How to Draft in Youth Baseball

There are four keys to successful drafting in youth baseball:

  • Establish clear goals
  • Gather the player data you need
  • Organize your data for rapid access
  • Work the system to your advantage

You can get what you want on draft night with minimal fuss if you concentrate on the first three.

An unfortunate reality is that many youth baseball managers rely on working the system to their advantage as the fourth and most important key to successful drafting. This leads to unfair outcomes for newer managers and for kids, and sometimes involves cheating.

In my opinion, doing whatever it takes to create a dream team is detrimental to doing what’s best for the kids and the league. So please don’t do it. Better yet, have your league develop drafting policy that eliminates unfair outcomes.

What is the Purpose of Youth Baseball?

Before delving into details, I think it is worth considering the purpose of youth baseball.

As stated in Little League’s mission statement:

Through proper guidance and exemplary leadership, the Little League program assists children in developing the qualities of citizenship, discipline, teamwork and physical well-being. By espousing the virtues of character, courage and loyalty, the Little League Baseball and Softball program is designed to develop superior citizens rather than superior athletes.

PONY league’s mission statement, while not identical, has similar goals:

To provide every child regardless of special needs the opportunity to participate in America’s favorite pastime of baseball and softball. It is our goal to provide an environment that enhances the participants’ self-esteem, physical mobility, and embodies the spirit of teamwork and community.

The way a lot of people like to sum this all up is that we want kids to have fun and develop their baseball skills.

National organizations and local leagues implement rules and policy to support these missions. Drafting policy is usually aimed to create a relatively even distribution of coaching and player ability so that all players in the league are able to have fun and develop their baseball skills.

Nothing in these mission statements suggests providing an opportunity for adults to concentrate many of the top players on one team to win a lot of games. Nevertheless, we are competitive by nature, so it’s natural to expect most managers to have among their drafting goals to create winning teams. A well designed draft system will take this natural competitive drive as input, and produce relatively evenly matched teams as output.

Baseball Drafting Goals

No two managers have the same ideas about drafting. Of course, managers will differ in which individual players and types of players they prefer. However, they also differ in overall goals. It’s important for you as manager to be very clear on what your goals are before the draft and communicate these goals in advance to the coaches that will be with you on draft night.

Even if they don’t consciously realize it, most managers will draft with more than one goal in mind. What differs between managers is how much they emphasize each goal. Here’s a list of goals, grouped in three sections:

Create a team that wins a lot

  • Obtain players with as much baseball skill as possible
  • Obtain players with as much athletic talent as possible
  • Go for the best pitchers
  • Fill positions (several pitchers, a shortstop, a catcher, etc.)
  • Avoid the weakest players in the league

Create a fun and comfortable team

  • Create great team chemistry (great teamwork, sum of whole greater than parts, etc.)
  • Go for players you know and like (including their families)
  • Go for families supportive of your coaching philosophy
  • Go for families that you know will happily fulfill their volunteer duties and beyond

Develop players

  • Draft the most coachable kids—those who listen, learn, and try hard.
  • Draft players with parents who have substantial baseball skills or who are willing to help on the field to aid player development
  • Draft players that you think are much more likely to flourish and develop with your coaching style than they might otherwise

Perhaps this list is too long—there’s overlap between some of these goals. However, for those of you who have done this before, think back to some prior drafts:

Did drafting the most skilled and/or talented players lead to the winningest team? Which players perform better—players with many years’ experience but little athleticism or talented athletes with little experience? Were all of your individual player evaluations accurate? Which player worked out better for you—the easily coachable “pretty good” player or the top athlete with “attitude?” Were the skills that mattered most the same for 7-8 year-olds as 9-10 year-olds or 11-12 year-olds? Note that I address this last question somewhat in the beginning of my Baseball Arms Race post.

Before the draft, think about which of these goals matter and how much you want to emphasize them. In my first year as manager, I knew I would need help so I prioritized getting players whose parents either had substantial baseball coaching skills or were willing to help on the field. I also tried to get skilled and talented baseball players of course but I especially emphasized pitching and tried to avoid getting a really weak player, which was possible to do by sometimes skipping slightly stronger players earlier in the draft in favor of a player with a lower score.

I like winning but I care more about making sure every player learns and develops. I was very pleased with the incredible coach and parent support I received. I was even more pleased with how much our players improved during my first season. Being clear with my drafting goals in advance definitely helped with that. In case you’re wondering, our record was 8-7. Emphasize player development and you’ll typically win some games as a byproduct.

Several years ago, my son was on a team that lost every single regular season game, though some were close. The returning players had not received adequate training from the prior-year manager. However, the manager of my son’s team cared more about developing players and having fun than he did about winning games. Every single player came back to play in our league the following season. My son learned a lot, enjoyed the season, and looked forward to having the same manager the following year. It’s not necessary to win a lot of games or even win any games to have a great season. As luck would have it, my son did get back this manager for the second year with the same team . . . which finished second in the playoffs.

Gathering player data

The better you know players and their families, the better you’ll be able to meet your drafting goals. A great source of knowledge about a player is observing performance in many real games. This necessarily means that managers who are new to the league are at an informational disadvantage. If you are new to a league or it’s your first year managing, talk to as many people as you can to learn about various players and families. Unfortunately, you’ll still be at a disadvantage to those who have seen the kids play.

Conversely, players who are new to the league are a mystery to everyone. You can get hints by talking to one of the player’s parents. Has this player played baseball before? If so, how many years? If not baseball, has he played any other sports? Multi-sport athletes tend to be physically fit and are likely to pick up the game of baseball much faster than the average kid who isn’t so athletically engaged. I have observed several instances of players from other sports who, during their first year of playing baseball, soon surpassed many other players in the league.

Another source of information is player evaluations. You’ll get to see each player hit, field grounders, and catch pop-ups. If you’re lucky you’ll get to see pitching too. The several minute look you get for each player is low-quality data. Some players may be rusty, some may be sick, others may perform worse or better than normal by random chance. Some kids may even purposely perform poorly.

You will probably be able to sort out which players are very obviously near the top or bottom, with regards to skill and athleticism. But the majority will be in the middle, difficult to distinguish from each other. Nevertheless, this is all the information you’ll get for some players, so the next few paragraphs will give you some ideas of what to observe.

Look for signs of baseball skill. What player strengths and weaknesses do you see for each baseball skill? How is ball tracking? How is form when getting down to field a grounder? How are throwing and hitting mechanics?

Look for signs of athleticism. How is foot work? Are they fast? Do they move gracefully or awkwardly? Do they have quick reflexes?

Pay attention to attitude. Does the player hustle? Pay attention? Get frustrated easily? Seem enthusiastic?

Don’t get too caught up in whether they actually field the grounder or catch the pop fly—you may miss out on all the other little clues about skill, athleticism, and attitude.

In every draft there are several kids I mark as “do not draft” because of attitude. A kid who doesn’t try hard, pay attention, and/or gracefully recover from mistakes is going to be difficult to coach and teach, no matter how skilled or athletic. On the other hand, if you are particularly good at turning such kids around, you may see opportunity where I see difficulty.

The best source of player information is stats from the prior year. Making stats available for all returning players to all managers before the draft would go a long ways towards making drafts fair, but I have never heard of a league that does this. It would take a bit of work, and even if done, the data would not be consistent across players. Judgment is involved in marking errors vs. hits and steals vs. passed balls. But many stats, such as strikeouts, walks, hit-by-pitch, reaching base, etc. are not open to interpretation. Such data would be objective and useful.

The best thing about stats is that it reduces bias. For example, a strong, tall power hitter that crushes the ball at batting practice may actually strike out 70% of the time during actual games and have sloppy fielding and base running due to inattention. Stats will show this. Direct observation may not, as it’s a lot easier to remember a player’s home runs and bulging muscles than his strikeouts and errors. Conversely, short, skinny kids who can’t hit the ball very far are often underrated. Stats that show getting on base 7 out of 10 at bats and scoring over 2 runs per game might help overcome short-person bias for a particular player.

