CA DISTRICT 14 LITTLE LEAGUE: District 14 News

CA District 14 Little League announces a location change for the February 21st Inter-league Managers Meeting to the H.A Snow Elementary School in Newark. Check our location page for the address.

All inter-league managers and coaches must sign a statement stating they will abide by the inter-league rules, by laws and guidelines. Any manager or coach that refuses to sign will not be allowed to participate in inter-league or District 14 TOC play.

District Administrator, Reggie Torres and his staff; Tom Curtis: Assistant District Administrator, Rob McCarthy: District Umpire Coordinator, Frank Bontempo: District Information Officer and Big League Coordinator, Sharon Kaufman: Junior and Senior Coordinator, Greg Kaufman: District Major Coordinator, and Sue Roman: District Minor and Tee Ball Coordinator will be attending the 2012 West Region Round Table Seminar in San Bernardino January 26-January 29. This seminar was formally called the DA/ADA Seminar.

Steve Keener, President and CEO of Little League, Pat Wilson the Senior VP of Operations, Lance Van Auken the VP of Communications, Nick Caringi, Senior Director of Operations, Dan Kirby the VP of Risk Management (Safety) and Sara Thompson, Director of Softball, plus the Regional Director, Jim Gerstenslager will present seminars on concussions and background checks, district communications, league development, training initiatives, regional hot buttions, and rules and regulation changes.

"This is the first time I am able to invite my entire staff to attend this type of a meeting" said Reggie, "this will give the staff a chance to meet the officers from Williamsport and get answers right from the top." "This will also give them a chance to meet DAs and their staff from around the region to exchange ideas and see how they run their Districts."

There will also be round tables discussions where the DA and staff will sit with others from around the region to discuss the new proposed rule and regulation changes.

"I think this will be a great learning experience for my staff" commented Reggie. "I hope this will help us run our district better."

Little League Baseball's California District 14 (Fremont-Newark) is proud to announce that John Chivers has been selected to umpire at Little League Baseball’s 2012 Big League (15-18 year old) Western Region Baseball Tournament in Silverdale, Washington.

John is the ninth umpire with District 14 roots to be selected to umpire at a Little League Baseball Western Region or World Series Baseball Tournament, joining Randy Morris (1999-Little League), Bruce Marcellus (2002-Little League and 2008-Seniors), Mike Martinez (2004-Little League, 2006-Big League and 2007-Big League WS), Tom Curtis (2008-Juniors), Rob McCarthy (2009-Juniors) and Vic Langford (2009 European Regional Little League Tournament in Poland) and Pat Mulhern (2011-Little League). Former District 14 umpire, Bob Slyter (2009-Little League), who represented Idaho District 2, is also counted among this group.

John first became involved in Little League in 1990, when he signed up his 6-year-old son Nick to play tee-ball at Centerville American Little League (Fremont).  John was asked if he wouldn't mind "helping to coach" Nick's team -- "helping" immediately became "managing", and John managed or coached CALL teams for the next 9 years. Like all CALL managers John was required to umpire, and there he found his true calling.  In addition to coaching and umpiring, John was on the CALL Board of Directors for several years, serving as Player Agent and Umpire in Chief.

In 1998 John moved to Niles-Centerville Little League (Fremont), where he continues to umpire to this day (often with Nick as his favorite partner).

John attended the San Bernardino Weekend Umpire Mechanics clinic in 1992, and joined the District 14 umpire staff in 1995, where he has officiated District and Sectional All-Star tournaments at all levels, and Divisional All-Star tournaments for 9-10, Majors and Big League. 

John was honored with California District 14’s Jay Horry Memorial Award in 1995 as a distinguished umpire upholding the ideals of Little League Baseball and California District 14.

The selection to umpire at the Western Region Big League Baseball Tournament is recognition not only for John’s umpire skills, but also for his years of dedicated volunteer service to Little League Baseball and its ideals. This selection also qualifies John to umpire at the Big League World Series, held in Easly, South Carolina.

The Western Region Big League Baseball Tournament is played in Silverdale, Washington and is scheduled to start in August, 2012. Winners advance to the Big League World Series.

Fremont-Newark, California – Little League Baseball’s California District 14 has announced a new format for the Senior Division (players 13 to 16 years old) Baseball program for the 2012 season.

In an effort to encourage maximum participation from eligible Senior aged players, Little League Baseball has granted D14 a waiver to operate the program similar to how the D14 Big League program is run. Players will continue to sign up through their local league, however if a local league does not have enough players to field a stand-alone team, the players will be pooled together and distributed via a draft after a common District run tryout. This program will be administered by Sharon Kaufman, the District 14 Senior Coordinator.

California District 14 Administrator, Reggie Torres commented that, “We believe this new program will allow for more Senior players to participate in the Senior program and give better balance to the overall division.”

