Trail Youth Baseball (TYB) ushered in a new era, with exciting changes coming to the venerable Trail league.
Trail native, Jim Maniago, is the new president and, with a number of first-year members on the executive, TYB’s fresh new mandate is to strengthen its relationship with Trail Minor Baseball, continue to grow the sport and make it more accessible to players emerging from Trail Little League.
“We want to build this program again as we did in little league,” said Maniago. “It will take a few years to get things going but we have lots of help and good people involved. We’ll need to purchase more equipment and uniforms, as with the greater number of kids, we’ll have more teams but again that will be a gradual process.”
Related read: Play Ball! Trail Orioles back in action
Due to changes in BC Little League’s age requirements, TYB’s first step is to create a 13-year-old house league to accommodate an increase in players coming up from the 11-and-12-year-old Little League ranks. As a result, TYB will also change the previous age 13-15 league to an ages 14-16 league. Ultimately, by 2020, Trail Youth Baseball will create two leagues of ages 13-to-15 and another of 15-to-17-years-old to include players up to Grade 12.
The All Star teams will remain in the Spokane American Legion Baseball League, save for the Trail ‘AA’ Orioles, now known as the Senior Orioles. The team ran into a litany of problems last season, with Washington State American Legion teams not showing up for games in Trail, games cancelled due to lack of umpires, and other scheduling issues. As a result, the AA Orioles did not play in playoffs and were summarily voted out of the league.
Maniago and TYB is looking to get the team reinstated, however, they also looked at other options for the Senior team, Junior team (West Kootenay ‘A’ Orioles), and the 13-year-old All Stars, but decided to focus on improving relations south of the border.
“Both of those All Star teams should be strong and built with kids that played on the successful Little League All Star teams we’ve had,” said Maniago. “We actually looked at joining BC Minor Baseball and playing in a provincial league and were quite welcomed. It was actually about half the cost, but it would have entailed a lot of travel and we weren’t sure on the competition level. So in the end, we decided to stick with Spokane for this year and see if we can get more cooperation from them.”
Another concern for the league is a shortage of umpires. In an attempt to bolster the men in blue, there will be an umpire clinic at the Montrose Hall on Apr. 2-3 at 6 p.m. and anyone from age-11 and up can register.
“We have a severe shortage,” said Maniago. “Even if people are willing and able to do one game per week, it would be a huge help. We have a large group of kids coming out of little league and that will continue for the next several years and we are planning on building our program back up, but we need umpires so the kids can play the games.”
Trail Youth Baseball and Trail Little League, with new president Steve Robinson at the helm, are trying to make things easier for parents to register and access information.
Registration for both Little League and Youth baseball starts today, and parents can go online at traillittleleague.ca and register their young ball players for either Trail Little League or Trail Youth Baseball.
For more information on the Umpiring Clinic contact Bill MacMillan at 250-368-9892 or go to http://members.bcbua.ca/?pg=clinics to register.
sports@trailtimes.ca
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