How To Attract and Retain Your Volunteer Umpires

I thought you might be interested in this article I wrote and posted on the KNLL message board a month or two ago. I hope you find it helpful. There might be a suggestion or two that can help.

Sincerely,
Jim Porter

How To Attract and Retain Your Volunteer Umpires
By Jim Porter

How can a league attract and retain its umpires?

The answer is a lot of hard work.

1. Training - Without an advanced training program, attracting experienced umpires will be nearly impossible. Representatives from your league must attend as many regional clinics as possible. These same folks need to constantly be learning to bring the latest and best information to their umpires. These league people should visit every umpiring web site and every forum for umpires on the internet. They should ask questions and advance their knowledge. They should acquire the proper publications and learn all the in's and out's of umpiring baseball. Hopefully, you already have someone with umpiring knowledge in your league. If not, do not give up hope.

Your league can start a program to pay a portion (if not all) of the fees to send your prospective umpires to a camp or training program. You have many choices. You can send them to anything from Jim Evans's week-long camp, his full school, a local high school clinic, an NCAA clinic or camp, and anything in between. You can hire professional umpires to come to your area to conduct clinics for your umpires. You can share the cost of such a clinic with neighboring leagues or districts. You can cover the cost by charging attendees a nominal fee. Bottom line is that if you have qualified instructors and you advertise your clinic properly, the umpires will come out of the woodwork to be a part of such an experience.

By providing advanced clinics, you have taken a giant step forward in attracting the best umpires to your league.

2. Recruiting - Your league must make an effort to recruit prospective umpires. This means putting resources into the recruiting process. Place ads in the newspaper, circulate fliers at local high schools and colleges, send a plea to all associations covering high school baseball and softball in your area, ask for help from every conceivable place where prospective umpires may be lurking.

Beat the pavement and you will quickly see a response to your hard work.

3. Reimbursement - Although Little League does not want us to be paying umpires, they do allow umpires to be reimbursed for travel expenses, equipment costs, food and uniform. $10 or $15 per game is not an unreasonable amount for such reimbursement. The cost of proper equipment and uniform nowadays is prohibitive and we all know how gas prices have skyrocketed over the summer.

If you allow volunteer umpires to simply give their time and energy and not have them worrying about their own wallets, then you are well on your way to keeping the valuable volunteer umpires that you worked so hard to recruit and train.

4. Treatment - Do not, under any circumstances, allow any abuses of your officials. Ask your parents, coaches and managers to pledge that they will act properly towards your umpires. Set up a clinic for coaches to teach them about rules, and how to effectively work with the umpires. Explain how to question a call properly, ask for time, and approach umpires calmly and with respect. Make sure that ejections for umpire abuses are not tolerated. Create appropriate penalties for parents, coaches and managers who cross the line. Back up your umpires.

All the training and recruitment in the world won't keep umpires who are constantly subjected to abuse. Be firm in this area and weed out inappropriate behavior and your umpires will be much happier working games for your league.

5. Appreciation - This is a vital area to retaining your league's umpires year after year. Set up a program that shows your league's appreciation for its umpires. Make sure post-season assignments are given to everyone. Fight for their presence at district all-star games and regional tournaments. Create awards for your umpires, like Most Improved or Umpire of the Year. Have a small backyard barbeque to serve as a cheap alternative to an appreciation dinner. Give all your umpires jackets to work games in and let them keep them, buy them league shirts to umpire in and allow them to keep them at year's end, give out a piece of top-quality umpire equipment to all your blues. Even certificates, trophies or some other symbolic trinket can help make your umpires feel appreciated.

If your umpires don't feel appreciated, they might not feel motivated to stick around very long. Give them something that says, "Thank you," from your entire league.

6. Friendship - Last, but not least, you should do your best to forge friendships among the group of men and women who are your umpires. Make a concerted effort to get together as often as possible in the off-season. Go to movies together, or go out to dinner a couple of times per month. Go to a professional baseball agem together to watch the pro umps. Meet often to talk about umpiring and share new information and official interpretations. Just be very careful not become a clique. Make everyone feel welcome into your group of umpiring friends.

If your group of umpires is friends then getting them to come back year after year will be effortless. If they enjoy working together they will be happy umpires.

As you can see it takes a lot of work to train, maintain and retain a group of umpires for your league. But don't neglect this vital area of league operations. Little League is for the kids, and the kids deserve the best umpires your league can provide.

-JP

Remember Rule 1.01, "Baseball is a game..."

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