Because stats are generally not available, gathering of player data is difficult and imprecise. Everyone makes mistakes, especially in judging potential. Kids who display poor skills at evaluations can surprise you with very rapid improvement, and vice versa. But nevertheless, you need to base your drafting decisions on data so you’ll have to do the best you can to get accurate data on each player.

Organize Data for Rapid Access

In many leagues, including ours, each manager turns in a score for each player. The scores for each player are averaged together to produce one group score per player. Some of your scores will be different from the group score. If this is your first year as a manager or you are new to the league, you should probably pay attention to group scores more than your own.

However, if you’ve been a manager for a while and have good powers of baseball observation, you will gain advantage by trusting your scores more than group scores. You can take advantage of this on draft night to choose players that you believe are underrated by the group.

Before draft night, you will receive a list of players with the average score for each player. Add in your score, adjacent to the group score for each player. Circle or highlight the players who you believe were underrated by the group. Then, on draft night, cross out the players as they get drafted. When it’s your turn to pick a player, you will be able to rapidly see which top players remain, according to your scores.

Work the System to Your Advantage

My first version of this article did not contain a section on working the system. But manipulating the system to create winning teams is the reality in most leagues, including ours. So then I went the other extreme, calling this section “cheating,” which is too inflammatory to be helpful. While some behavior definitely crosses the line into cheating, I think for the most part managers and coaches are just following their natural inclinations to use whatever legal means available to create a winning team.

Recall that the goal is for kids to have fun and develop their baseball skills. This goal is not supported if one team assembles several of the top pitchers en route to an undefeated season or a new manager is not given equal access to coaching staff or top players. It’s not even all that fun for the winning team, which gets less game-time fielding opportunities. Nevertheless, to be complete, any article on drafting must cover this reality.

Drafting is not fair. Search the Internet for advice on drafting, and you’ll find hardly any discussion of just how unfair drafting is beyond John T. Reed’s article. I suspect most coaches are embarrassed to admit that the main reason they so consistently win so many games each season is their experience and skill in manipulating the drafting system.

The single biggest systemic drafting issue is abuse of the coach pre-empt rule. All leagues recognize the need for coach assistants to help run practices. So managers are typically allowed to pre-empt 1 or 2 players whose parent will be a coach, before the draft even begins. It’s hardly coincidence that most pre-empts are players who would have been early draft picks. A team that is able to assemble the 3 players with greatest pitching skill and overall ability on the same team before the draft begins will usually have one of the best win/loss records for the year. Conversely, a team whose manager pre-empts players of average ability will be disadvantaged.

Some managers cross the line into outright cheating, by hiding or falsifying information. Examples include asking certain players to not try too hard at the player evaluation, or skip the optional pitching portion, or perhaps even miss the evaluation altogether. Another form of cheating is turning in artificially low scores of players pre-empted onto your team, while boosting scores for players pre-empted onto the other teams.

Some age-based leagues combine 7-8 year olds in one division, 9-10 in another division, and so on. Many such leagues have the 9-year olds return to the same team. This opens up an entirely new set of ways to manipulate the system, such as stacking your team with top 9-year olds to set your team up to be dominant the following year.

Excluding pre-empts and other systemic forms of unfairness, veteran managers still have advantages over new managers on drafting night due to experience and, more importantly, better information from having observed most of the leagues’ players over the years. Apparently, experiential and informational advantages aren’t enough for many veteran managers, as unfair drafting is the norm, not the exception.

Update: A year after writing this I observed a player evaluation as a Bronco 11 to 12-year-old manager. I saw a new source of cheating. Quite a few players took it upon themselves, with no urging from parents or coaches, to purposely perform poorly in the evaluations. Some of them were sons of coach pre-empts attempting to help lower their team’s points. Others were free to be drafted, but they wanted to try to make it look like they were bad because they thought in would increase their chance of getting drafted by a certain coach who knew how good they were. How do I know this? With some kids it was obvious just by watching. Several kids actually bragged about how clever they were . . .

