this is going to be long so bear with me please. i'm on the board of directors for my daughters softball league. our recreational league and the travel teams are all ASA and we play mostly ASA tournaments. i have no faith in the state and local ASA reps so i figured i'd ask here. what exactly are we to expect in return from ASA? the guy over our region is very biased towards his teams. not only is he the regional ASA rep, but he is also president of a city's softball league and coaches his own tournament teams. that right there to me is a conflict of interest. as we all know, certain holidays/weekends draw in more people for bigger tournaments. he determines who gets to pick their tourney dates according to who had the most enrollment the previous year in their softball leagues. he is president of the league in the largest city in the area so he wins every year. my city has never hosted a district or state tournament. we had 3 fields but the city is slowly taking over our fields to build a municipal complex and are planning on building us a new complex. we are down to 2 fields now. at the last meeting that determined tournaments, he had a printout that showed which cities had hosted district/state tournaments in the past (we had hosted none). we wanted to host one of the bigger tournaments but he said we couldn't because we only had 2 fields and would be getting a new complex in the future. we informed him we had already agreed with the county to be able to use a complex 5 miles away that is 3 years old and has 4 fields. yet again we were denied. the next town over got the district tournament. the president of that league is good friends with him and they only have 2 frigging fields. also, all the entry fees for district and state tournaments go to ASA. at $300 a pop for 20-40 teams that is a chunk of change. the only thing that comes out of that money is umpire fees. where does the rest of the money go to and what is it used for? makes me wonder how all of his tournament teams have no fees associated with them and everything is paid for on their travel tournaments. they all went to disney last year for free. we just got into a big argument with him over insurance. he expected us to pay almost $200 a team (for rec league) for insurance. i don't mind that for the tournament teams but that is a bit much for 3 months of rec ball. we asked if we could have insurance through another company and he said no. then we asked if there were different deductible options and he said no. after some research, we can use a different company and ASA's insurance does offer different deductibles. ASA gets money back if you use bollinger's insurance, but where does that money go? we went against him and got insurance from farm bureau for $400 for all of the rec teams and ASA's bollinger insurance for the tournament teams. last i heard he is not even on speaking terms with our league president. i'm at a loss of what to do. the state president is real big buddies with our regional rep so i don't think he would be much help. it seems we are trapped in the good ole boy buddy system and we aren't one of the good ole boys. i think we may try to start an USFA based rec league next year and just get away from ASA entirely. all we do is pay money to them and we get nothing back in return. there are several other cities that have already stated they are tired of the crap with ASA and are willing to leave for a different organization. any suggestions? |
<tbody>
</tbody>
Last edited: