New to LL, help me understand the boundary expectations

[YouthSportsBoardMember]

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.

[Velho]

15 minutes ago, YouthSportsBoardMember said:

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

That's exactly it. Your common sense approach has been killed by underhand actions of the past.

16 minutes ago, YouthSportsBoardMember said:

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?

Other save more LL board experience than I and they will weigh in but my advice is to talk to the District Administrator to see if you can get traction there. Each local LL is considered its own entity but the D.A. may have sway. Also, LL has changed league rules regarding boundaries the last few years so they can best explain the rules and application.

Other alternatives are Pony, Cal Ripken, YMCA, etc. Offerings in your areas may vary of course.

Good luck. Love what you're doing.

[YouthSportsBoardMember]

5 minutes ago, Velho said:

talk to the District Administrator to see if you can get traction there.

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!

[Coach Carl]

Generally, a player is eligible for your league if he lives in your boundries or goes to school in your boundries. 

However, Little League has loosened it's boundry requirements.  Carefully review Regulation II regarding League Age 4-7 players.  Any player who is league age 7 or younger can "register in any Little League program without respect to any geography-related eligibility or school enrollment eligibility requirements."  Since this is a written rule, if you are following it, there is no waiver required.

For kids league age 8+ there may be eligibility based on a league age 4-7 sibling.  It's hard to make blanket statements about that.  Check it over on a case by case basis.

Further, a player who lives in any territory outside your league boundry that is also NOT within the geographic boundry of another Little League is eligible to play in any league, regardless of age (again, with caveats that should be investigated on a case by case basis).

[SeeingEyeDog]

I spent 3 years on The Board of my local Little League. I don't have any hard demographic data comparing my League with others or the national averages but, I will just say that we had a lot of players who came from shared-custody families. Many of them had one parent living in one Little League's boundaries and another parent living a few boundary areas over or in an adjacent area. And this was all properly facilitated by our DA. Did we lose some "great players" to other league's all-star teams? Sure. And...we also got some in return. Honestly, we never really cared about balancing that out. Little League participation was down in our market and we wanted to get as many kids on the field as possible.

@YouthSportsBoardMember, you mentioned you are close to 2 other boundary areas. Were I a league president in your situation, the first thing I would do is invite your neighboring league presidents AND the DA out to dinner on your dime. (We live in a post-COVID, highly impersonal world now. By getting face time with people, it's generally easier to get people to cooperate.)

And I would use that dinner to first frame a discussion about border disputes as it relates to players and families wanting to play outside of their "home zone". Get everyone at the table onto some kind of agreement of how you're all going to do business that hopefully uses LL regs fully as your guide. I would also use this dinner to fully gauge the personalities of those you are dealing with. Are these in fact cooperative people who want to create a situation where a kid can simply play baseball on a schedule that makes sense for them and their family? (Which is why LL exists..) Or is there the vibe of, "Well, our priority must be the All-Star Team..."

You mentioned the DA is not typically issuing waivers...that sounds weird to me. I can think of a many, many scenarios where under their rules and in the best interests of the player in question and their family for a child to play in a Little League other than their home zoned league. So, I would probe them a bit more to review the waiver process and fully understand when they are going to issue waivers and if they have a blanket policy not to issue them, why is that?

~Dawg

[Mussgrass]

Just run it as an independent rec league. You can make all the rules. Then let LL do their own thing.

I bet you'd have no shortage of players.

[YouthSportsBoardMember]

19 minutes ago, SeeingEyeDog said:

You mentioned the DA is not typically issuing waivers...that sounds weird to me.

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

[Velho]

20 minutes ago, YouthSportsBoardMember said:

I do believe there are other factors at play (youth sports politics - yay!)

Curious, where at you located?

[YouthSportsBoardMember]

7 minutes ago, Velho said:

Curious, where at you located?

Virginia

[Coach Carl]

34 minutes ago, YouthSportsBoardMember said:

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 agree with this sentiment and wish it could prevail.  The problem you will run into is there will inevitably be some kids who become interested in post season play and now you have old promises not to play all-stars that were made in good faith but the parents or player no longer want to be held to them.  