Local leagues must have a minimum of 12 Senior aged players to field a stand-alone team. If they are under this minimum, players will then participate in a District tryout and be drafted to a District-run team. D14 will assign managers and coaches to the D14 Senior teams after an application and interview process has been completed.

As a District run program, these teams will have more opportunities to travel to other Little League Districts to play games, as well as meet D14 Senior teams in regular season contests. This format was developed as a way to create a full 10 week regular season followed by a post-season Tournament of Champions – for non-high school players and high school players who have completed their season.

All-Stars for this Senior format also brings a new look. Stand-alone leagues will be able to enter their own Senior All-Star team as they always have. However, local leagues with less than the minimum will be grouped as pairs by the District, with each of the two leagues contributing players to an All-Star team. Once again the District will assign managers and coaches to the D14 Senior All-Star teams after an application and interview process has been completed.

For more information on the 2012 Senior Baseball Division or to apply as a manager, please contact Sharon Kaufman at kauf9er@yahoo.com.

Little League Baseball's California District 14 (Fremont-Newark) has announced changes to the Challenger Program meetings scheduled in January 2012.

The Challenger Coordinators Meeting, originally scheduled for Thursday, January 19, 2012 has been moved to Wednesday, January 18, 2012. The Challengers Parents Meeting, originally scheduled for Friday, Jaunuary 27, 2012 has been moved to Thursday, January 26, 2012.

Both meetings continue to be scheduled for 7 pm at Centerville Round Table Pizza in Fremont. For more information on the District 14 Challenger Program, contact District 14 Challenger Coordinator, Rick Carrabello at 510-381-2949 or E-mail him at r8durz@pacbell.net

Little League Baseball has issued a Bulletin outlining Rule Changes for the 2012 Little League season. Below is the message from Little League International:

Nov. 23, 2011
 
Bulletin: Significant Policy, Rule, and Regulation Changes for 2012
 
Little League International today announced the full list of significant changes that will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2012, to the policies, rules and regulations of the program.
 
In order to give timely information to parents and leagues, some of the changes were announced several weeks ago. One change, in the bat regulations, has been further updated since the first announcement. The update clarifies the penalty for using an illegal bat.
 
As always, thank you for your service to the children and families of your community, and please accept our best wishes for a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season.

Sincerely,
Little League International

For a list of all the significant changes, along with a summary and explanation of the changes, a PDF of the Rule Changes is available in the Handouts Section of the D14 site. Look in the "Rule Changes 2012" Section.

Highlights of the Rule Changes include:

Clarification of the composite bat rule and expansion of player ages in the Senior and Big League Divisions of play.

However, the biggest change to Little League Baseball rules may be that Little League has now allowed batters to advance to first on a dropped third strike in the MAJOR (Little League) Division - similar to the Junior, Senior and Big League Divisions. This will be implemented fully in the International (All-Star) Tournament, but can be an option for local leagues during the regular season. It will also be implemented in the 10-11 All-Star Tournament.

This is a big change in the style of Little League Baseball and how the game will be coached, played and umpired.

Little League has posted an announcement regarding upcoming changes to the bat rules and specifications for the 2012 season.

To see that announcement, visit this page (for a short-cut, click on the article headline):   

http://www.littleleague.org/media/newsarchive/2011/Sep-Dec/LLAnnouncesBatRuleChangesfor2012Season.htm

Little League is taking this step, before the rule books are actually published in December, to give parents and leagues a timely "heads up."

As always, thank you for your support of Little League Baseball and Softball.

Sincerely,

Little League Baseball and Softball

Little League International today announced a change to the regulations for 2012 that will allow more options in the teenage divisions of baseball.

Effective Jan. 1, 2012:

The Senior League Baseball Division (previously limited to players league age 14-16) may now include players league age 13-16.

The Big League Baseball Division (previously limited to players league age 16-18) may now include players league age 15-18.

For Tournament Play, the age divisions will be: Junior League 13-14; Senior League 13-16; and Big League 15-18.

The Junior League Baseball Division remains for players league age 13-14 during the regular season. (Note: As before, 12-year-olds also are eligible for Junior League Baseball regular season play, under certain criteria.)

This gives local leagues wide latitude in tailoring their regular season teenage baseball divisions based on the available talent pool and age breakdown.

"All of the changes in the rules and regulations for 2012 will be announced in the next few days," Patrick W. Wilson, Senior Vice President of Operations and Program Development, said. "We wanted to get this change out to our leagues and districts sooner, however, for planning purposes."

The change also will affect pitch-count limits in Tournament Play, so the days of rest guide will apply to 13-18 year olds participating in the Senior and Big League divisions. Pitch count limits for the regular season remain the same as in 2011, based on the age of the pitcher.

Below is a great article about travel ball. Must reading for all parents!

