Very apprehensive about coming season...

[Osric]

Kinda venting a little here, but would like some input as well.

Our league is growing and for the first time, we are in a position where we can legitimately have a division for jr. high girls (in the past, girls from 12-14 have pretty much been dropped from the league). We are drawing in 5 teams from outside areas and putting together some teams with the girls specifically from our organization. The problem (and I'm sure this is common) is the coaches.

The board (mostly baseball elders who don't know who the coaches even are), chose the first coach, and while I don't like the way they chose the person, I agreed that she was a solid choice who would do a good job. As more girls became interested and it looked like we would have 2 teams from our group, I was appointed as the coach of the 2nd team (the board kinda got bypassed on this because they didn't want involvement in softball affairs, but the President of the organization agreed that I was acceptable to them as a coach). The problem now is that there is a fair chance that we will have enough girls for 3 teams.

I should mention here that most of the teams that are coming in are pretty competitive (we've played many of them before in fall ball/all-star tournaments).

My first concern is that while we have enough good girls to be competitive with 2 teams, when we go to three, we are diluting our talent pool too much, imo. As of right now, there are only 3 pitchers signed up, and of all the rest of the signups there are only one or two that have any mound time in at all. Pretty much the same story with catchers. But even once you take those players out of the pool, there are only 3 or 4 players with significant skill left on the rosters...everyone else is in varying levels of "low skill". Some I can coach and make sure they are acceptable, some honestly don't have the skill set to play at a jr. high level.

My bigger concern, though, is the person who is waiting in the wings to be the 3rd coach. He himself is a nice enough person, but he is there 100% for his granddaughter and will willingly sacrifice what is good for the team for what is good for his granddaughter. We got into it last fall when his granddaughter was tired of playing outfield and decided to put her in as catcher (her primary position, but one which it was agreed upon before the game that another catcher would be given plate time for experience and growth...and the backup catcher was catching a hell of a game at that point, so there wasn't a reason to remove her). Add to this, the fact that he is just a BAD fundamentals coach. His practices consist of 1 girl hitting, 1 girl on deck, and the rest of the team shagging balls. ALL PRACTICE. Pretty much nothing else going on. (league officials have talked to him about this repeatedly in the past with little to no improvement.) Add to that his daughter (his granddaughter's mother) who is one of those parents who badmouths everyone and everything, stirs up trouble with other parents and players, etc.

Now, you might be thinking that since there isn't a big deal here because I will be coaching another team and I don't have to put up with these people anyways. You'd be correct. But my problem here is that one of the things I don't want to see happen in the first year of our expanded program is that our girls or other teams have a bad experience and decide not to come back next year. I've put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the development of our program over the past 5 years and want to see it continue to grow.

I am also very concerned that some of the girls who will be assigned to his team will want to try out for the travel team I assist with in the fall. If these girls lose 3 months of development because they are with a poor coach now, then I may be forced to cut players that frankly I've been looking forward to see play at a higher level just because they haven't progressed as much as they would had they not been put into this situation.

I've expressed my feelings to the commissioner of the division and while he agrees, he also says that nobody else has shown interest in coaching the 3rd team so he is kinda stuck. I'd rather see that we keep the top 22-24 girls, and then put the lower skilled girls back in the 11u league, but I think he wants to see more teams in the junior high division (even though we should have 7-8 teams right now).

Not sure what I expect from the community. Needed to vent a little here. It is tough watching kids that you've worked with for years be put into a situation that, even if it doesn't "hurt" them, will certainly won't help them either.

 

[CoogansBluff]

You sound very invested in the program, and you're in the best position to answer any questions that you've asked. Maybe it would help to define the problem in simple terms -

Is this the dilemma?

1. Have three teams, one of which will be terribly coached.
2. Have two teams and send some 12-14 girls to 11U when they'd rather play 12-14U.

I'd also advise that you put yourself in the shoes of the kids who play the game. Their desire to be well-coached at that age (12-14U) is often not as important as they're desire to play in their age division and to play period, meaning they don't want to be on teams of 14-15 players.

