Special LL waiver???

I'm not absolutely positive, but I am pretty sure about this. Our league encompasses something like 400 square miles south west of Sacramento. Our development alone is over 4,000 and we get a bunch of really small towns in it too, But, we also cover Elk Grove which is up to about 60,000 now. I'd guess that all in all the population has to be 70-80,000.

But with all that, we still only have 250 or so kids in the whole league including t-ball! Out Majors Division has 3 teams that have to be the epitome of rec ball. Last year we didn't even have enough 12's in the league to make up a Jr team to play fall ball.

So what do you do in a situation like that? What they've finally started to do the last couple of years is to play inter-league games with some of the smaller leagues in the District just so the kids wouldn't be playing the same team 8 times during the season.

Are we over the pop limit? You bet! Could our kids go into one of the other leagues in the area? Sure they could waive them in, but that would make a bad situation worse. Our league has absolutely no chance to ever go anywhere. Even getting out of the district would be a miracle!

By the logic you guys are using, if that miracle did take place on year and our boys did manage to get to the region or beyond, you'd be screaming all over the place what kind of SOB's and cheats we are.

In our area, BR, CR, Pony and whatever suck the kids up. It isn't that they think the baseball is any better, but those programs have laid claim to all the fields and won't share them. There's also some kind of deal that prohibits LL Inc from mailing to or even advertising in the area, Don't ask me exactly what it is, all I know is I've been told LL isn't allowed to do it.

Heck! One of the reasons there aren't a lot of select teams at the 12U level is that there's no place for them to play! As it is, our league put together a quasi tournament team last year and the only place they could practice was on the privately owned fields our league uses. That doesn't mean the league owns them, but rather someone else does. That meant there was no ins and the leasor, was forced to make the LL sublease the fields to themselves because the team wasn't officially a LL team.

Most of the 12 U teams play on school fields and that means you have to battle on a 1st come 1st served basis. The HS fields are used, but they don't do much good to a 12U team. Meanwhile, the local BR program has something like a quarter of a million dollars to spend on maintenance and acquiring or building new fields each year, while our league can't get $1,800 to put up a decent fence.

So you see, going strictly by the rules may be a great goal, but in a case like ours, it just isn't realistic! Without a waiver here and the turning of a head there, things would be bleak indeed.