[BretMan]

I'm very fortunate in this respect. The local league I most often work:

- Prints a summary of the rules and distributes them to all coaches.

- Publishes the rules on a website, accessible for anyone to read, copy or distribute as they wish.

- Holds a yearly rule clinic for coaches.

- Holds yearly umpire clinics.

You can't get much more informed than that. There's really no excuse for participants on either side of the fence not to be aware of the local rules.

Where I run into the old "it's a local rule" thing most often is in tournaments (where the excuse will be "it's a tournament rule"). Most are pretty good about distributing any special rules. Some aren't so good. Every year you can count on a tournament or two that will tell the umpires something like, "We're playing (fill in the sanctioning body) rules"- while forgetting to mention the two-page handout of exceptions that was given to the coaches but not the umpires!