John T. Reed passionately discusses unfair drafting and proposes changes at his site, and in more depth in his baseball coaching book, which I reviewed on Amazon. While his style of writing is somewhat abrasive, many of his observations ring true.

In Reed’s opinion, blind drafts are the way to go. First have managers collaboratively create balanced teams. Then assign each manager at random to one of these balanced teams (with adjustments for coach players’ skill).

Our league had a typically unfair system for many years that involved retaining half the players on each team from the prior year, with typical consequences. Drafting was improved in my first year as manager.

Our league’s new system uses a “parity draft” to redraft every player in the division each year. In a parity draft, teams do not get one pick each round. Instead, the team that gets the first pick is the one with the lowest number of points. Each player’s rating is between 1 and 10. So if one team has the lowest point total of 19 to start with because the manager and two coaches’ players are rated 5, 6, and 8, they get first pick in the draft. If another team starts with the highest total of 28 points, they may have to wait a long time to get first pick as some teams will get 2 picks before they get their first pick.

In my opinion, our league’s new drafting system is an improvement over the prior system as it does allow teams with less pre-empted player ability to get 1 or maybe even 2 early draft picks. However, it is still susceptible to the pitcher issue. If one team assembles a manager and two coaches whose 3 players are the top pitchers in the league, they will win most of their games and likely the playoff championship game as well.

John T. Reed’s blind draft proposal strikes me as a way to organize a draft that makes for more evenly matched teams, but I’ve never heard of a league that drafts blind. I also suspect that managers who get to pick their players will feel more invested in their players and better about their team than in situations where most or all players are assigned.

I think a fair alternative might be a slight modification of the parity draft system used by our league. At the ages of 9 and up, top pitching talent is the big issue. So how about in divisions with 8 teams, identifying the top 8 pitchers, and insisting that no two of those pitchers can be on the same team?

Another modification I would make to any system is to insist on making prior year stats available to all. I know it would add extra work each year, but I think it would go a long way to supporting fairer drafts. I wrote a three part series about the collection and interpretation of youth baseball stats as well as an in depth review of the Gamechanger scorekeeping software which makes stats reporting easy.

Lastly, I would like to see managers new to the league or moving up to the next age division for the first time paired with more experienced coaches, in order to make sure players have equal access to manager and coach ability and experience.

Last Words

You can still draft well in the face of unfairness. Be clear with your goals, gather as much data as you can, and organize your data for rapid access on draft night. Get a good coach or two to help. And yes, it helps if the player that comes along with the coach would likely be an early draft pick.

However, if you’re a veteran manager, I encourage you not to pre-empt two coaches with the top two pitchers in the league. It’s a better experience for the kids throughout the division if you can have the veteran coaches and top players spread throughout the division evenly.

If it’s your very first year as manager, it may be unrealistic to expect to end with the best win/loss record. However, prepare well and you will end up providing an experience for your players that is fun, competitive, and developmental, regardless of the win/loss record. That’s what we all say we want for youth baseball. So let’s do it!

Author: Joe Golton

I’m a dad with a son who loves baseball. Professionally, I’ve been a software developer, investor, controller, and logistics manager. I now make my living from this blog, supplemented with occasional consulting gigs.

22 thoughts on “How to Draft in Youth Baseball”

  1. Is this a legal Little League draft? We put the numbers 1 – 10 in a hat and every manager picks a number. The number system is run as a snake draft (1 – 10; 10 – 1). The managers and one assistant players are protected and when that players name is in one of the three brackets the manager has to pick that player. The brackets are broken up in: 10 year olds, 3 sets of 10 ranked players. 9 year olds, 3 sets of 10 ranked players. The top 30 players in each age group is broken up into three rounds of 10 players each. We have to pick through the first 3 rounds of 10 year olds and then we pick through the first 3 rounds of 9 year olds. All other players not picked in these rounds are then put together. About 20 players are not ranked because they were not evaluated. Little League rules say that you have use the draft procedures in the Operations Manual or get approval from the region that rarely ever happens. I never have head of drafting this way before.

