Your advice for improving youth league

[Xraf]

What advice do you have for improving a league's overall competitiveness? What I mean by "competitiveness" is improving the overall talent of the youth players.

So is it simply better coaches = better players = better league?

[Jake Patterson]

What advice do you have for improving a league's overall competitiveness? What I mean by "competitiveness" is improving the overall talent of the youth players.

So is it simply better coaches = better players = better league?

1. Keep it fun for all involved.
2. Select those that WANT to be there regardless of talent (both players and coaches).
3. Select coaches who are willing to stick around for awhile.
4. Train, train, train....

We ran a yearly clinic with coaching and player clinics throughout the year. Also helpful is appoint a training coordinator/director and have him/her constantly provide information on coaching.

What many people perceive as "better coaches" usually have an adverse affect...

It's a long-haul item and NOT something you can fix in a year or two.

[Xraf]

1. Keep it fun for all involved.
2. Select those that WANT to be there regardless of talent (both players and coaches).
3. Select coaches who are willing to stick around for awhile.
4. Train, train, train....

We ran a yearly clinic with coaching and player clinics throughout the year. Also helpful is appoint a training coordinator/director and have him/her constantly provide information on coaching.

What many people perceive as "better coaches" usually have an adverse affect...

It's a long-haul item and NOT something you can fix in a year or two.

So what I am reading here is get good people, keep it fun, train coaches to be better coaches.

We have a coaching coordinator and it sounds like he is intending to be active this year. At this point I'm not sure what he has in mind for coaching improvement.
In years past we have had a coaching clinic just before the beginning of the season.

So far it seems everyone seems agrees that improving a league rests on improving/training the coaches.

[Coach45]

Xraf, great questions. I suggest you read Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

You need master coaches who can break down FUNdamentals into small parts, who understand the value of deep practice, and can also inspire players. It's much more complicated than this but if you really want to get better it's going to take hard work.

[mudvnine]

Work your hardest to do whatever it takes to draft/assign equal talent across the board to all teams.

The best leagues have the majority of their teams battling for the championship, all with about even records.

If your league has a team that's won all but one of their games, and another team that has lost all but one of theirs....somewhere a couple individuals had more influence in the league than they should have, and if that's allowed to happen two or more years in a row, you start to lose people.

To simply say, "better coaches = better players = better league" is pretty much meaningless if you define a "better coach" by some win/loss record.

IMO, anyone can coach a team full of talent and have a great win%, but that does not define a "good coach". It's the guy who's able to take marginal talent, and develop it into a "competitive" team, who I believe to be the "better coach".....regardless of his overall win/loss record.

Put the quality of competition above the individual needs of adult egos and you'll do just fine.

[songtitle]

If your league has a team that's won all but one of their games, and another team that has lost all but one of theirs....somewhere a couple individuals had more influence in the league than they should have, and if that's allowed to happen two or more years in a row, you start to lose people.

There's another way to think about this.

The best leagues that I have seen, do the opposite. They allow stacked teams, or divisions, in order to win state championships. This attracts good coaches and players. This creates pride in being part of the park. This also stems the need for so many out of state travel teams.

Of course, this could get out of hand and must be managed properly.

[skipper5]

Most organizations have a mission statement.
Work within you league to have it adopt "team parity" as the league's mission statement.
Our town's youth league made team parity it's prime mission about 10 years ago, and it has thrived.
Needless to say, it requires followthrough--e.g., reforming draft procedures, etc.

[raptor]

IMO many kids end up leaving a league or switching leagues because of:
-poor coaching (too results-oriented, poor communication with parents, poor practice time efficiency, little or no rules for behavior or attendance, and perception of favoritism). Jake mentioned coaching clinics and that is a staple of well-run leagues. A board who selects coaches carefully and without favoritism
-politics around daddy-ball playing time, all-star selection, etc.
-quality of fields and facilities, allotments for practice time, etc. Community involvement and sponsor activity should always be in the works.
Given the above, well-run leagues can thrive even without a relatively high level of competitiveness relative to other leagues and all-star teams, but if the above is right then the "competitiveness" will follow.

[mudvnine]

There's another way to think about this.

The best leagues that I have seen, do the opposite. They allow stacked teams, or divisions, in order to win state championships. This attracts good coaches and players. This creates pride in being part of the park. This also stems the need for so many out of state travel teams.

Of course, this could get out of hand and must be managed properly.

That's a valid and good point that I think is dependent on the sanctioning organization of the league.

I've never been involved in a LLI sanctioned league, so we never had a T.O.C. type event, where a regular season team had an opportunity to compete anywhere out of league play itself.

The only "out of league" play we had was for those selected to the all-star teams, but you do make a good point wrt LLI organizations or ones like it....I was thinking of how we effectively changed the model of our league in years past from a different "playoff" format.

[HeinekenMan]

I certainly don't have all of the answers. But I'd like to say a few words on the subject.

I have seen kids make huge strides after receiving paid instruction and/or after playing for a travel team. A league that allows kids to play travel ball will draw the most experienced, most talented players and the best coaches. And they raise the bar for all of the kids. The key is to ensure that travel ball doesn't trample the rec league.

If you have good mentor coaches who are willing to conduct clinics for new coaches, it makes a huge difference. The kids can learn so much in those early years. And it makes a giant difference in how they perform as they move up. The competitiveness is great at years 8-10 when the fundamentals are taught during the 5-7 years.

Machine pitch is vastly superior to coach pitch. The kids adjust much better to kid pitch when they're moving from machines.

Early pitching instruction leads to a much better league. I've seen walk-athons too many times. The league I'm in now has kid pitch for two innings for the 7-8 kids. Then they go to machines. This gives the kids early pitching experience, which is a huge bonus when they move to the kid pitch division.