Where the 'elite' kids shouldn't meet 

Your kid is good, right? Really good? You don't want to brag, but he can do some things on the field that other kids his age won't even try. You played a little ball yourself, and you know the difference. Make no mistake: There's someone out there for you. He's putting together a team, and he's got a pipeline to the best tournaments. He knows people. He'll have tryouts and he'll tell you what you want to hear. It's expensive, sure, but who can put a price on your kid's future? If he's got a chance to be the best, he needs to play with and against the best, right?Judging by the direction we're taking preteen youth sports, it appears we have completely lost our minds. Gone crazy -- collectively and individually. It's become something of a hobby for me to read the local sports coverage of the three or four sub-20,000 circulation papers in my area, and I am here to report that the center cannot hold.

 The days of simply playing ball with your friends is over. It's a different world out there for the preteen athlete, with "Elite" and "Select" commonly turning up in the names of our youth sports teams and leagues. We're having tryouts for 10-and-under traveling baseball teams, and we've got 10-and-under basketball teams traveling the country playing against other fourth-graders at God knows what cost to the parents' bank accounts and the kids' psyches. All in the name of … what? Trophies? Exposure? A leg up on a college scholarship? The egos of the parents?The exploits of these kids, which almost always include tournament championships, national rankings from some little-known organization and perspective-free quotes from the coaches, are dutifully and breathlessly reported. If you didn't know any better, you'd think the 9- and 10-year-olds in my neck of the woods are the most remarkable 9- and 10-year-olds anywhere. But then you could probably say the same about yours. You just have to know where to look.

I found a great nugget the other day: a notice for a 10-and-under baseball team that's having tryouts for its extensive fall tournament schedule. The notice included the following sentence: "The team needs competitive youngsters who are looking to play baseball at the next level."Let's parse that for a moment. Someone needs to explain to me what the "next level" is for a kid who's 10 or younger. I dare you to define it. Is it 11-and-under? Maybe 12-and-under? And if so, are there really 10-year-olds who are striving to play baseball at the 12-and-under level? Wouldn't it just happen naturally -- you know, with age?

 If you think that, you're behind the times. This is the age of the special child. This is the age of the parent who believes his or her kid playing Little League for the neighborhood team is beneath them both. (Despite the talent you see at the Little League World Series, make no mistake: Little League has suffered enormously at the hands of the folks who peddle dreams to the parents of the preteen set. Local independent teams -- most of them touting the supposed benefits of year-round play -- skim top players out of neighborhood Little Leagues.) This is the age of the youth-sports industrial complex, where men make a living putting on tournaments for 7-year-olds, and parents subject their children to tryouts and pay good money for the right to enter into it.

There are palaces built just for the purpose of housing these tournaments. Big League Dreams is a chain of West Coast baseball complexes with multiple diamonds that attempts to replicate different big league ballparks. There's a bunch of 10-year-olds playing in Fenway, the 12s in Yankee Stadium and the 13s in Wrigley Field. (You haven't really lived until you've seen Wrigley's ivy-covered wall painted onto slabs of plywood. There are times you have to pinch yourself.) The fields are spokes that extend from the hub -- an air-conditioned restaurant and bar, where parents can sit inside and watch games away from the infernal heat.They go through every player's backpack as he enters -- and yes, there's an entrance fee -- to make sure he isn't trying to smuggle in any outside food or drink. PowerBars and Gatorades are confiscated.

There are buzzwords in this business, sure to coax the gullible parent. The big three terms are "elite," "select," and "travel ball." Oh, the power of those words. Waving the prospect of "travel ball" under the nose of the ambitious father of a talented 9-year-old is like wafting a steak under the nose of a sleeping dog. After all, the more you travel and the farther you go to play a sport, the better you must be at that sport, right?

"Travel ball," in this world, is meant as a synonym for "better ball." Parents say, "Oh, he plays travel ball," as a means of separating their kids from the riffraff who don't see fit to spend thousands of dollars to travel all over the place with their 9-year-olds. And if it's "year-round travel ball" -- a red flag across the orthopedic medical community for the dangers of repetitive overuse -- all the better. It's a status symbol, one promoted by parents and justified by the guys who collect tournament fees, and it's the main reason baseball in this country is widely becoming the province of wealthy suburbia.

Another nugget: A 10-and-under AAU basketball team from my Northern California town got the lead story in the sports section about a week ago. They've won six of seven tournaments, we're told, and they aren't stopping there. The coach is quoted as saying, "I am looking to go to North Carolina and Houston. And there may be a New York tournament."In the bylined story -- and yes, I remember the days when I had to cover Little League and adult softball (gack) for a local paper -- we are treated to thumbnail descriptions of the team's two best players before we're left with the following walk-off quote from our coach: "Some parents claim they're the best team in [the county]. I must agree with them."These are 9- and 10-year-olds, which raises a question: What the hell are we doing? Here's one thing we're doing: We're creating a class of kids who are being labeled with terms such as "elite" and "competitive" and "best of the best." They're being worshipped by their parents and coaches, who keep statistics to post online and send photographs to the local paper. It's organized insanity.