  2. Thomas – I am familiar with the PONY league system, not little league. But I did find this link:

    http://www.littleleague.org/leagueofficers/BylawsLocalandGroundRules.htm

    The implication is that local Little League organizations can have their own rules which supersede national rules. One example given is the selection method for all-star teams. I would imagine that if all-star selection systems can be decided locally, than so too could the system for drafting of regular rec season teams. This is certainly the case in PONY. Perhaps – as you say – superseding with local rules is not permitted for drafting system unless a specific waiver is granted. I don’t know as little league does not post their rules online.

    Regardless, systems vary. Regardless of what the specific system is – if your system is resulting in 1 or 2 teams each year that win nearly all their games and gather many of the best players onto the same team, then everyone would benefit if the rules for the system were changed to produce more balanced teams.

  3. We live in a small town and we have a draft. This year we have 3 coaches on each team, one team has 3 8Th grade players, the other team has 4 7Th grader players because we have a brother rule. My question is how do u even up the teams when all but 2 of the players are 8th graders?

  4. Hi Darci,

    There’s two good questions you have there, and both questions have come up in our league in recent years. I can tell you how we deal with them, using the parity system (where each player is assigned a point value), as described toward the end of the above article:

    1) How to handle age differences? Given that each player has a point value, it doesn’t really matter what their ages are. So long as each player’s point value is reasonable, or close to it. The parity system will insure that if the coach pre-empts are very skilled players, then that team will start with a high point value and therefore won’t get to pick additional players for a while (some teams may get 2 picks before they get their first. In some years, our division presidents have wanted age balance – so in those years they require that every team end the draft with no more than a certain number of first years, and no more than a certain number of second years.

    2) What to do if you start with 4 players instead of 3? For this one, let’s say the brothers are named Al and Bob, and that Bob is less skilled. Then Bob is not included in the point total to begin with. However, as soon as a player is picked in the draft with a lower point total than Bob, then the team with Bob must pick him for their next pick. The practical effect of this rule is that the team with Bob will get in 2 or 3 top picks before Bob must be picked. It works out.

    The one thing that the parity system doesn’t account for well, though, is if 3 top pitchers somehow make it all onto the same team. There is nothing to be done to make for evenly balanced teams in that case – other than to insist that 3 of the top X pitchers can’t all be on the same team, where X is the number of teams.

  5. Hi.. Quick question our town little league is going to do a redraft after the original draft.. There were 3 teams going to 2 teams., are there rules in which coaches should stay and which ones will have to go? Our coach is In his last year coaching after 8 years.. There is a new coach coming up from the minors to the majors., who makes the decision on who coaches and who doesn’t ? Thank you

  6. Diane – I have never seen a situation like the one you’re describing. I’ve seen it only go the other way where they decide to add an additional team at the last minute. Sounds like a decision for the board – and a tough one at that. If you have a few extra players, perhaps they could somehow combine with a neighboring league who also has a few extra players? That way you might not have to shrink down to two teams.

  7. My grandson is in the 5-6 year old range. His dad, my son, is coaching for the first time and he didn’t know any of the kids. When it was time to choose teams, the person in charge said that since they were a coach last year then they got to choose their team first. Basically, this coach chose all the top players who have been on his team every year since they were in tball. That left my son and the other coaches with who was left. This coach with all the top players even sent several of their players to batting camp before the season started. Is it right that one coach can choose all the top players and not spread the teams out more evenly? This one team has been crushing all the other teams.

  8. Kelly – The unfair situation you describe is not okay for Little League or PONY league baseball. It is not okay for any kind of recreational league. The coach you describe who chose all the top players should have simply quit the league and formed a travel ball team (a scenario that happens all the time). If the league has a functional board, your son should approach the board and get the situation corrected. However, I suspect that a league that lets this happen does not have a functional board . . .

