100 kids in 12U. You've got 10 decent pitchers. Most likely, all 10 of those decent pitchers are among the best 50 overall players. So Division A gets the 10 decent pitchers (2 per team), and Division B has no real pitching. Of course, one could argue that this is how more pitchers learn to pitch, but the game is little fun to 12-year-olds when facing bad pitching.

CoogansBluff said:

Haven't read the whole thread and probably missed something, but here is the issue I would anticipate with A and B divisions. Let's say you've got 100 kids in 12U. You've got 10 decent pitchers. Most likely, all 10 of those decent pitchers are among the best 50 overall players. So Division A gets the 10 decent pitchers (2 per team), and Division B has no real pitching. Of course, one could argue that this is how more pitchers learn to pitch, but the game is little fun to 12-year-olds when facing bad pitching.

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I've had a complete re-think on this. I'm going to start with the 8U division, get the kids (and parents) trained properly so that by 12U they're used to it. It'll take a couple of years, but I'm confident that starting at the bottom-ish (we have 6U) is the way to go. Already made a couple of changes for this season after our coaches' meeting.