I love baseball, don't get me wrong. I umpire every chance I can get, but a couple of weekends ago I did something that made me think about my limits. Three weekends ago I did the most games I have ever done in one day. I did 6 16U baseball games on one Saturday. I started at 8:3o am and finished at 9pm. It made for a very long day for sure.
This day got me too thinking, how many games should an umpire do before we begin to lose effectiveness, our judgement begins to wain, and we just get plain grumpy and tired? I think there are a lot of variables that go into how long umpires should go in a day. Weather (hot, cool, medium) is the biggest factor in my mind. The weekend I talked about above was hot, and muggy, which made it that much tougher.
If I can give some advice, I would advise to be careful about how many games you can do in a day. I found out the hard way that 6 was definitely too many for me. I will most likely schedule no more than 4 in a day for the rest of my career.
Hopefully all of the summer leagues you are officiating are going great!
Monday, June 23, 2008
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
End of One Season...The Start of Another
For me, I basically have (and will always have) two season when I umpire baseball. My first season is the high school baseball season and the second season is the summer baseball season.
I work very hard to keep them as separate as possible. As a basic rule of thumb in my umpiring career, I do NOT work any non IHSAA sanctioned games in the months of April and May. This basically means no little league or youth leagues, no Babe Ruth tournaments, or any other tournaments besides high school tournaments. My reasoning and logic is pretty simple. I want to be as focused as possible on my primary responsiblities to the organization I am licensed through. If I do a bunch high school games and then a couple of 12U's and then back to high school, I get thrown off my game.
During the summer, I pretty much will umpire anything from 12 and under to American Legion baseball. My favorite summer ball to work is the American Legion because it is very good baseball and the atmosphere (for the most part) is very relaxed and enjoyable. I do two very good American Legion tournaments here in Indiana. I work one in Anderson every year and a wood bat tournament in Elkhart.
As far as this high school season was concerned, it was a decent season. I did not get selected you officiate in the Indiana state tournament, which was disappointing but I will have many more opportunities in the future. I only ejected one player for malicious contact (running over the catcher) but everyone else I was able to keep in the game. I ended up with 22 Varsity contests and 10 JV contests.
I had a good season and now it is time to move on to the summer season. I promise I will blog more and keep you all up to date!
I work very hard to keep them as separate as possible. As a basic rule of thumb in my umpiring career, I do NOT work any non IHSAA sanctioned games in the months of April and May. This basically means no little league or youth leagues, no Babe Ruth tournaments, or any other tournaments besides high school tournaments. My reasoning and logic is pretty simple. I want to be as focused as possible on my primary responsiblities to the organization I am licensed through. If I do a bunch high school games and then a couple of 12U's and then back to high school, I get thrown off my game.
During the summer, I pretty much will umpire anything from 12 and under to American Legion baseball. My favorite summer ball to work is the American Legion because it is very good baseball and the atmosphere (for the most part) is very relaxed and enjoyable. I do two very good American Legion tournaments here in Indiana. I work one in Anderson every year and a wood bat tournament in Elkhart.
As far as this high school season was concerned, it was a decent season. I did not get selected you officiate in the Indiana state tournament, which was disappointing but I will have many more opportunities in the future. I only ejected one player for malicious contact (running over the catcher) but everyone else I was able to keep in the game. I ended up with 22 Varsity contests and 10 JV contests.
I had a good season and now it is time to move on to the summer season. I promise I will blog more and keep you all up to date!
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