  9. in my area for baseball and basketball all teams are re-picked each year with divisions grouped in 2 year increments, a draft is used where all players are ranked based on coach evaluations performed typical as you describe above, then the list is divided into flights by number of teams…

    120 kids with 12 teams; #1-12 are in first flight, #13-24 second, etc…

    Coach and asst coaches kids that fall in a flight are that round’s draft pick for the team. (e.g. if you have #5 and #20 on the same team that coach doesn’t get a pick until 3rd round, #26 and number #50 you skip 3rd and 5th). A serpentine pick order is used and draft order is decided by impartial board member and ideally weighted based on the pre-emted pairings to further equalize non parity (#1 and #8 kid on the same team, they pick last in the third round).

    Players do dog tryouts occasionally, more frequent is coach’s kids get scored up and end up one flight higher on average, it all balances out except the coaches sons that truly are top flight end up the same as say a second flight.

    Soccer in the area does the double blind method Reed suggests. Both work well, blind drafts in my opinion work well for basketball and soccer before age 12 but baseball teams have too many working parts, specialized skill sets and it is nice to be able to draft the personalities that will work with your style, I think draft is the way to go for baseball. Also as you noted, drafting your own team makes coaches more accountable and have greater buy in.

  10. Thanks for your perspective, David. Very cool to hear that some teams use the double blind method for drafting, and that it’s working out well for some sports. I agree with you on the different working parts for baseball. I found myself drafting one player this year specifically in order to get a good catcher. Another player I drafted partly because I knew he could play shortstop.

  11. Unfortunately your article explains what happened within my league. I have a small amount of coaching experience. Two experienced coaches joined forces and their kids were placed on their team. The top draft choice also had requested the team along with the dad to coach. So before any drafting occurred, the team had the top 3 players in the league with 3 experienced coaches. I was provided with no assistants. You just need to forget about the winning part and focus on your job to develop your players.

  12. i was picked to manage a minor AAA team,went to one tryout then got a text to submit applications for my coaches?i call to question picking coaches since i thought that didnt occure until after the draft.so i was informed that managers already have coaches from the previous seasons.this is my second time being picked to be a manager and my first year when i showed up for the draft i found out that all the other managers had already prepicked they players and didnt like that i thought that was a form of cheating since i didnt have 5 or 6 players to choose from and only had what i gained from the draft,so needless to say their was some ill will torwards me.anyway after bringing up my previous experience about the draft i was inform several days later that i had been remove as a manager and replaced with a manager who they said had players who had request him during signups which also didnt sound fair to men.do i have any recourse with this league as i dont care about the cheating i just want to manage a team with my grandson?

  13. Michael – Without knowing more detail about your situation and the particular rules of your league, I can only give you very general advice. First, I would carefully read all of your leagues policies and rules regarding drafting. No two leagues run drafts exactly the same. It’s quite possible that you’ll find out that whoever removed you as a manager was well within their authority to do so. Or maybe you’ll find out that it shouldn’t have happened.

    I think it’s likely that you’re too late for this season, but if you want things to be better starting next year, then you should go to a board meeting and explain that the process for manager selection and drafting this year left you pretty upset, and without a team. Perhaps you can suggest alternative procedures for the following year so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.

    Some of the things that should be present in any system for manager, coach, and draft selection should include the following:

    • An opportunity for anyone to submit their name to be a manager
    • A formal process for selecting the managers from the manager candidate pool
    • Clear communication about assistant coach policy – what is the minimum and maximum number of player pre-emts that can be chosen for assistant coach purposes (note that unbalanced teams are the usual outcome in leagues that allow more than 2 assistant coach pre-empts to join the manager for a total of 3 players to start)
    • Clear communication about what is required of managers going into the draft, and what the system is for drafting on draft night

    It sounds like, at the very least, the communication wasn’t very good in your case, so hopefully what happened to you will help motivate board members to set up a better system for the following year, with clearer policy and better communication. That can only happen if you attend a board meeting and explain the details of your situation.

