Rec league competitive guidelines?

[lostcreek1]

My town - population around 40K - has a rec program that works well for grades 2 or 3 through 8. I suppose there are around 400 kids at each grade level. Overall the rec program gets about 350 kids. Each year, we hold tryouts. The tryouts are to assess skill levels - everybody is makes a team. All of the coaches observe the tryouts and submit ratings which are then pooled. After results are consolidated, we hold a draft and we end up with, theoretically, balanced teams. It's not perfect because there are always a couple of players head and shoulders above the rest, but it works pretty well. The important thing is that everybody understands that this is to introduce girls to softball and that parent coaches to try to keep their Jenny Finch fantasies in check.

I think the important thing is for parent coaches to not lose sight of the goal of developing softball players as opposed to creating teams that can slaughter the competition.

We also have a town travel team made up of the best rec players.

Over time, the girls who like/are good at softball tend to find private instructors and may join a travel team. Come 9th grade, rec ends. The better players play for the high school at the rest give up the sport.

So out of 350 kids none of them continue to play after 8th grade except for HS, none play TB.

 

[Orange Socks]

If by lower socio economic families you mean middle class i agree. Around here there are very few poor people playing TB, the few I do know are being subsidized in some way. I do know quite a few girls that play rec because they cant afford to play TB.

I mean lower than middle class. These parents are truly making family sacrifices for their children to play TB. DD's National Team made it palatable. $900 fees for summer. $900 fees for fall. All local tourneys in the fall. Summer-Usually 3 travel tourneys the rest were local or within the state. If your family needed help the team would work the family.

 

[lostcreek1]

I mean lower than middle class. These parents are truly making family sacrifices for their children to play TB. DD's National Team made it palatable. $900 fees for summer. $900 fees for fall. All local tourneys in the fall. Summer-Usually 3 travel tourneys the rest were local or within the state. If your family needed help the team would work the family.

Where I live that would mean you make below 31k a year as a household. Be very tough to play TB with a household income below 31k a year without help.

 

[Orange Socks]

Where I live that would mean you make below 31k a year as a household. Be very tough to play TB with a household income below 31k a year without help.

Of course, we had super uber wealthy parents as well. We had many kids go on to play in the Ivies and other schools in the NE. I remember we were at the East Mapleton fields at IDT and a coach walked up, looked around at the other college coaches and said there must be a lot of super smart kids on the field.

 

[schwabach]

So out of 350 kids none of them continue to play after 8th grade except for HS, none play TB.

All who play TB also play HS but not all who play HS play TB. One way or another, in our town, and I suspect this happens a lot, participation in sports plummets when kids get to high school.

 

[BucketDud]

All who play TB also play HS but not all who play HS play TB.

Are saying just in your area? Because that would certainly not be true everywhere. Many players in our area skip HS Ball to play only TB.

One very large school nearby didn't even have team couple years. Good players in the district and nice facilities, but school hired a warm body to coach and several opted to skip it. After few years of being bad, less kids came out and had to cancel some seasons.

 

[schwabach]

Are saying just in your area? Because that would certainly not be true everywhere. Many players in our area skip HS Ball to play only TB.

One very large school nearby didn't even have team couple years. Good players in the district and nice facilities, but school hired a warm body to coach and several opted to skip it. After few years of being bad, less kids came out and had to cancel some seasons.

Just speaking for my little corner of the world.

 

[bjenkins24]

I'm actually currently building an app to help with this for rec leagues. I've talked to a couple dozen rec leagues now about how they hold drafts and create teams. Here's some thoughts.

1. Hold assessments is the best way to judge girls and have a fair draft
2. Coaches will purposely tell girls they want to pick to do bad, so they can get them later in the draft. The scores used for the girls should be an average of all the coaches with the outliers removed. That way if a girl does really bad on purpose, maybe half of the coaches will know she did that (because they know her) and rate her higher anyways.
3. Ideally don't let coaches draft at all. Assign girls to teams based on that average rating amongst all coaches. Round 1 should be first round pitchers. Round 2 is first round catchers. Round 4 is second round pitchers. You do this because in a snake the last pick for the first round pitcher will be the first pick for the second round pitcher in round 4.
4. You MUST try out as a pitcher to be a pitcher, no exceptions. Pitchers can only be picked during the pitcher round. If there are enough catchers, you can make that requirement for the round 2 catchers as well.

You then get a list of all girls based on the ratings by coaches. You just do the snake then based on the highest rated player in that category. Go back and forth until every girl is picked. You CAN let coaches pick girls in the draft if you want, but it will always be a little less fair.

Anyways this is all a lot of work and I found about 20% of rec leagues do something similar to this. The rest just let the coaches do it all themselves and hold a normal snake draft. I'm building an app that does this all for you. The coaches would have their phones during evaluations and all the numbers/averages and what not would be taken care of with the app. Then you could either hold a draft with coaches picking or literally just press a button and get even teams. Should be ready by October to play with and ready for board approvals for the Spring. Let me know if you're interested!

 

[tim_s]

very similar to everyone else

when our Rec league was strongest, we'd redraft every year.......we'd start with P/C, making sure each team had these positions filled first......sisters would go together when applicable....

these were 10u rules:
we have done 4 & 6 runs max per inning.......this keeps them moving, they don't get stuck in the field for hours

every girl must play INF & OF every game

3 innings/pitcher.......coaches might agree to let a pitcher come back in if a pitcher totally falls apart and there's no one else

lead on release, can only "steal" when the ball is "out of reach of the C"

no dropped 3rd/no INF fly

only 2 ATTEMPTS from 3rd/inning on a passed ball


out of town teams have been a struggle.......we encouraged everyone to register through the rec league to go through our assessment/draft process......but more and more many towns want to bring intact teams in, and i get why, it does help with participation numbers......one town would always bring 2-3 teams, one would be stacked and one would CLEARLY be all brand new/young girls.....and it sucked......i distinctly remember telling DD1 to swing at anything 3-0, because she MIGHT get a hittable pitch after that.....after a few years of this, many girls from this town started to register directly through us, and they got a little better on team creation