Pair of Waltham Youth Baseball Leagues Merge Into One
By Scott Souza/Daily News staff
Daily News Tribune
Posted Dec 09, 2009 @ 12:51 AM
For five Friday nights last summer, North Waltham Baseball League teams traveled across town to face teams from the Little Nippers in the Waltham youth baseball version of interleague play.
It worked so well the two leagues have decided to drop the ``inter'' from the arrangement, and to create one youth baseball league that now covers two-thirds of the city.
An idea that senior league officials first floated two years ago will come to fruition this spring when North Waltham and Little Nippers combine to form the Waltham Youth Baseball League. All players will be placed in one pool for a ``blind'' draft, with the new board of directors hoping to come up with 10 competitive teams in the age brackets of 7-8, 9-10 and 11-12.
The goal of the new league, which will also contain a T-ball component, is to allow for more instruction, a better variety of competition and strong travel teams. All of that is designed to increase the popularity of the sport among young athletes in the city.
``We want to build a new league from the ground up using the best parts from the other two leagues,'' said John Huff, the former Nippers league director, who will share WYBL direction duties with former North Waltham director Robert Fitzgerald. ``It should keep the kids more interested. Before, you would have a 10-year-old pitching to an 8-year-old because of numbers, or a 10-year-old playing against a 12-year-old. It could be intimidating. Now, hopefully, we will be able to allow for more skill development, a more competitive atmosphere.''
Huff said there was a movement to include the Waltham-based Warrendale Little League in the new alignment, but because that league was already so far along in its planning for next season, it chose to remain independent. Huff said he hopes to create a strong interleague relationship with Warrendale and forge a similar relationship to the one North Waltham and Little Nippers enjoyed in recent years.
Fitzgerald said the ability to pool resources will help make the single league stronger than the two could possibility be separately.
``Pop Warner is citywide,'' he noted, ``lacrosse is citywide, basketball is citywide and soccer is citywide. Baseball is the only sport that still went by street and by district.
``Now there's double the number of fields. ... This gives us more fields to practice on and work on skills. ... There's strength in numbers, and this brings up the number of parents, volunteers and coaches.''
While both directors are excited about the possibilities for the future, they and the Waltham Parks & Recreation Department were aware there could be some backlash from those concerned about cutting ties to the past. That's why they brought in the coaches for a special meeting last Thursday to explain the benefits of the changes.
``We had a coaches' meeting to get them involved early so none of this was done behind closed doors,'' Huff said. ``We had coaches who went in there not wanting to see the end of two 60-year-old leagues, but came out of it thinking that this might work, and might be better.''
They have also instituted early guidelines to keep some of the tradition alive. The two divisions in each level will be named the North Waltham and Little Nippers divisions, although players from each part of the city will play on each team. They have also divided the board of directors up equally among representatives from the old leagues and will name the four age brackets after the names of the old brackets in both leagues - taking the Juniors and Seniors designations from the Nippers, and the Minors and Majors designations from North Waltham.
A big step for the new league will come next Thursday when registration is held at the Prospect Hill offices of the Parks & Recreation Department from 6 to 8 p.m. Registration is also encouraged online at www.walthamyouthbaseball.com. Strong early numbers will allow the league management to begin scheduling early, and stronger depth overall should help improve the level of travel-league play in the summer.
``We just don't see the caliber of baseball in the city that we used to,'' Fitzgerald said. ``When we first started talking about merging, one thought was that a unified group working on baseball skills could bring it back toward where it used to be.
``I had a travel team in North Waltham, and we've had some winning years, but we've never been a championship team because we're a neighborhood league going against city leagues,'' he added. ``We would play teams where they would have 60 kids from all over the city try out for the team. In North Waltham, we would only have eight or 10 kids from that part of Waltham who were committed to play at that level.''
Fitzgerald acknowledges there's a lot of work to be done between now and when the season opens in the middle of April. By the middle of February, he said he would like to have most of the rules, drafts and schedules completed.
It's a major undertaking in a short period of time.
It's an idea; however, both Fitzgerald and Huff are convinced whose time has come in Waltham.
(Scott Souza is a Daily News staff writer. He can be reached at 781-398-8006 or ssouza@cnc.com.)
