YouthSportsBoardMember

Great feedback, Coach Carl! Love the idea of spending a little more time and energy on the T-ball program to build from the ground up rather than "fighting" to change the current situation. I appreciate the outlook and perspective.

Virginia

I do believe there are other factors at play (youth sports politics - yay!), which just further complicates all of this, unfortunately. I like your idea of meeting in-person rather than emails or phone calls. In our area it definitely feels All-Star driven, which in my opinion (doesn't mean it's right) isn't the goal of youth sports at that age. That being said, a season-end tourney is always fun! Our goal is to have as many kids playing sports as possible, and at this current juncture, LL is capping that for us. I just think that if All-Star selection is off the table for an out of county player then LL shouldn't care where a kid plays so long as they are playing baseball. I appreciate all of there responses! Thank you

The District Administrator is the one who is ultimately denying these requests and so now our local person is discouraging us to even submit them. We have heard through trusted sources that he "won't approve any more waivers." Which is why I questioned the purpose of waivers altogether in my initial post. I appreciate the response!

I am a board president of a private, non-profit youth sports organization. My goal is to ultimately grow my organization in ALL sports, but baseball has proven to be the most difficult due to some of the Little League boundary requirements. Our organization is in partnership with a government parks and rec department that seemingly requires us to participate in LL with them. As far as the overall LL experience is concerned, the baseball itself seems to be going great. The kid's are having fun and the opportunity, although rarely ever a reality for our teams, to compete in a season end tournament keeps the parents happy. Where we are running into an issue with our local LL board has to do with boundary restrictions. We are right on the border (less than a mile away) of 2 other boundaries. In all other sports, because we are a private non-profit, kids are allowed to sign up, but must pay an additional fee (an out of county fee to cover tax dollars that are used to improve our park). However, in baseball we are forced to turn away so many kids that could literally walk to our park. My question to the experienced baseball people in this forum: If we have an "out of county" 8+ year old that wants to sign up to play rec baseball at our organization, but agrees to forego All Star selection at the conclusion of the season be prohibited from playing? It would seem to me that the boundaries are there to prevent organizations from stacking their all-star teams, which I fully support and understand. My issue arises when you have a kid who is just trying to play rec baseball for fun and is not concerned with all-stars. Our waiver requests are getting denied left and right from our local board chair, which also raises the question about whether the waiver process even has a purpose. We have told the LL board that all out of county kids have been told they are not eligible for all-stars, but it doesn't seem to matter to whoever is in charge. From a youth sports perspective, this is counter productive to growing the sport. Kids want to have fun and play with their friends. If LL is denying them that opportunity based on where they live then they may have just lost a kid to another sport, or worse, no sport. It feels like common sense to me, A NON BASEBALL GUY, that it shouldn't matter where you play if it doesn't impact all-star selection. Please help me understand.