The Menlo-Atherton Little League has made several key changes to its program aimed at both improving the quality of play and reducing overly competitive behavior in the younger age divisions, said Dale Sakai, an M-A Little League board member.
The changes, which began in the past season, involved using local high school players and coaches, as well as baseball organizations, to conduct clinics for divisions from T-Ball to Majors. And to reduce excessive competitiveness among younger players, the league has stopped keeping scores in T-Ball and the pitching machines divisions.
Player development
The league launched a Player/Coach Development program to help coaches improve the quality of instruction and introduce players to new drills that enhance their baseball skills.
The development program tapped baseball organizations and local high school players and coaches to help instruct the Little League coaches and players.
Menlo-Atherton High School players and coaches helped with T-Ball instruction, putting on two clinics for each team at the M-A High field. The clinics covered beginning instructions for players, such as how to swing a bat and throw, while teaching Little League coaches how to instruct children at this early stage.
The idea was for the coaches to reinforce the same fundamentals and drills at each practice “and it worked out really well,” said Sakai. “So the quality of play, actually, in T-Ball went up dramatically because we held this program.”
A similar clinic, run by an organization called Kids Love Baseball, was held for players in Single-A, a pitching machine division for less-experienced players. The Menlo School baseball team ran a clinic for the players and coaches in Double-A (a pitching machine division for more advanced players).
Still another organization, called Starting Lineup, performed a clinic for the Triple-A division (the lower level of the kid-pitch divisions), while JS Athletics, run by Jim Noreiga, a former Stanford baseball player, held the clinic for the Majors division (the highest level of competition in Little League).
In addition to the clinics, the baseball organizations and high school programs were also paid to run one practice for each team in the division they instructed.
The M-A Little League board created a curriculum for each division, describing the skills the board wanted each player to obtain at each level of play.
If some of the division names sound foreign, that’s because of other changes by the board to improve quality of coaching and play. The pitching machine division of the past has been divided into Single-A and Double-A divisions to provide players with more age-appropriate instruction, Sakai said.
The pitching machine division used to have players from age 7 to 10 with a wide range of skill levels. That made it difficult to provide valuable instruction to each player.
Now, the Single-A division has the younger and less experienced players, and the Double-A division has older, more skilled players. Both divisions use a pitching machine, but there are differences in the pitching speed.
Sakai said the feedback he has gotten from players, parents and coaches in the league has been “overwhelmingly positive,” and the level of play in each of the divisions noticeably improved.
Sportsmanship
The M-A Little League board also made some changes to decrease the emphasis on winning in the younger division, and promote sportsmanship in all the divisions.
“We wanted to try to stop [unsportsmanlike] behavior because we thought it was counterproductive” for the kids, said Sakai.
The league, said Sakai, has had many incidents of poor sportsmanship, especially when coaches, parents, and players became overly competitive.
He cited an example of a coach in the former pitching machine division who had all of his players bunt, exploiting the weakness of fielding and throwing in the league to win games at the expense of real game experience for the players.
To combat such behavior, the league has stopped keeping game scores in T-Ball, Single-A and Double-A divisions, with the exception of the Double-A postseason tournament.
Also, the only individual award is one for sportsmanship, given to the player on each team who was not necessarily the best player, but who “exemplified and symbolized the Little League spirit, which is ‘Play Fair, Strive to Win, Do One’s Best,'” said Sakai.