  14. Joe,
    thankyou for your reply,i have been on little league boards in the past when my kids were young and playing baseball.i sent a letter to all board members in regards to this issue and i am waiting for a response.i know i cant change the world but what i see happening seems wrong to me and if i feel this way im sure others also have had this concern. someone needs to speak up.i spoke with my grandson mom about this and she also thought about writing a letter to the board but was afraid that it would impact her son negatively in future seasons.i am still not clear why i removed as a manager and was not given a very good reason.so maybe some of my response is due to that.we will see what becomes of this and i will keep you updated on the out come. for now the fight not over

  15. In our local league we select coaches, then have a tryout. Once the kids tryout and are scored by coaches and board members. once the tryout is competed, all players scores are averaged and the highest and lowest are thrown out and then players are ranked 1-whatever by their average score. Then depending on how many teams there are then dropted into tiers. Coaches are only guaranteed their own child. Must draft assistant coaches. We try to make the 1st round a pitching heavy round allowing every team to get 1 experienced pitcher. We snake draft the kids, coaches are forced to take their kid with the pick their son ranked in. Every team gets a player from each round. For instance my son was a 1st round grade so I had to use my 1st pick on him, after taking him with the 7th pick I could then take anyone else as long as I only got 1 kid from each round. Thus method has worked out for many years for us allowing fairly even teams.
    Any thoughts?

  16. Carl – Thanks for describing your system. The fact that it is producing fair teams year after year is proof enough that it’s a good system. The one way I think it could be gamed is when players take it upon themselves (or from urging of coaches) to purposely tank tryouts. But that hurts the effectiveness of any tryout-based system, including the one our league uses that I described in the post (the parity system). I’ve always thought that incorporating stats from prior year would help reduce that tryout-bombing factor that can happen.

  17. Joe- That is the purpose of the board member on the evaluation committee. Our player agent has been in the that role for 5 years now, he is very knowledgeable of all the kids. New to the league kids are the toughest to evaluate. Usually if new kids, we try to call sources in former leagues to get assessments if theyou can’t make tryouts. Only problem with stats from past year is many coaches have parents keeping books, and an error looks like a double to them.

  18. Carl – having a player agent on a board evaluation committee like that sounds like it is the key to why your league is so successful. Kudos to you and your league for working out such a great system!

  19. I am so thankful that I found this site. My husband volunteered to be a coach/manager for the first time this season and we clearly didn’t know the ropes well enough or understand how underhanded the whole process was going to be. It’s been a rather disturbing learning process for us this season. We’ve seen some really bad behavior by some of the veteran coaches and their clearly stacked teams but have tried our best to just focus on teaching the kids and having fun. When it came time for the draft, we selected kids and families that we knew and tried to get a few other kids that pitched well on evaluation day. As a result, we have a wonderful group of kids — the best team we’ve ever been a part of. What we don’t have, though, is a winning record. Now that we understand how the system works and what to watch out for, I think we’ll do better next year…will definitely review this site for a refresher before draft day!! Thanks so much!

  20. Great post! Thanks for sharing, totally got me ready and inspired for my team draft! 🙂

  21. Snake drafts are how my league does it. However, they don’t take into account the skill levels of coach kids. They can have two 1st round kids and still have their 1st round pick. The issue was extremely bad in 2022 for our league with two coaches from a travel ball team having such a huge advantage that the bottom of league teams, like mine, were just not even competitive. We had very little pitching.

    Similar issue this year, except I have a higher draft pick than last and there aren’t as many travel ball kids.

    Last year it was rigged so the league all-star team would be good enough to make a deep run. I never had a chance at success as the new guy that was asked to coach because they didn’t have enough volunteers. Best I could do for the kids I had was teach and work. They all got better and we almost won our very last game.

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