Starting a rec program

[dbronstein]

I'll try to explain this clearly. The league I've been coaching in is comprised of member clubs, and to play in the league you have to play through one of the clubs. The league runs a bunch of different sports - softball, baseball, football, lacrosse and a couple of others. There have only been three clubs participating in softball for the last 4-5 years (compared to 8 or 9 in baseball). It's a rec league, although some travel teams play sometimes to get some extra games in, so it can be fairly competitive. There are usually 6-10 teams in each age group (8U to 12U, sometimes they get enough 14U teams to have a division for them).

The club I have coached with is dissolving. I approached one of the clubs that that hasn't had softball about starting up a program and they couldn't be more excited about doing it. The spring season is 4/2-5/8 (there's a fall season) so we're hoping to open registration in the next week or two. My team and another team from the previous club are coming over (both 12U) and I'm hoping to get another team or two for this season. The old club usually had 4-5 teams each season across the age divisions. The other clubs usually have 9-12 each.

Fortunately the new club has the infrastructure in place - contacts for jerseys, insurance, website, etc - so we're not having to do everything totally from scratch. They also have a large contact base to recruit players - they have about 40 baseball teams each spring. I just want to get it up and running for the spring. Long-term, I want to create an integrated program, not just have individual teams, with cooperation/coordination among coaches and such.

I'm working on what we need to get this started and what our budget will be. So far, I know we have the league entry fees (they handle all the scheduling, umps, game fields, etc), practice field permits (we're hoping to take over the ones from the other club), equipment, insurance, and jerseys. What am I missing?

 

[quincy]

Never did this but give some unfounded options to get post bumped interested in responses.

Why not try to join LL SB? Managed 'LL BB, 'LL SB is not around our area for whatever reason so have never done it.

Try to get a relationship with the park district and elementary schools. Park district can be great if you have a good relationship with them.

 

[ROC 33]

Little League has a lot of resources on their website for operating. you might be able to see what you are missing by reviewing their info. https://www.littleleague.org/resource-guide/

 

[quincy]

For what is worth our slowpitch program was bigger then fastpitch. If we had to do again DD might have played slowpitch until 10 or so.

 

[dbronstein]

Never did this but give some unfounded options to get post bumped interested in responses.

Why not try to join LL SB? Managed 'LL BB, 'LL SB is not around our area for whatever reason so have never done it.

Try to get a relationship with the park district and elementary schools. Park district can be great if you have a good relationship with them.

Trying to start a league from scratch is not a feasible option. There are quite a few leagues around (this one for BB and SB, a Babe Ruth one for BB and SB, a couple of LL BB leagues, Denver Parks runs their own league) and there's no way we'd be able to get anywhere near enough field permits. We'd also struggle to get umps. Not to mention the marketing needed to start a new league.

 

[dbronstein]

Update: It's been a bit of a struggle (mostly from having to wait on other people to do things) but we are starting practice this week. We have three teams, my 12U team and two 14U that also came over from the old club. We had some 8U and 10U players register and it killed me to have to tell the parents we wouldn't have teams for them. I ended up taking 14 on my team because I didn't want to turn down another player. I was able to get a lot of equipment from the old club so we didn't have to order much. We're still trying to transfer field permits from the old club. We got jerseys ordered. I'm still waiting on one team to get their last few players registered.

I didn't understand why the old club's registration fee was so much less than our competitor's - $250 compared to $350-375. When I did our budget with the new club, we still came up with a $250 fee, but now that we are getting going I can see that we do need to increase it going forward to cover some other things like scholarships.

Now that we are up and running, I'm hoping to get more teams for the summer/fall season. I also want to reach out to the local HS coaches to see if they want to work with us, since our players will be going to those schools.