 

[David Carter]

Assuming we are talking rec, right?

While not exactly the same situation I can appreciate the problem/blessing of having more girls keep coming, last year our 14U was 2 teams, this year we had 50 girls sign up. Our group of coaches and board members had already set in our minds how things were going to go then as it became clear we would need 4 teams we just started over.

The first thing you MUST do is nail down the pitching situation, as crazy as this sounds we actually wrote into our by-laws that teams must draft a pitcher early (1 or 2 ,if coaches kid does not pitch). Not sure exactly how we would enforce this and I'm sure there could be some creative ways to get around this but the point is basically made that every team MUST have a pitcher and preferably two.

The next thing to look at is your cutoff numbers we set a cutoff at 10-12 girls per team so each time you reach that number you need a new team. When registration is over girls are taken in the order they sign up, so if you signed up to late you could be in limbo and not on a team if the numbers don't work out. Now we do try and make allowances and ask girls to stay down/move up or take the 13th girl if she is the only one without a team but everyone understands those are things we are doing to try and get everyone to play and we are in no way obligated to do these extra things.

As far as coaches what the president/division commissioner needs to do is email every parent that signed their kid up and let them know the league is in need of another coach you might be surprised, when we did this we had a mom (board member) who had never coached but had two kids on All Stars team volunteer, then an aunt of one of the kids said she would do it (a former college softball player) then another kid signed up and her mom played college ball too so now we have an all female coaching staff for our 4th team and they got 1st draft pick and pitcher pick so they are pretty stacked and I think will be both very fun and very competitive. As long as registration is going on you have time to continue to solicit volunteers at the very minimum I would see if board will hold off until registration is complete and just use this guy you described as a fall back position.

As far as competition that is tough the more teams you get the more diluted it will become once our rec season is over and we form our All Star team the top 12 girls will do a few warm up tournaments with travel teams, in preparation for their run at PONY nationals and it would not surprise me if they held their own at these tournaments. If you have girls on the bubble of playing up or down wait until registration is over before deciding anything, although we have had parents basically tell us that if their DD was forced to play down they would walk but I could not blame them she had the talent and maturity. Our by laws let the girls play up if parents want and as long as it is not a safety issue she gets to play up.

Finally re-look at your by laws, they should address these situation and if they don't fix them, obviously there is no fix for bad coach but personality issues will always come up.

Keep us posted and good luck

 

[Osric]

You sound very invested in the program, and you're in the best position to answer any questions that you've asked. Maybe it would help to define the problem in simple terms -

Is this the dilemma?

1. Have three teams, one of which will be terribly coached.
2. Have two teams and send some 12-14 girls to 11U when they'd rather play 12-14U.

This sums it up pretty well. There are a few girls that we *know* should play down another year...whether we can convince the parents and kids of that is up in the air. Currently, we are 'officially' at 22 girls with two others who have said they are going to play and a couple more who are on the fence (not sure if it will work with one of the school's middle-school team). But we generally pick up several more players on evaluation day (this Saturday), so there is a pretty good chance we'll be at the 28-30 mark. Too many for 2 teams unless we send them down to the 11u level, but not quite enough for 3 teams, so we may need to draw a couple of the better 11u girls up. Either way, the talent pool will definitely be watered down with 3 teams.

Pitchers/catchers DO have to be taken in the first two rounds, and there are 3 decent pitchers available and 3 decent catchers. There just isn't 6 pitchers/catcher (but there may be 4).

Just not a great situations. Round 1 of evaluations is tonight, so I might have some more insight soon...who knows. Maybe there is a group of girls coming out tonight who have skills, will bump the quality up enough, and who has a dad who is a good coach....

 

[David Carter]

Just make sure all the girls that say they can pitch or want to try you actually get to look at, I have seen both extremes one parent that said DD was great and it turned out she was not, then another that said she was a "project" but is probably top 3 in our league.

