Too old to umpire?

HS umpire assignors have an even bigger dilemma since the games are at 3:15pm (around here). That shrinks the pool of available umpires considerably.

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I am glad you brought this aspect up! Early Monday through Friday games need to go away. I have yet to figure out who 'wins' with these early games. I understand the most common issues of not having lights/running out of daylight. In the town I currently live in the school experimented with having a night softball game played at a neighboring complex that had lights. Attendance skyrocketed... parents, grandparents, classmates, teachers, and other people in the community showed up in numbers I have never seen at a high school softball game. All because they could! It was at a time that was convenient for people to attend. Logic says play the games at seven or eight o'clock at night.

YoungBuck said:

I am glad you brought this aspect up! Early Monday through Friday games need to go away. I have yet to figure out who 'wins' with these early games. I understand the most common issues of not having lights/running out of daylight. In the town I currently live in the school experimented with having a night softball game played at a neighboring complex that had lights. Attendance skyrocketed... parents, grandparents, classmates, teachers, and other people in the community showed up in numbers I have never seen at a high school softball game. All because they could! It was at a time that was convenient for people to attend. Logic says play the games at seven or eight o'clock at night.

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I think the biggest reason why these games are played at 3pm instead of 7pm is because many, if not most, of the coaches are also teachers at the school. If you push the game time back to 7pm, there's 4 hours of dead time where they really can't do anything or go anywhere. With 3pm games, they're done by 5pm and home in time to be with their families. Move it back to 7p and many schools will have to look for a walk-on coach. So, in the school administration's view, it's easier to deal with possibly sub-par umpires than with the headaches associated with walk-on coaches. For the record, DW and I are walk-on coaches for DD1's varsity team. We know what kind of headaches we are!

Edited to add: that all being said, I know I would much rather have 7p games than 3p games. Right now, every game day, I'm taking 2-3 hours of vacation time. Not to mention the new boss giving me hell about all the time off I'm taking.