And this is just something to think about, but if there are countless elite and select teams where I live, how elite and select can they be? We went through a culture shift in American education in which self-esteem became a major focus. Slower kids became "challenged" or "special" as a means of eliminating pejoratives. A lot of good came of it; kids who were branded with demeaning terms found strength in their differences.Well, the pendulum has sure swung, hasn't it? We're nearing the point in youth sports where we need to stop the "elite" and "select" madness because we're raising a generation with too much self-esteem. They can't handle failure because they've been conditioned to believe they're too good to fail. They're being placed on teams that identify them as better than their peers on the whim of either a parent/coach or a businessman/coach.

Parents line up to have their kids try out for under-10 fall baseball teams, where tiny kids compete for the right to have their arms trashed by pitching in four different games over two days of a weekend tournament put on by a for-profit organization that gives teams 10 minutes between games to warm up. There is the allure of better coaching (sometimes true), better gear (nearly always true) and better competition (debatable). Still, is there anything dumber than holding tryouts for 9-year-olds? We're not talking about Little League tryouts, which don't include cuts and are intended to place kids at the appropriate level for their ability. No, we're talking about putting 9- and 10-year-olds through an extensive tryout to keep some and cut others.

And then, five years down the line when Little Johnny decides to trade his bat and glove for a skateboard and a piercing, his parents can scream and yell about the travel ball coach who ruined baseball for their son by taking their money and not playing him. It's an overgeneralization, sure, but the whole operation has a way of surgically extracting the fun out of a sport at an age when fun is all it should be.

Here's what the dream-peddlers don't tell you: Anyone who has spent more than five innings watching 10-year-olds play baseball -- or one half of a basketball game -- knows that athletic ability in a kid that young is directly related to physical maturity. The kid with hair under his arms in sixth grade is going to hit the baseball farther than the prepubescent kid who can't get out of the dugout without tripping over his own feet. It's really not that hard.

When I played youth baseball -- it was called "Fly League" where I grew up -- everyone knew the legend of Buddy Wall. He was the 5-foot-10 guy from the other side of town who struck everyone out, hit mammoth homers and bench-pressed 225 at 12 years old. He was a couple of years older than me, and I lost track of him after Fly League days. Then, when I was 16 and showed up for the first day of practice for a local 16- to 19-year-old team, the coach had all the players introduce themselves. One guy, 5-10 with a full beard, said, "My name's Buddy Wall." I was stunned. I wanted to yell out, "No! You're not Buddy Wall! Buddy Wall is bigger than life, and you're a backup outfielder on an average summer-league team." But he was Buddy Wall, and he still liked to play baseball even though the rest of the field had caught up with him. Today, Buddy would have been a travel-ball wonder at 9, feted and honored throughout the land. I'm guessing it would have made the inevitable fall to 19-year-old backup summer league outfielder that much harder to take.

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Join Little League Baseball's California District 14 on Facebook. Updates, scores and quick notes are posted for your information. Take a look and let us know if you "LIKE" us.

Find California District 14 on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Little-League-California-District-14/107626795999661 or click this articles headline for a direct link.

Below are links to Little League Baseball's web site, where information can be found on Approved Composite Bats for play in Little League (Majors) and below - 2 1/4" barrel bat - and the Junior, Senior and Big League divisions - 2 5/8" barrel bat. Only composite bats on these list are approved for play within the Little League program. On September 1, 2010 Little League Baseball placed a moritorium on the use of composite bats in the Junior, Senior and Big League Divisions - with the exception of composite bats on the "Approved Bat" list. On December 30, 2010 Little League Baseball placed a moritorium on the use of 2/14" barrel composite bats (used in the Major division and below) - with the exception of composite bats on the "Approved Bat" list. All other non-wood and wood bats continue to be governed by their respective regulations and rules.

2 1/4" Composite Bat Approved List - http://www.littleleague.org/learn/equipment/approvedcompbatssmall.htm

2 5/8" Composite Bat Approved List - http://www.littleleague.org/learn/equipment/approvedcompbats.htm

The position of California District 14 (Fremont-Newark) is that it is the responsibility of the manager to ensure that every composite bat in their team's possession is on the "Approved Bat" list - the bat must be an exact match to the name and model number provided on the "Approved Bat" list. The manager must provide the proper documentation (i.e. the Approved Bat list), when asked to do so by an umpire or tournament official. Failure of providing the documentation or bats not exactly matching the information on the "Approved Bat" list will lead to the bat in question to be removed from the game. Umpires will not carry "Approved Bat" lists when making routine equipment inspections before a game.

For past articles regarding composite bats in Little League Baseball - click here.