I would put a pretty hard cap at 26, 13 on a team is a handful. If you get 30 I think you have to bite the bullet and make the 3rd team. If you are at 28 I would really push hard for girls to move down rather than pull girls up, since it sounds like your talent level is already questionable from what you said.

we look forward to the update

 

[chinamigarden]

If you have less then 36 girls then you really don't have enough for 3 teams. If you end up with 10 player teams you will have an issue if there is a kid hurt or sick or someone goes on vacation... If this is rec and you have more then 24 girls the org needs to enforce the age brackets. The girls who have to be in the 12-14 age group are drafted first and then you hold a draft for the number of girls you need from the 11 YO girls who are interested. All the 11 year olds who are not drafted stay down. Its the only way to ensure you have a team for everyone.

 

[David Carter]

If you have less then 36 girls then you really don't have enough for 3 teams. If you end up with 10 player teams you will have an issue if there is a kid hurt or sick or someone goes on vacation... If this is rec and you have more then 24 girls the org needs to enforce the age brackets. The girls who have to be in the 12-14 age group are drafted first and then you hold a draft for the number of girls you need from the 11 YO girls who are interested. All the 11 year olds who are not drafted stay down. Its the only way to ensure you have a team for everyone.

and this is why you should get a copy of the by laws and see exactly how it is supposed to happen...while this is the way some leagues run our by laws are different. Your by laws are there so you don't have to try and make this up as you go along each time and have a governing set of principles everyone has voted on ahead of time.

 

[Osric]

So, yesterday was the day of drama...evaluation day. We had 27 girls show up, and there were a couple who signed up who couldn't make the eval, so we were exactly at the level I was fearing...28-29. Too few for 3 teams, too many for 2. The coach in the wings was there the whole time pretty much expecting a team while his daughter (who really is 75% of the problem) was frantically calling people trying to get them to come to evals so there could be three teams.

We went through evals and rated the players. Most of the girls we knew, but there was at least a half dozen that I had never seen before and another half dozen that I had seen so infrequently that I knew virtually nothing about them. Of the group, there were 4 that had never played before and it was very obvious that they would be completely outclassed at the level of ball we are trying to do this year. (while we are "rec", most of the teams that are coming to play are jr. high teams that are looking for games outside their brief 10 game schedule.) The final decision really came down to the coach that was chosen by the board when she said that she really didn't see more than two teams there based on the talent pool.

We sat down with the other divisions and found out that one other girl that tried out with us was actually signed up for the lower age division and she came to our evaluations by mistake. In the end, we held a draft for two teams of 12 players each and are going to see if the a couple of the extremely low skilled girls are willing to spend a year in the 11u league to get their skills up. 13 is just too many to carry on a team that only plays 9 in the field (our 11u league still plays 10 in the field).

I'm fairly pleased with my team. I only have 1 real pitcher (only 3 real pitchers in the league, so one of us was going to get stuck), but she has the most raw talent of any of the pitchers. Just need to work with her on focus and she'll be OK. Have another pitcher that got some mound time last year, so I'll need to spend a lot of time with her building from the ground up. Good hitters 1-7, with 8 and 9 being unknown quantities since I haven't seen them before, but they've started infield for the past couple seasons, so I'm hopeful. The rest will be works in progress, but I didn't choose anyone that I didn't think I couldn't work with.

So overall, I'm pleased with the results and my team. The coach who was waiting in the wings ended up being given an "assistant Commissioner" position which was a way for him to save face while getting a position with very little real power. Best of all, his daughter will not be involved at all so hopefully this will make things run much more smoothly throughout the league. (just to clarify; his granddaughter is the player. She is still playing, and she was never a big problem...some drama and normal teenage scatterbrain. It was the coach's daughter that was a large source of the conflict. In fact, as I called people last night to tell the kids who I selected for my team, I had 3 people check to make sure that I did not also pick up the player whose mother is such a pain.)

Thanks for letting me vent.

 

[quincy]

So overall, I'm pleased with the results

All sounds good, play ball!