Pelham Little League

Board Meeting Minutes

Monday, January 6, 2014

Attendance: John Koutrobis, Mark Beauchamp, Scott Paquette, Dave Williams, Ken Ringdahl, Arlanna Garcia, Jared Breault

Motion Summary:

  • Not providing pants to players as part of registration: APPROVED
  • Registration fees for 2014 ($10 discount per player for early registration, $10 increase from 2013): APPROVED

Treasurer’s Update (Arlanna):

Balance of $2833, website fee of $575 is due and will be paid (new balance to be $2258 after website fees)

Fields Update (Scott):

Needs for 2014 season include:

  • Home plates
  • Dugouts
  • Repair/replace the existing dugouts
  • Scott to compile list of materials, ideally someone donates some/all materials and/or labor
  • Infield dirt
  • Several options discussed to improve the situation from last year.
  • Remove dirt, bring in clay
  • Till existing dirt and mix in new material, compact, slope for drainage
  • General consensus is this could be $3-4k for full replacement
  • Bases
  • Minors Scoreboard
  • Equipment shed: at least 5’ x 7’ needed

Umpires:

Moving forward with the 2013 schedule as a template for the 2014 season so we can get umpires booked ASAP

Safety:

Looking into CPR courses for coaches which could be 2 classes @ 4 hours each or 1 session if there are a large number of participants.

Majors Coaches:

Email to go out (this week?) soliciting interest in being a head coach for a majors team. Based on what comes back coaching interviews will be scheduled as appropriate.

Pants:

The subject of providing pants for free to registered players was discussed at the 12/16 meeting and tabled until this meeting to research what other towns provide to their players. No other towns provide pants to their players. A motion was proposed to no longer provide pants to farm, minors, and majors players. The motion was unanimously approved. We will reach out to Dick’s to identify the specific pants we want players to buy so they can help anyone that comes in to the store on Dick’s Appreciation Day (3/15).

* Socks will still be provided to minors and majors players (investigation to be done as to what type of socks will be provided – there was debate as to whether the socks provided last year were the right kind)

Registration Fees:

The subject of registration fees was also discussed at the 12/16 meeting and tabled until this meeting to research what other towns do in terms of family discounts and/or early registration discounts. A motion was proposed for registration fees as follows:

  • The registration fee will be increased by $10 from 2013 levels for farm, minors, and majors players.
  • There will no longer be a family discount
  • There will be a $10 discount per player for anyone signed up early (deadline is 2/15 which coincides with the 3rd walk up registration)

The motion was unanimously approved.

Snack shack:

Several options for how to handle the snack shack were discussed. The options were:

  1. Keep the existing vendor and discuss any issues with them to improve customer satisfaction (some percent of the proceeds comes back to the league)
  2. Take over the snack shack and run it ourselves (all proceeds come back to the league)
  3. Hire someone to run the snack shack for us (all proceeds after paying the help comes back to the league)
  4. Allow a group from town to run the snack shack and work out a revenue sharing model

In the end everyone felt there were significant disadvantages/risk associated with options 2-4. So we are going to proceed with the existing vendor and discuss improvements which include:

  • Long lines and long waits for food due to certain items taking a long time to cook
  • Price of certain items being excessive
  • Better variety of food/snack items
  • Friendliness of the staff

No motion was required for this since it does not signify a change.

Evaluations:

Everyone feels that something needs to be done to improve the evaluation process. The discussion surfaced the following options for evaluations:

  • All returning players that were on a majors team in 2013 will stay on that team in 2014. In this scenario teams would only need to fill the spots vacated by a 2013 player that is not returning for 2014 (they graduated from the program or otherwise)
  • A regular draft is held where the majors coaches choose their players
  • Players are placed on each of the teams as was the case in 2013

It was decided to table this and revisit once the 2014 majors coaches are in place. We will then involve them in the process of determining which option above to choose or something else all together different.

Fundraising:

Fundraising was mostly tabled until the next meeting with Katie not being present. Work is being done to prepare for 2014 sponsorships.

The suggestion was made to post to the Friend of Pelham Facebook page soliciting local sponsors for the 2014 season

Another suggestion was made to consider having a Pelham Baseball Comedy Night as a fundraiser for the program. This subject is to be revisited but likely we’d need to act soon to coordinate this to happen prior to the season.

* The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, January 21 @ 7 PM since that Monday is a holiday (MLK) – This is still TBD – Scott’s last note indicated a meeting for 1/22 instead.