T-minus 10 days

As I'm sure most could imagine a lot goes into being able to kick off the season but I'm not sure many know just how much goes on behind the scenes to make it happen. There's lots of late nights, weekends/days off at the field or working on schedules, headaches, text messages and phone calls.

We started off with making sure our board members are prepared to keep our players safe by doing a CPR class. Huge shoutout to Travis Noyd for donating his time and dummies to teach us.

After practicing our skills and understanding the correct amount of pressure and pace to deliver compressions we of course had to document the event with a picture our dummies.

The following weekend our president Aaron Peer spent several hours with the coaches drafting players for their teams. This is the first year Orion Little League has rostered teams this way and besides a few hiccups it seemed to work out fairly well.

Aaron came home with teams drawn up and began adjusting documents to be able to send out all pertinent information to their coaches so that parents could be notified. He did this all while navigating waters of developing online scheduling for the coaches to help decrease the amount of time our coaches have to spend at the field just trying to make practice schedules.

Next up was scheduling games. If you've never been to an event of this sort let me just tell you it's a lot for first timers. MaryBeth and Brad did everything in their power to help prepare Aaron for the long two days of scheduling each team at least 15 games but it was still more than he expected. Saturday was for baseball, this year we have 8 teams! While we are so excited to see so many players, we also needed to keep in mind important dates for our amazing volunteer coaches. As you can imagine it takes a lot of strategizing and double checking. Sunday was for softball, again such an amazing turnout! We are kicking off the season with 6 teams! With some over lapping of head coaches in one division who are graciously volunteering as an assistant in another division it took even more organization and lots of different colors of pens. 😆

While getting that all organized on paper to pass out to coaches Aaron and his wife spent time putting the schedule on separate calendars for each field and helping coaches navigate and utilize each calendar for scheduling practices. We have learned so much within the last month and made lots of notes to help next year go a little smoother.

Aaron finds himself talking out loud about all the things that still need to get done. But then there are so many amazing board members standing alongside of him making sure the season starts off with a bang.

MaryBeth DeBaillie, Sean Graff, Brad Child and Chad Carlson (and their amazing families) spent lots of hours over the Easter weekend on the fields tilling, leveling, dragging, spreading turface, spiking and dragging some more to make sure they are grass free and ready to play on for our opening games.

Alyssa and Christian have been working on scheduling concession stand workers and umpires. They spent countless hours finding individuals wanting to work with Orion little league, creating logs and scheduling them for each home game. They then take the time to do clinics to ensure they walk into their first day with confidence.

I'll end this blog post by thanking not only those mentioned above but our community and sponsors. We would not be able to continue to pass along the love of the game to the next generation of ball players ⚾️🥎

(Go to our sponsors page and check out all our amazing local business)