Venting...

So I am AC on a 12U Rec All Star Team that is attending 2 tournaments this summer. We are all home grown from a small Association that is really baseball oriented, so we don't get much of anything - field time, cooperation, etc. We're an afterthought. Both the HC and I am new to tournaments and have only coached Rec Ball for about 5 years.

Our first tournament saw us playing All Star Rec teams from Associations 3X our size and a few B level travel teams. We went 0-5 but were really only rocked once, in the bracket play. The girls had fun and I felt like we were improving the whole way through pool play.

I was hoping to see us step up in this second tournament and maybe steal a game or two after getting the butterflies out two weeks ago. We get to the venue tonight for the second tourney with a big task. We're playing the league champs who went 14-1 and then run ruled everyone the whole way through the post season, but the girls are ready. As we take the field for warmups, we find out not are we playing the top team from our rec league, but apparently minus their three or four worst players but picking up four top players from two other teams in our league from different associatiosn including a top pitcher/catcher in addition to their own. Our HC goes over to the TD rules in hand. TD says Oh, we mentioned at the league meeting in March that since we (the host team) wouldn't have enough players to field a team at our own tournament, we were going to let everyone pick up any players the wanted.

Only problem with that is that then they proceeded to post tournament applications and rules that clearly state all players had to be members of one association or community. We weren't in attendance at this meeting. It's a scheduling meeting for the whole league, all age groups. Not only that, the "waiver" apparently only applied teams from our league. Over half the field in this tournament is not in out league, so I guess too bad for them too, and some of them are clearly staying over in hotels because they are 150 miles away. We downloaded rules and applications from the website in early July, and the rules were still there on their website tonight.

When we told the TD that that was totally unfair and that's not what the rules posted say, his answer was sorry, yeah, I guess we should have changed that in the rules.

I guess????? Yeah, would have been nice. Even though this tournament is close by, we could have looked elsewhere for a tournament where we might have been more competitive had we known. We got shut out 10-0 in 4 tonight. Tomorrow we drew the team that ran the table at the last tourney in the first game and a team we lost 8-3 to last tournament in the second. This was supposed to be a Rec All Star, Single Community tournament. It turned into a free for all.

Any advice on how to deal with the whole situation? It's pretty discouraging for the girls because they knew that they were basically playing a multi-area all star team and they know the team tomorrow won the tourney we went 0-5 in last week. We tried to have them play one play at a time, but we were down 5-0 after 1 tonight and never got things going after that. I don't mind taking it on the chin in a fair game, but am I asking too much to expect that tournaments/leagues follow their own rules? Where's the breaking point between standing up for your kids and whining?

A few thoughts:
1. The guys running the tournament are clowns. They bent the rules in their favor, screwed a bunch of teams coming from a distance, and will likely never get teams to come play again. Very short-sighted.
2. For better or worse, you will run into these situations in tournaments. There is not much you can do, they have your money. Make the best of it, keep your girls spirits up, and try not to let your anger at the situation spill over towards them.
3. As a first time tournament participant, I think it is very common to lose, sometimes big. It is not fun, but it is the part of a long process to get better. You will find out quickly how resilient your players are. If they come back the next year wanting more, then you've done a great job.

Swim Coach said:

I don't mind taking it on the chin in a fair game, but am I asking too much to expect that tournaments/leagues follow their own rules? Where's the breaking point between standing up for your kids and whining?

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You play your games and move on... Not much you can do for this weekend. You can only control what happens in your dugout - forget the other dugout.

However by move on I also mean:

- You make sure you never come back to this tournament in following years
- You talk to all the other teams that got screwed, and discuss with other teams what an alternative might look like for the following year. For example,see who might be willing to run a competitive tournament the following year to go up against this one
- Make sure you get their contact info as well so you can scrimmage and make friends with the other teams for future teams/tournaments/etc

The local TD might get a short-sighted win for the home team, but long term the softball community is small and gossips hard. If there is an alternative to something that people don't like, they will go to it fast. Just need some people willing to do the leg work.

Local to me there is a travel league in fall that everyone hated playing in, but that was all that there really was at that time of year. Two years ago an organization finally decided to put the work into creating an alternative that addressed all the issues with the league - now the original travel league is almost gone. We are talking what was about 100 teams over three parks from 8U to HS with 2 divisions in each age division, that dropped in two years to 20 teams, to not sure it is going to happen this year. Meanwhile the new alternative is at 64 committed teams before they even open registration and a possible wait list for some divisions if they can't find more fields.

People do this sort of stuff because they can get away with it and because no one wants to step up and put the work in to compete with them.

marriard said:

"Hands are NOT part of the bat because they didn't come with the bat when you bought it." - some umpire I met

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^^^^
Sorry, off topic, but I LOVE this!

We'll do our best today to keep the girls' spirit up. They are getting exposed to a higher level of play than they've ever seen before so it does give the serious ones an idea of where they need to get to for next year. 9 out of 11 are 2003s so they are young.

Rec ball in this area is tight clique of association leaders. EX: In our first playoff game, we caught the other team using illegal players and turned them in. They are coached by a travel ball coach who knows the rules. She claimed to not understand what the league rules meant and their association president told her what they were doing was fine. The league's response was to make us go back and play them again with legal substitutes instead of calling a forfeit because it wasn't fair to DQ their girls.

A lot of cronyism and good ole' boys, but they have every field tied up that there is. I've been pondering a way out for the last two years but I don't see one. The only possibility is getting into LL softball but that is really scarce around here meaning we'd have a lot of long drives to play. It is a possibility though.

Yeah, avoid that organization in the future for sure. In the meantime, tell the girls that playing good teams helps them grow as players. Just to go out there and do their best and have fun. Next time when they play teams more on their level, they'll be more prepared for having played in this one.

I don't have any advice, just offering support and sympathy. It sucks when teams do BS like that.

There used to be lots of Rec / All Star tournaments in my area, but not any more. They were wrecked last year by trophy-hunting B/C level teams and tournament and state directors who wouldn't enforce their own rules. This year, these types of tournaments are almost non-existent.

It is short-sighted, but not surprising considering that the majority of those running these leagues, tournaments, and sanctioning organizations have IQs on par with toasters.

There are obviously two tiers in this tournament. After losing 20-0 (yes, that's 20 as in twenty) in the first game today, we won 7-5 against a team we lost to 2 weeks ago 8-3. That was good enough to place us 8th in this 12 team field as 4 teams went 0-3. As luck would have it we face the same team tomorrow in the 8/9 game. There are two teams that do not belong in this tournament at all on the top side and we had the misfortune of playing both of them.

But......we won our first game, ever, and the 20-0 loss is not even a memory for my girls.