How To Be A League Commissioner

The overall role of Commissioner is to manage the league they are assigned to. This will involve communicating with parents, organizing the teams and recruiting coaches, scheduling games and practices, communication with umpires, and handling any disputes and issues that may arise during the season. Below is a suggested timeline to be followed in a typical season. This is a working document, so please add/remove/modify as necessary.

February

  1. Registration opens for the league. Nothing for the commissioner to do at this time.

March

  1. You will receive updates from the board on how many kids are registered in your league.
  2. Decide on the size of your league, number of players allowed and number per team. Decision is influenced by number of coaches you can get.
  3. You might want to attend the Old Trail sessions for your league to meet the coaches and talk to parents about becoming coaches.
  4. Once registration has closed, usually during the pre-season training at Old Trail, send out an email to all the parents in your league to let them know what’s going on. Your email should include the following:
  5. Introduce yourself and give them your contact info.
  6. Remind them of the current schedule. When are the remaining Old Trail practices, when will teams be decided (usually right before Spring Break), when will the season start, when will the season end.
  7. Let them know that once teams are decided, their primary contact will be their coach and that their coach will send them a welcome email.
  8. Ask for coaches if you still need some for your league.
  9. Tell them about equipment requirements. Are there restrictions on bat size for the league? No metal cleats allowed. Cleats are allowed but not required. Shirts will be provided. Should have athletic cup and baseball pants, but may want to wait on pants in case the coach wants a specific color.
  10. REMEMBER: for some of these parents, this will be their first time in RBSA. Good communication up front will make everyone’s lives easier and the parents will be more relaxed.
  11. Communicate to coaches:
  12. Give your coaches your contact info and ask them to send you all of their contact info. Create a contact list of all the coaches to share with each other. They will need to contact each other during the season for rain-outs, rescheduling, etc.
  13. Have your coaches tell you who their official assistant coach is. Teams are only allowed 1 head coach and 1 assistant coach for draft purposes. Once the teams are selected, they are allowed (and encouraged) to use as many parent volunteers as they want. Make sure the coaches know to attend training sessions to evaluate kids for the draft.
  14. Evaluations. Show up to the evals for your league and help evaluate the coaches’ kids for the draft.
  15. Send an email to your coaches reminding them about evaluation day and ask them to stick around for the other leagues to help evaluate. The more people we have doing the evaluations, the better placed these kids are and the easier it is to accomplish. It’s very hard for one guy to evaluate 30 kids.
  16. The evaluations are used to specify a draft round for the coaches’ kids. Once this is complete (hopefully the Sunday before draft week), please send out the final draft excel sheet with all the kids, their evaluations from the previous year, and label the draft round for the coach’s kid.
  17. Draft. Schedule the draft. It’s usually the week before Spring Break. Collect the coach evaluations of the kids that were in the league last year and try to make a list of who is a first year player and second year and list their evals. Send this out to your coaches so they have it for the draft.
  18. As the draft is happening, you should be keeping an overall record of who is drafting which kid.
  19. Shirt Orders: Have your coaches fill out their shirt order forms for their teams at the draft. They need to select a team name and colors. The kids’ shirt sizes are on the registration info and hopefully you’ve included it on the draft list.

April

  1. Scheduling. You have to wait for the travel teams to set their game schedule before you can set yours. Zach will tell you when travel schedules are in.
  2. Contact your coaches and ask for dates/days of the week that they have conflicts. You can plug these into the system as a black out date for each team and when the system auto-generates the schedule it will avoid them.
  3. Soccer. Try to find someone that knows the soccer schedule and work that into your blackout dates. I think last year it was Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings. I told the system not to schedule any games/practices until the date that soccer was over for those times. This way kids can play both without having to choose.
  4. Schedule practices first. Decide how many practices you want to give each team before games start. I’ve done between 2 – 4 each. I tell the coaches that if they want more to just let me know and I’ll add them in.
  5. Schedule games. Depending on the number of teams and games you need to get in, I would black out Fridays, Sundays, and maybe one other day of the week so you have days that you can fall back on for make-up games.
  6. Games should be scheduled for 2 ½ hours each. On the weekends you want to have enough space between games so that the following games have time to warm up. For instance, the first game of the day is from 9am to 11:30. The second game is from noon to 2:30. The third game is from 3:00pm to 5:30pm, then the last game is 6pm to 8:30pm. This way the second game on the field has ½ hour before their game to warm up.

May

  1. Send out a group email to everyone in your league asking for volunteers for opening day on 5/20. We usually need people to help with food/concessions etc.
  2. Start asking your coaches to talk about the RBSA night at Rubber Ducks on 6/4.
  3. Send out an email to your coaches to tell them about the evaluations at the end of the year. You should include a copy of the Excel sheet that will be used. Remind them that they will not be allowed to participate in the end of the year tournament until they submit their evaluations. They are important for the drafts the following year. Giving them the evals at the beginning lets them know what they should be looking for/thinking about during the season.

May, June, July

  1. Rainouts/Make-up games. Don’t let the coaches push these out too far. Try to reschedule right away and as soon as possible. If not, the games end up not played.
  2. As soon as you know of a rainout or cancellation of a game, let the umpire know as soon as possible.

June, July

  1. Send out another email asking for player evaluations. The submitted evaluations are required for the team to participate in the end of the year tournament.
  2. Based on team records, you’ll create your playoff games schedule. Here again, you plug the info into the system and it will auto-generate the schedule and bracket for you.