Are there really leagues that draft completely from scratch every year?

Welcome to Discuss Fastpitch

Your FREE Account is waiting to the Best Softball Community on the Web.

Aug 12, 2014
644
43
Someone commented in the Coach vs Commish thread that rec leagues shouldn't allow players to pick their coaches and should draft completely from scratch every year. Are there really leagues that do this? I'm in Denver and every softball and baseball league I've seen in the area allows coaches to keep teams together. Maybe it's a regional thing, but leagues where they try to create even teams don't seem to exist here.
 
Oct 11, 2010
8,337
113
Chicago, IL
We don’t but have been known to shuffle a couple players around.

IMO part of the problem is the best pitchers are the HC and AC’s DD. When you get 2 of them together on the same team they are going to win a lot of games and there is nothing you can do about it.

VB became really unbalanced so last year they blew all the Teams up and started over. Right on the signup sheet it said what they were doing and that no special requests would be entertained.
 
Last edited:

JJsqueeze

Dad, Husband....legend
Jul 5, 2013
5,436
38
safe in an undisclosed location
There really are...in our FP community ALL rec leagues that I know of draft from scratch each year. The are I am talking about is Northern San Diego County and Southwest Riverside (Temecula/Murrieta). There are a lot of parity rules in fact.
 
May 30, 2013
1,442
83
Binghamton, NY
we started drafting teams from scratch two years ago, and it did wonders for keeping games competitive.

before the re-draft policy, it seems all teams had a 2+ year plan, that cycled from young team that would continually get crushed just to have that one dominant season, before you started all over again (usually handing the team off to new rookie coaches)

with the re-draft, we also pre-rank all returning players, and slot coaches daughters where they would be picked in the draft based upon thier ranking. and then equalize pitching/catching as much as possible before the general draft begins.

works well.
 
Feb 7, 2013
3,188
48
I believe that was my post. We live in a large metro community (Los Angeles county) and maybe it's the sheer numbers of kids both every sport my kids have played involved some kind of tryouts and draft before the season started. That includes baseball, softball, basketball, roller hockey, soccer, lacrosse, you name the sport there is always a draft after the kids are 5-6 years old. I can't imagine a rec league that allowed the coaches to hand pick players and the non popular team(s) gets no talent. Seems to be contrary to the whole idea of recreational league youth sports.
 
Last edited:

JAD

Feb 20, 2012
8,231
38
Georgia
There was a guy in my neighborhood who "hand picked" just about every player on his son's little league baseball team....they run ruled every team they played and had the two kids who were on the team and not "hand picked" trading off time in RF. How much fun is that?
 

marriard

Not lost - just no idea where I am
Oct 2, 2011
4,312
113
Florida
Someone commented in the Coach vs Commish thread that rec leagues shouldn't allow players to pick their coaches and should draft completely from scratch every year. Are there really leagues that do this? I'm in Denver and every softball and baseball league I've seen in the area allows coaches to keep teams together. Maybe it's a regional thing, but leagues where they try to create even teams don't seem to exist here.

Yes our rec league (and most rec leagues locally) draft from scratch. This is how it was done when I was VP:

- We have multiple tryouts days (it was mandatory for players to attend ONE day of tryouts) which coaches can attend PLUS we have an independent evaluator group (the local HS softball team provides girls to run all the tryout stations plus do these evals - they don't know most of the players so all coaches get a strong read on all the talent.)
- We provide a sorted list of the independent evals by over all ability, over all ability including pitching, age - we also note any teammate requests (which parents are told are not guaranteed but we do our best which was about 75%). We also included a list of catchers (although we don't try them out)
- Players who did not attend tryouts could not be drafted unless a majority of coaches agreed on where she would fall in the independent evals (i.e. majority agree she is around a '3rd round' pick. That way any coach could draft her at the 'right' time or thereabouts even sight unseen. Anyone not eligible for the draft were hat picks (where depending on how many they were basically picked at random at the end from a hat
- Coaches and his one allowed AC's kids were pre-placed into the draft based on evals PLUS agreement from other coaches (e.g. HC DD is a '1st round pick', his AC's DD is a '3rd rounder' so they don't get picks in those rounds.
- Went you drafted one sister you got the other (in the round as determined by the independent evals).
- Teams were required to draft a pitcher by the end of the 3rd round. A catcher by the 5th. If a team did not have this, we invalidated the draft and started again (this only happened once in the first year we put this in place)

In general most coaches got 5-6 players they wanted, 2-3 they knew and then the rest was somewhat random. Teams were 'fair' (not even - that is impossible) and the vast majority of games were competitive.

The independent evals was what made this successful. It meant new coaches/coaches coming up from younger divisions had a reasonable opportunity to get a read on the players they didn't know (especially the older/experienced players) and everyone had some sort of reasonable pitching/catching. Add in clinics/weekly pitching/catching session and we drive not only the rec program but feed well into the local travel org, the 2 local HS's and the 3 private HS's
 
Jun 18, 2013
322
18
Someone commented in the Coach vs Commish thread that rec leagues shouldn't allow players to pick their coaches and should draft completely from scratch every year. Are there really leagues that do this? I'm in Denver and every softball and baseball league I've seen in the area allows coaches to keep teams together. Maybe it's a regional thing, but leagues where they try to create even teams don't seem to exist here.

Our rec league does and this year we had to do it with no evaluations due to weather.
 
Mar 23, 2010
2,019
38
Cafilornia
Ours drafts from scratch, with only "Will not play for" forms honored, no preference requests. In spite of insurmountable mathematical odds this creates, one coach fielded the same team 3 years in a row. Just lucky I guess.
 
Jun 7, 2015
61
6
Our rec leagues used to put every kid's name in a hat and literally pull names. They've moved to evaluations (pitching, fielding, hitting, throwing) and having a round table. Rec director issues players and then coaches get one trade off each.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

Latest posts

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
42,830
Messages
679,468
Members
21,443
Latest member
sstop28
Top