Options:  (1) as SeeingEyeDog mentioned, get a meeting with the other leagues and rather than seeking out waiver processes, see if boundaries can be re-drawn.  If other leagues aren't getting players from that area then they may not care. (2) give up on the 8+ year olds and devote volunteer resources to developing a robust T-ball program for the 4-7 year olds.  In a couple of years you'll have lots of those out of boundry kids legally participating in your league and you've accomplished your goal while leaving all-stars open for anyone.   (3) Find out if your local parks and rec department truly wants you to stay in Little League. You may find that they use "Little League" generically.  It may be that they would be just as satisfied with Cal Ripken or Pony.  They may just want to have a national organization backing the program.  Both of those orgs have boundary issues as well but in your local area they may already be drawn to allow your outreach of the nearby areas.  Or they may be more amenable to changes, if the Little League folks are not.  (Or you may be able to use the threat of leaving as motivation to change the LL boundaries).   

[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.

[MadMax]

4 hours ago, YouthSportsBoardMember said:

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.

Participating in or linking to LL is like obtaining a house in a HOA-gripped neighborhood. 

The reason LL was institutionalized may have been for the promotion of youth baseball (and softball), but it’s been intensified and made more stringent and overbearing in the past two decades for the projection (of power and influence) of the adults. 

The adults in LL all get wrapped up in titles, and roles, and responsibilities, and liabilities, and the structure of it all. They get lured in by the convenience and shared responsibilities (“Hey! They have a community pool! And our dues go to it! Sweet!”), but any of these benefits quickly are inundated and suffocated by battles for control, power, and superiority (“Waddiya mean my kids can’t swim in our community pool, unless they’ve got a WaterWings -brand pool noodle, and are wearing blue-colored one-piece swimsuits, and we can show full immunization status?! What kinda place is this?!”) 

So it begs the question, and maybe you can read this for the implied meaning within – Who are the boundary rules written / delineated for? The kids?… or the parents (adults)? 
 

 

Hint: the kids don’t care. 

[The Man in Blue]

7 hours ago, YouthSportsBoardMember said:

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.

 

I will second that idea.  I am several years removed, but I ran our local softball program for several years.  Baseball and softball were separate organizations since the 1970s. . . I don't know why, but I have good guesses.

One of the first things I implemented was shopping around and looking for an org that would line up with the program's values, but offer us some "travel" opportunities (this was as travel ball was beginning to decimate community programs).  We did not have any affiliated programs within an hour of us.  In the past, we had been PONY affiliated, but had drifted away.  We still used their rules and bought their rulebooks (very reasonably priced).  We looked at Little League and quickly discarded them as an option for several reasons.  We opted to go back to PONY and were in the process of building a good local program covering several towns when the wheels fell off.

The next thing we did was look into starting a T-ball program.  There was not one in our area.  Kids went straight into 8u coach pitch, which discouraged some people from playing.  I met with the baseball organization and told them of our intent, and asked them if they would want to work with us to make it co-ed.  They laughed and said "Nobody wants to play T-ball."  So I asked if I was going to step on their toes if we made our program co-ed.  They laughed again and said, "Go right ahead."  

So we did.  T-ball essentially saved our local program.  The first year we limited it to 4 teams to get our feet under us.  The next year we more than doubled to 10 teams.  Not only was this a boost to our ailing team and player counts, but it introduced people to the community program earlier, which meant they were more likely to stay longer.

Play the long game.  Use that loop hole to build your T-ball program, then look to go off book with your built-in audience.

Do you need those other local LL programs to have people to play against?  

[BLWizzRanger]

I really don't have anything to add to this discussion.  They are giving good advice.  FWIW, one of the best things we did was go with Pony.  

Even more fun was having an opening day parade at the fields where the teams walked, parents cheered and the older teams formed a path where the T-Ballers walked through them all.  They were cheered and high fived by the older kids and the young ones and parents absolutely loved it.  Great memories.