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

[dbronstein]

Thanks for the replies. The way the leagues work here is the players get dispersed mostly randomly at the youngest ages because most don't know any coaches yet. Then as players are put on teams, they tend to stick with the same team as they move up through the age levels. Free agents coming in at older ages get placed on teams that have open spots. There is also a league that is club ball, even though it's rec, and players and teams have to enter through a member club. So either full teams enter or the clubs put together teams, and a lot of times they try to stack their teams.

 

[Coachmom]

Our league drafts from scratch every year. We use evaluation day.
Then coaches draft in a serpentine fashion with their daughters slotted in at the appropriate round according to their skill level.

 

[Dabears17]

In our league 6u and 8u are school based, and we do a serpentine draw based upon team rankings for 10u and above.

 

[BuckeyeGuy]

If you could design the perfect parity system for a league, how would you do it? What rules for roster building?

 

[dbronstein]

If you could design the perfect parity system for a league, how would you do it? What rules for roster building?

The best one I've heard of came from John Grisham (yes, that one) in an article he wrote about a baseball league he was involved in. They had tryouts so the coaches could see all the players. Then the coaches would do a draft where collectively they identified the top 6 players (there were 6 teams), and then each team would select one of those six. Then they would collectively identify the next best six players, and so on. I don't remember how they decided the order for each group of six. I think there was some randomization to it so coaches didn't know which pick they had in each round so they couldn't try to push some weaker players into a group if they knew they had one of the first picks in that round. And I don't remember how they worked in the coaches' kids.

Of course there's also the issue of parity (or lack of it) in coaching. But there's not a whole lot you can do there because most leagues are happy just to get enough people willing to coach.

 

[Greenmonsters]

If you could design the perfect parity system for a league, how would you do it? What rules for roster building?

Pitcher Round - draft or assign P so pitching talent is evenly distributed
Catcher Round - reverse order from P round and draft or assign catching talent

Position Player Rounds - evenly distribute talent based on evaluation criteria (do it by draft OR do it blind and then draw lots to see which coach gets which position player team)


Question: How do you most fairly divide a donut (or fill in the blank) between 2 people?
Answer: Let one make 2 equal halves and let the other pick which half they want.

 

[Greenmonsters]

The best one I've heard of came from John Grisham (yes, that one) in an article he wrote about a baseball league he was involved in. They had tryouts so the coaches could see all the players. Then the coaches would do a draft where collectively they identified the top 6 players (there were 6 teams), and then each team would select one of those six. Then they would collectively identify the next best six players, and so on. I don't remember how they decided the order for each group of six. I think there was some randomization to it so coaches didn't know which pick they had in each round so they couldn't try to push some weaker players into a group if they knew they had one of the first picks in that round. And I don't remember how they worked in the coaches' kids.

Of course there's also the issue of parity (or lack of it) in coaching. But there's not a whole lot you can do there because most leagues are happy just to get enough people willing to coach.

Grisham's Calico Joe is a great book that involves baseball

 

[Rocketech1]

If you could design the perfect parity system for a league, how would you do it? What rules for roster building?

Here's what our local rec league did:

Tryouts for all players in pitching, hitting, fielding, throwing, and running bases. Coaches and Boardmembers would rank all players, rating 1-10. With 10 being the best.

Have a draft. And coaches pick one player per round. For example, if you have 60 players in the division and want 5 teams of 12 players you would have 12 rounds for the draft.

The first round is the top 5 pitchers based on tryout score . After that, the players are ranked by their overall score for all other categories not pitching. The order for picking in the first round is a lottery drawn out of a hat.

The coach with the lowest scored pitcher from round 1, picks first in the 2nd round and so on each round.

Each round uses a cumulative score based on the previous round, so a coach that chose a top players in round 1 will be picking last the 2nd round and possibly 3rd round giving the other teams the ability to build a good team around their average or below average pitchers.

This goes on until all 12 rounds are complete.

While not a perfect system, it does help create parity in the league so that it's almost impossible to stack a team unless the other coaches are clueless or just pick players who are friends of their DD and don't care about drafting talented players.

No system is perfect when scoring and drafting kids but this system above works fairly well. I have seen some parents sandbag their kids at tryouts which is disgusting, but most of the coaches know the kids and will rank them accordingly based on their knowledge of their play during the previous seasons.

During the all-star draft, the coaches will speak about their players who put their name in for all-stars but they cannot vote for any players that played for them that season. The voting is done by blind ballot so no one knows who you picked. If a player is unanimous, she is automatically on the team. The next round of voting, if the player received all for votes but 1, she is on the team, etc until 10 players are picked. The head coach has 2 or 3 at-large picks where he/she can pick any players to round out the team.

Unfortunately, since the coaches vote for the all-star players there are many back room deals before the draft and many teams are picked informally even before draft day. In an effort to curb this manipulation, the rec league board would vote for the head coach in a blind draft and in theory no one other that the league president knew who the HC was before the all-star draft which helped to eliminate some of the pre-draft shenanigans.

Hope that helps?

 

[CoogansBluff]

I ran a small league (4 teams in 8U, 10U, less in others) for about 6 seasons and offered to pick the teams for everybody, but the coaches usually let me, with good results.

We'd hold evals, so each player was rated by each coach. I'd then send out suggested teams based on evals and the requests of players and coaches.

Worked pretty well, because it was a small league, I knew most of the players from the previous season and people trusted me.

But also because each coach got what they thought was the best team - based on their own evals.

If I've got 4 coaches' rankings, then I basically draft based on those rankings, but I also honored player/coach requests as much as possible. So if Julie says ''please don't put me with Coach Smith again,'' or ''Please don't let me be teammates with Beth,'' then those people get their requests without anyone getting their feelings hurt.

One time we had a 4-player car pool. It worked fine. Another time we had a middle school feeder team that wanted to play together. We allowed it because they rated out about like the other teams.

When coaches picked their own teams, I felt it was my responsibility to help coaches that I thought would be taken advantage of. It's probably a good idea for any league to have a report of the evals, so that everyone knows how every player was rated.

 

[TimothyJ]

Here's how NOT to do it..

LL Regional Admin told this story at a Presidents meeting about a league in NJ.

They held their draft in a local gymnasium. Lined the kids up in the hallway, and had parents in the bleachers.
The Managers were given monopoly money.

One by one, the players came in, and the division director read off their "stats" to the managers.
Then, right there in front of kid and the parents, the managers "bid" on the players.

You can imagine the chaos that ensued. Parents yelling at managers for under-bidding on their kids, some kids not getting any bids...

The regional office and Williamsport were flooded with calls over the weekend.
The Regional Admin waited for a call from the League President on Monday, which did come.

When asked what his plan was to remedy the situation, the President replied "We want to do the draft again in the same format, but this time we won't let the parents watch" :-o