Well, $5 is nothing, but why do you have to charge at all? Your Organization should pay you to teach a clinic. As an umpire, i 'm tired of being nickled and dimed. I pay $200 for travel league, plus 10% of every game to assignor, and school is $100 for the season. We talk about respecting umpires from parents and coaches, but I've found in the three short years of umpiring the biggest lack of respect is from the organization's that hire us. School is not bad, it's only one game a day, but TB tourney s around here are the worse. No place to change, no parking, no food voucher, not even a bottle of water on a hot summer day. And half the time the checks are delayed coming, but if you work a cash game, be sure to send that 10% to assignor, cause he gonna be on you for that.And I agree that is an issue. Unfortunately it won’t be tournament directors. They need the umpires for their events. There needs to be training involved, but there are so many games, and not enough umpires to go around, so training went out the door for umpires, except for the ones who really want to become respected umpires. With the current situation, there are too many umpires that just want to make money. Just like the TD or organizations that don’t want to spend the money for training of the umpires.
I run an umpire associations, and if I try and run an umpire clinic, and just charge $5.00 per umpire, I might get 5 umpires to attend, out of the 80 members in the association. And 3 of those 5 are only there because I assign high school games, and they think if they attend they will get games. I can’t get them to understand……..if you want games, GET BETTER!!!
With all this said, I'd still pay the $5, because I want to be the best i can be. but then again the TB org doesn't run clinics.