Part XVI of Why Youth Sports Umpires and Referees are Calling it Quits!

You’ve just gotta love “complainers”, especially when we’re talking about organizations like recreational town youth sports leagues that are run by volunteers. In typical youth baseball leagues, there are a group of people who not only coach teams, but also run the league, which can be a lot of work. Since these volunteers are not paid, you would think that the people who don’t volunteer to help with anything would just keep quiet and be grateful that others are stepping up to do all this work to help provide a place for everyone’s kids to play ball, while they never offer to help do anything.

That’s not always the case. Often those who are the last to volunteer to help, claiming they’re too busy, are the first to complain about anything and everything done by those that do volunteer their time.

My favorite complainers are ones who complain incessantly, but always try to make it sound like this is the first time they’ve ever complained about anything, when they are actually veteran complainers with many years of high level complaining experience under their belts.

As “Umpire-in-Chief” for a league, you not only are in charge of hiring and scheduling umpires for games, but also must deal with complaints about umpires if any arise. An Umpire-in-Chief for a town received a very lengthy email from a mom complaining about an umpire several years ago after a semi-final game for her son’s nine-year old summer travel team.

This irate mom submitted a three page complaint about the strike zone of the plate umpire, beginning with “I have a SHORT complaint…….”. Following that opening line was the statement “I want you to know that I never, ever complain about umpires……..” Three agonizing pages later, she closed her “short complaint” about how terrible the plate umpire was, but emphasized that he was only terrible for her team, which lost, not the other team. Her last line was “Please don’t brush me off as just another complaining parent, because I’m not a complainer.”

Somehow I have serious doubts that this was her first rodeo in the complaint department. The complaint was anything but “short”, and for someone who insisted she never, ever complains about umpires, her skills at the fine art of complaining about umpires were most impressive.

As umpires, we’d all love to stick people like this behind the plate for a game, and then get to tell them what WE think!

Next time I’ll talk about what happens when obnoxious parents knock down a few “cold ones” during their kid’s games.

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Randy Corwin is a veteran Massachusetts youth baseball umpire and author of the book, OBNOXIOUS PARENTS AND RUTHLESS COACHES, which is now available at Amazon Books, Barnes and Noble’s online bookstore, and at Escape Into Fiction in Franklin, MA. This post is part sixteen of a series of articles based on the book.