In the second of 10 provincial association profiles, Baseball Canada speaks with Baseball Alberta representative Terry Murphy about the upcoming 2006 season.
BASEBALL CANADA (BCAN) – In no particular order, what five events or initiatives are you looking forward to the most as you are in the midst of kicking off the 2006 baseball season?
1. Baseball Canada National Bantam Girls Championship: Grande Prairie, Alberta
TERRY MURPHY (TM) – 1. At the top of our list would be the Bantam Girls National Championship in Grande Prairie. We’ve been working very diligently on that for quite some time now in order to make sure that it’s going to be a nice and smooth operation once the tournament kicks off.
Our vice president here at Baseball Alberta, Doug Star, is on the executive committee for the tournament and with his guidance I’m sure everything will be in order when August 18 rolls around.
Grande Prairie is the largest association in Baseball Alberta and they’ve got a great volunteer base to work with. As you’ve probably seen, they hosted the World Women’s Curling Championship there not too long ago, so they’ve proven they can host great events.
BCAN –What kind of exposure can this championship give girls baseball, given the fact tat it will be held one week prior to the rest of the Baseball Canada Championships?
TM – I really hope it can help promote the growth of girls’ baseball. The City of Grande Prairie is extremely excited about having them there. They’re extremely supportive of women’s sport and I don’t think that will be any different with our Bantam Girls.
2. League Management Initiative
TM – Our next big initiative is our League Management Program, which we started at all levels last year – from Mosquito all the way to Midget as well as working with some tournaments at the Junior and Senior levels.
We had a league management workshop at our AGM this year, from which some positive recommendations surfaced. We also had a very good turnout at this workshop, which included 56 representatives from a number of our associations throughout the province.
The goal of the initiative is to get all of these representatives and associations on the same page and accepting how we’re going to manage our leagues and provincial tournaments.
We’ve established a framework where there would be no significant travel in the first round of a tournament. Based on the results of that first round, teams will be seeded for the second round of play and will be split up into different tiers. The third round will be the final provincial championship round and each tier will have a provincial champion. In other words, we’re having more championships within each age group and more kids are going to have the chance to play through the month of July.
Furthermore, we will be holding the provincial championships earlier (middle of July instead of the first part of August), giving teams that qualify for the national championships the opportunity to better prepare themselves. For example if it’s a team that needs to travel a long distance across the country, they will have more time to save the money they need to be able go. In some cases, teams would only have two weeks to get ready and that’s too taxing on our associations to raise that kind of money within that short period of time.
One of the things that has really helped with the League Management Initiative is our on-line registration process, which we introduced last year. During the first year, we had 75 associations work on-line and this year we expect virtually all of them to do so. The beauty of the on-line program is that the associations can develop spread sheets for their players, which can be updated from year to year as the players move up through the different age categories. It’s also easier this way to add new players to the system.
Also, it’s a good vehicle for collecting data for mail-outs or canvassing for registrations. It really gives you easy access to all of the information that you would require for each association or individual athlete.
3. New NCCP Leaders
TM – We’re very happy to have hired Mark Randall and Shane Bromlley to get the province on track with the new National Coaching Certification Program Initiatives. They were the two top guys during our interviewing process so we decided to go with both of them in order to get coaches together and organizing clinics.
Their first assignment was to get a good turnout to the new NCCP evaluator training and that went off quite well. Now they’re continuing to press on by organizing clinics and making sure that communities are aware of what they have to do to host these clinics.
In the future these are two individuals that we would like to see do more things with Baseball Alberta, so this is one way that we can start to do that.
See http://www.baseball.ca/eng_news_story.cfm?NewsID=811 for more information about the new NCCP program.
4 & 5. Rally Cap and Winterball Programs
TM – First of all, we’ve had so many requests for the Rally Cap Program that we can’t even fill them all. We’re going to get another batch of Rally Cap hats here in the next couple of weeks and, already, they’re all spoken for. It’s extremely exciting that all of the associations are enthused about it and looking forward to getting on board with the program.
Secondly, we’ve used all but 25 of the Winterball kits we’ve received thus far. Those 25 kits are all spoken for and are going out to schools this fall. Dan Curtis and Brad Wolanski, who are running the Winterball Initiatives in Alberta, have done a great job generating interest in the program.
One of the main reasons for the high interest is that they attended a teacher’s convention here in Edmonton, which was essentially a trade show for educational materials. They set up a booth at the convention to present the program and as a result, we can’t even fill all of the requests we’ve had.
They’re also making sure that our baseball associations are aware that these Winterball kits are going out to schools in their communities. As a result we expect the associations to communicate with the schools. That way when spring time rolls around, they can either hold registration at the schools or at least make sure that the kids in these schools are aware that the registration process for local baseball is ongoing.
BCAN – How important is it for local baseball associations to maintain a relationship with the schools that have adopted the Winterball Program into their curriculum?
TM – If we don’t nurture the program and keep the lines of communication open with the schools we won’t see any growth in our registration numbers. Nurturing the program means making sure everything is going well while the program is being introduced and asking the teachers if they need any help. We expect the associations to send representatives out to touch base with the educators and most of them seem to be willing to do that.
BCAN: How much optimism does that create when you’ve got such a high demand from programs like these at the grassroots level?
TM – It’s pretty exciting because our baseball programs haven’t grown all that much until the last couple of years. I think new programs from the NCCP, Rally Cap and Winterball, are really going to help our associations grow stronger.
See http://www.baseball.ca/eng_doc.cfm?DocID=212&Related=13 for more information about Baseball Canada’s Rally Cap Program.
See http://www.baseball.ca/eng_doc.cfm?DocID=69&Related=13 to learn more about Baseball Canada’s Winterball Program.
Want to learn more about Baseball Alberta? Visit their website at www.baseballalberta.com.
That wraps up this weeks edition of Play Ball 2006! Come back next week as Baseball Canada sits down with Saskatchewan Baseball President Ken Hamilton. Due to the Easter Holiday, next week’s edition will be posted Tuesday, April 18.
Schedule:
April 18: Play Ball 2006! Saskatchewan Baseball
April 24: Play Ball 2006! Manitoba Baseball Association
May 1: Play Ball 2006! Baseball Ontario
May 8: Play Ball 2006! Baseball Québec
May 15: Play Ball 2006! Baseball New Brunswick
May 22: Play Ball 2006! Baseball Nova Scotia
May 29: Play Ball 2006! P.E.I. Amateur Baseball Association
June 5: Play Ball 2006! Baseball Newfoundland
