I am not a good enough writer to adequately respond to the BA Ledger’s, BAYB Striking Out letter, Sat Jun 7th, 2008 in the limited text space they provide. Rather than try I feel it is more important to get the whole truth out to our members and customers. Please read the below response.
BAYB is comprised of over 450 members dedicated to promoting, developing, sustaining, and supervising a youth baseball program. Which includes, but is not limited to, teaching baseball rules, baseball skills, values of teamwork, sportsmanship, safety, and other characteristics of moral citizenship.
The BAYB Striking Out article in the Sat., June 7th, edition of the BA Ledger represents a person’s opinion and we respect her right to an opinion. The article does however ask some questions and makes some inaccurate statements that BAYB would like to clarify here.
First; Our concession stands provide ice for injury care. Most of our volunteer staff and some of our concession workers are trained in First Aid and CPR. We strongly suggest that all coaches have at least First Aid training and carry First Aid kits to include cold packs. Our duty volunteer also carries a First Aid kit and an AED on our golf carts. The concessions have radios to contact the duty person. Additionally, the BA Fire Department provides excellent emergency support to the ball fields with response times typically around or under 5 minutes.
Second; Our concession prices are compatible or lower than most youth sports concessions in the Tulsa area. We do not prohibit anyone from bringing drinks to the game with them. We do prohibit individual ice chests but allow teams to bring water coolers. We discuss proper hydration on our website and in our monthly Newsletter. We also have proper hydration guidance posted at our office and available for all upon request. BAYB does not own the park, we lease it from the City and they provide excellent support to us. We will request the City consider installing water fountains.
Third; Scheduling; A few of our volunteer age coordinators did have trouble with scheduling this season. We have apologized for these issues several times (in emails and in our Newsletter) and take this opportunity to apologize again. To answer the question, “Is it that difficult to schedule?”, simply put “yes”. We schedule for 150 teams over 1100 games on 16 fields in 9 weeks with many teams having special requests (days they can not play), limitations on when we can schedule regular games (No Sundays), Holidays, School Breaks, Graduation, and other dates to consider when scheduling a season. Add weather causing make up games into the mix and scheduling is a difficult task. We have taken steps to make it easier and we will take more in the future but we realize we will not be able to make everyone happy.
Finally and of most concern; Myself and my staff beg for feedback. Our e-mails are listed under our “Executives” link on our website and we have 2 comment e-mails that have been discussed in every meeting and in our monthly newsletters (baybcomments@windstream.net and baybumpires@windstream.net ). In fact we answered the article author’s questions when e-mailed to us, but obviously not to her satisfaction.
Our phone numbers are published (455-BAYB) and we spend a good part of our days discussing issues with members and customers. At the end of each season we have surveys for feedback to help us focus our limited resources. Finally we have a volunteer duty person at the park during all games. We do prefer written correspondence because we can send to all board members and discuss in detail without anything being translated. We do and will speak with anyone but will request an e-mail for this purpose as well. We are committed to our organization’s objective as stated in the opening paragraph and view all comments as facilitating our improvement.
We know we have room to improve but we feel we provide good services and meet our organizational objective.
Sincerely,
David Hays
President, BAYB
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