In the fifth of 10 provincial association profiles, Baseball Canada speaks with Baseball Ontario President Don McKnight about the upcoming 2006 season.
BASEBALL CANADA (BCAN) – In no particular order, what five initiatives are you looking forward to the most as you are in the midst of kicking off the 2006 baseball season?
1. Strategic Planning
DON MCKNIGHT (DM) – 1. This really has to do with the way baseball is governed in Ontario and how our executive operates. Right now we have a 14-member executive – six elected directors, two vice presidents, one president, a past president and four appointed directors. The way we more or less want to change that is that we would have 4 or 5 members on the executive and have the rest of our directors broken up into sub-committees.
All of these sub-committee directors would take care of more specific areas and would, in turn, provide reports to the directors. That way they would be able to hold their own meetings rather than having to hold an entire board meeting to discuss certain issues. One member from that sub-committee would then be able to come to an executive meeting to provide a report.
We’ve met once before on this and it was a very productive weekend. We got a lot out of it.
2. Winterball Program
DM – We’re really trying to push the Winterball program. We have around 350 schools enrolled in the program right now, which is fairly significant and we’ve hardly touched on the Greater Toronto Area. We’ve had some difficulty getting into the schools in the GTA so that’s going to be one of our initiatives this year. Baseball has been growing in areas like Mississauga, but the story isn’t the same in the core of Toronto so that’s what we’d like to concentrate on in the next year.
BCAN – When Baseball Ontario first drew up the plans for the Winterball Program, did you have any idea that it would blossom into what it is today?
DM - We certainly hoped that it would. The first year we ran this program, we ran it for 100 schools in outlying areas and we saw a 15 to 20 per cent increase in registration in those areas the following spring. We were able to track those numbers and really show that the program does increase the awareness of baseball.
See http://www.baseball.ca/eng_doc.cfm?DocID=69&Related=13 to learn more about Baseball Canada’s Winterball Program.
3. Rally Cap Program
DM – Our past-president and Baseball Canada board member Randy Pickle has done a great job heading the program in Ontario. We ordered 5,000 hats and they were all gone rather quickly.
When we were at Baseball Canada’s annual general meeting in Regina in November we were asked how many hats we wanted to order. We really low-balled that number, I guess, because when the orders started coming in we ran out very quickly.
Now that we know what kind of response we’re getting for this program, next year we’ll be quicker off the mark for the people who weren’t able to get any hats this time around. People just really like these hats. Even though it’s a program that’s run for the younger age groups there are a lot of older people that are looking in asking how they can get their hands on these hats because they like the Baseball Canada logo.
See http://www.baseball.ca/eng_doc.cfm?DocID=212&Related=13 for more information about Baseball Canada’s Rally Cap Program.
4. New NCCP Initiation Coach Program
DM – Our director of coach and player development at Baseball Ontario, Wayne Parro, is doing a really good job of education people about this program, and that’s not easy because any time you introduce change to something there’s bound to be some resistance.
Beforehand the biggest complaint we would get is that people just didn’t want to go out to all of these clinics. This year we’re able to considerably cut down the amount of time coaches have to spend at clinics because they can do the rest of the stuff at home – and we’ve been able to do that at a reduced cost.
The program has really taken off. The coaching clinics that follow the on-line portion of the program have been over-attended and we’ve even had to reschedule some because we had too many clinics being scheduled on the same day. Our trainers and evaluators for the new program are stretched kind of thin at the moment, but that will change as more people will become qualified over the next couple of years.
Everything is going remarkably well and we have a very positive outlook for the future of the program.
See http://www.baseball.ca/eng_news_story.cfm?NewsID=811 for more information about the new NCCP program.
5. Province-wide League Collaboration
DM – When we’re trying to run programs like Winterball and Rally Cap among others we really try to meet with the people involved at the grassroots level. One of our initiatives is to try to get all the house leagues more in line with the rest of the Ontario Baseball Association.
We’re not trying to take over anything by any means, but we’d like to provide as much help as we can at the grassroots level, even financially. That being said, I think there’s even more grant money out there that would be available to us if we were all together on certain issues.
We’re really trying to be more supportive of house leagues because that’s where everything begins. If we can get stronger house leagues, all of the other leagues will flourish as well.
That wrap’s up this weeks edition of Play Ball 2006! Check back next week when Baseball Canada sits down with Baseball Québec president Gilles Taillon.
Schedule:
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
