As with every year, the subject of the lack of competent umpires came up at both of our district meetings. We simply cannot cover all of these games. We try diligently to recruit other individuals to help us out, and cover these games, but we continue to fall short.

To improve on the situation, we are considering implementing a better junior umpire program.

Are their any well established junior umpire programs that you know of that may be able to help us along with guidelines to how their programs are run?

Do you have any personal suggestions on how we might go about implementing such a program?

As always, your thoughts are GREATLY appreciated!

You can contact me at my personal e-mail if you would like to give your suggestions, or post them here.

[email protected]

Tim.

Make baseball games start after 5:00 PM in the spring and you'll get a better pool of candidates for H.S. ball.

yes, and buy every HS field in america a full lighting system to go with that later start time...

We've tried several things to get a junior umpire program going. I'm assuming that you mean umpires age 14 - 18.

Paying them well is the only thing that has worked. That means $40-50 per game, not $15 - 20. For this price we require them to have proper uniforms, attend training, and show up on time. Even then, 50% of the umpires don't work out but we have plenty to take their place.

our fees went up this year to roughly $60 for modified, $75 for JV, and $90 for varsity

it's brought in about 20 new recruits this year

Wow, where do you live? I'll move there!!! We just got a raise to $59 for varsity. and $69 for 1 man JV. Two man JV got a raise to $49 dollars a man. I could make a living where you're at, since I usually work 6 days a week!

I <3 NY

I'm beginning to think that our
State Athletic Assc. is cheap. I'd
love to make $49 for JV.

From what I understand, San Diego is pretty much the lowest in the whole state. Los Angeles, Orange County, Sacramento, and San Francisco all pay officials much more.
If they went by cost of living, S.D. would be the highest paid.

By the way, our fees for each level were raised by $2, and include a $2 travel fee. WOW! That helps a bunch with $3 a gallon gas prices.

Our fees were raised this year
by $7, yet we still make less
for Varsity than ya'll do JV.

Nine replies, and only one has anything remotely to do with the original question. Nice job derailers! Way to pay attention.

Tim,

Our junior umpire program started 5 years ago. 12 year olds and up. It began in winterball, or training and development season. No score, no standing, so little pressure. The local BoD backed the kids, and made it very clear to the coaches that if they try to imtimidate any youngster they'll be done in our league.

We started with weekly classroom sessions, followed by games on Saturday. Lots of adult mentoring. Kids had gear to use at the field, and were given hats and shirts. The hook was food. Work a game in winterball, and the snackbar is open. "Will work for food" works well. Plus, the incentive to get better, so you can get paid in springball.

We had a great UiC the first year. He was a no-nonsense fellow, but with a big heart. Appearance was key in his book, and kids even got haircuts just to umpire games for him. At the end of the first year we had about ten kids working lots of games. At the closing ceremony, after the All Stars were announced, the UiC had one more award. A $500 savings bond (that he paid for out of his own pocket) for the Umpire of the Year. After that, we practically had a waiting list for Junior Umpires.

We've now put kids in District, Section and State championship games. We've graduated one to doing adult league games, for some major coin, at 17 years old. And our program is being copied by all the surrounding leagues. But it starts with one guy, and BoD willing to back him. Good luck Tim, it's a worth while cause.

you must be new here

Finally!
 

Thank's Kyle!

I really appreciate the input. We don't have winter baseball here though. The players have a hard time finding ground balls in the snow!
http://www.officialforum.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

We'll have to start slow this spring as baseball starts up again and go from there.

We've discussed this in the past and there was significant resistance to using any players under 16 to work games. It just never took off like I had hoped it would. Last season the need for more umpires jumped dramatically in our area. We didn't retire many guys, but we took on another district near us to work games in.

I'm hoping to have a decent policy down by the second weekend in January to present to our association for approval. From there, if it's approved, we'll take it to the next district meeting and present it to the league presidents.

Hopefully they'll get on board with it, and help us out. After all, they're the ones who ***** the most that we don't have enough umpires to cover their regular season games.

Tim.