A 50/70 transition is a must in today's game. The jump to the big field is simply too great when players don't have the 50/70 field to allow incremental adjustment.

Practice facilities are extremely important to the development of the kids. My old league didn't have a cage. I had to pitch on the field to one kid at a time. My new league has side-by-side cages, and my batting practices are 10 times as successful.

An organization must have a system for weeding out poor managers and coaches. It would be nice to see some sort of interview process. I have seen some seriously poor coaches. I'm not talking about coaches who don't know how to teach hitting mechanics or something. I'm talking about coaches who lack patience, who aren't willing to practice more than once a week, who don't know how to talk to kids, etc. And, frankly, I've seen some coaches who had a screw loose to the point that it was obvious after a short conversation. Through an interview, you may be able to weed out a few. For the others, have a review process. Have parents do anonymous evaluations and have board members watch games. Also, you should keep records of how many players return for another season right after having a certain coach. I've seen a few coaches who chased off 5-6 kids each season.

[Xraf]

Thanks Coach45 I'll check it out.

At least at the lower levels (t-ball & coach pitch) our league has good things going for it. Blind drafts to set up the teams (maybe ages split evenly?), score isn't kept, mandatory player rotations. I think the draft procedures are changing for the coming years for ages 9 and up, it used to be a manager draft.

Better coaches means better educated & prepared coaches.

The idea is to improve the coaches who improve their players which gives the league better over all teams and better all star teams.

I'm thinking the measuring stick used for the league is how well the all-star teams do against their competition. At the moment I'm not aware of how the baseball all-stars are chosen. From the little I hear on the softball side the all-stars could be chosen in a more deserving manner. So maybe the program is better than it appears already???

So...
Better trained coaches,
Talent split evenly between teams,
All-stars chosen properly??

So far no one recommended having a more aggressive rule set.

[Xraf]

If you have good mentor coaches who are willing to conduct clinics for new coaches, it makes a huge difference. The kids can learn so much in those early years. And it makes a giant difference in how they perform as they move up. The competitiveness is great at years 8-10 when the fundamentals are taught during the 5-7 years.

Hopefully we can get more coaches teaching good sound basics!

Machine pitch is vastly superior to coach pitch. The kids adjust much better to kid pitch when they're moving from machines.

Around our league it's believed that coach pitch is superior to machine pitch because kids are seeing live pitches coming from a hand sooner. We just recently switched to coach pitch. Of course after seeing a full year of it I'll say most coaches can't pitch accurately and consistently from a knee at a reasonable speed and distance.

A 50/70 transition is a must in today's game. The jump to the big field is simply too great when players don't have the 50/70 field to allow incremental adjustment.

Our league is currently planning for a 50/70 division for next spring.

Practice facilities are extremely important to the development of the kids. My old league didn't have a cage. I had to pitch on the field to one kid at a time. My new league has side-by-side cages, and my batting practices are 10 times as successful.

An organization must have a system for weeding out poor managers and coaches. It would be nice to see some sort of interview process. I have seen some seriously poor coaches. I'm not talking about coaches who don't know how to teach hitting mechanics or something. I'm talking about coaches who lack patience, who aren't willing to practice more than once a week, who don't know how to talk to kids, etc. And, frankly, I've seen some coaches who had a screw loose to the point that it was obvious after a short conversation. Through an interview, you may be able to weed out a few. For the others, have a review process. Have parents do anonymous evaluations and have board members watch games. Also, you should keep records of how many players return for another season right after having a certain coach. I've seen a few coaches who chased off 5-6 kids each season.

Thanks for the input.

[Jake Patterson]

Hopefully we can get more coaches teaching good sound basics!

The only way this will happen is if you train them how.... Otherwise you get a hodge podge of approaches that seldom work...

[mudvnine]

The idea is to improve the coaches who improve their players which gives the league better over all teams and better all star teams.

This is not a bad idea, but......

I'm thinking the measuring stick used for the league is how well the all-star teams do against their competition. At the moment I'm not aware of how the baseball all-stars are chosen. From the little I hear on the softball side the all-stars could be chosen in a more deserving manner. So maybe the program is better than it appears already???

....using this a "measuring stick" may be problematic. The reason is that unfortunately, demographics wil always play into the formula.

Over the years, our once VERY strong league, saw our catchment area demographics change dramatically, and sports in the area were less important to the cultures moving in, and were replaced by more "academic" (music, dance, specialized advanced classes) activities instead.

This is why "team stacking" amongst a couple individuals was hurting the overall dynamics/success of the league. IOWs, the "better coaches" were not always ending up with the all-star teams, until the all-star coach selection went to a committee, and not just the coach with the best win/loss record.

That helped, but league play was still sometimes sketchy until the player draft rules were changed to raise the overall competitiveness of league play. We eventually started getting "better" players from other leagues (LLs within our catchment area) and our all-star teams started to find great success in sanction play.

The bigger LL organization in our area has since changed it to the same PONY sanctioning organization, so the "better" players from that area cannot play within our league, and as a result, I understand that our all-star success is again slipping, but league play and registration is still as strong as ever fortunately.

[HeinekenMan]

To touch on coach pitch vs. machine pitch: I have been involved with two leagues. One league has coach pitch for ages 6-8. The best 8-year-old players go to the LL Minors for kid pitch. The other league has a combination of kid/machine pitch for ages 7-8 with strict league age rules (You can't move up early.) I believe they pitch for two innings and use the machine for the rest of the game.

In the coach-pitch league, most coaches lob the ball. The pitches are the same as what would be thrown to T-ball players before the tee is brought out. There is a pitch limit, and batters are out even if three of the six pitches were over their heads or in the dirt. Kids who move up to the LL Minor division at age 9 have absolutely no pitching experience.