I know next to nothing about baseball. Didn’t grow up with it, can’t get into it. I do know a fair bit about kids and sports, though, and particularly about how to run a youth sports program. This is no way to do it. Apparently, the apparatchniks in charge of the Little League franchise in South Burlington have gotten so full of themselves that they’re now putting their rules and regulations, pomp and circumstance above the kids who want to play ball:
League officials are sympathetic but unwavering. The league has never bent registration and evaluation period rules, said Donna Kaczmarek, the league’s administrative officer, and her husband, Tim Kaczmarek, the league president.
This in response to a mom who registered her kids four days late for Little League. Evidently, the not-so-dynamic duo of Donna & Tim Kaczmarek find it more important to maintain their rigid rules than accomodate a 10-year-old. Seriously, now. You can’t bend your rules so a 10-year-old can play ball? What do you think you are — the MLB? I thought the whole point of something like Little League — or any sports organization that caters to 10-year-olds — would be encourage and facilitate their participation, not slap them around the head with some arbitrary set of rules.
But as becomes apparent in Mike Donoghue’s excellent article in the Burlington Free Press is that Little League is at the same time extremely self-important but also impotent organization — the regional boss can’t overrule his local organization, but the board of the local Little League shop is evidently made up of childless whackjobs who get a high from standing firm on the minutiae of their bylaws and regulations.Who the hell picked them? If this is their idea of furthering the sport of baseball, then it’s no wonder really that soccer, lacrosse and other sports are increasingly more popular than baseball these days…
Which no doubt must leave a kid in Burlington wondering why grown-ups are such f’ed up morons. Not all of them, Matthew, not all of them. But quite clearly the clown posse in charge of Little League in your neck of the woods. So sorry, hope you still keep up the urge to participate.
