Little League Alberta District 1 Fall Baseball

In 2016 District 1 ran their first fall baseball program joined up with Prairie Baseball Academy. The program ran from the end of August up till just before Thanksgiving. This year we had roughly 90 Little Leaguers sign up for the program. Just before we started the fall ball season we ran a selection day event with a BBQ after the drills were completed. This year we were fortunate enough to have 3 teams in our U10 group, 2 teams for U12, and 2 teams for our U14 group. This allowed us to be able to run games every weekend right here in Lethbridge and with some last minute planning we were able to send 1 team made up of both U14 teams up to Calgary to play a couple of games against their fall ball teams.

The partnership with Prairie Baseball Academy worked out well in it’s first year as they would send us players each week to help us out with our Tuesday group practices. Each Tuesday they supplied us with 6 College players in order to help our volunteer coaches to run their practice. This was a great opportunity for our Little Leaguers to meet some of PBA’s players as well as learn from skills from some of players from one of Canada’s top Canadian college programs. Prairie Baseball Academy was excited to be involved with our program for the first time and are looking forward to keeping that partnership alive as we move into our second fall ball season. We expect to see more improvement in this upcoming fall ball program with this great program.

With this being the first year that fall ball was ran we kept the schedule more Lethbridge based in order to keep it as simple as possible. Now that we will be moving into our second year and have a better understanding of what other districts have for fall ball we will be working on having inter district weekends in this upcoming program. Inter District play could include a weekend in Calgary playing district 8 teams or even a weekend in Medicine Hat against district 4 teams.

As we move into the planning for the 2017 program we are reflecting back on the first year on what went well and what didn’t work out as planned and we are working on making improvements to make it an overall better experience for volunteers, parents, coaches, umpires, and players. If you are a Little Leaguer or parent wanting to get involved in fall ball in the upcoming years you can anticipate some changes in areas such as schedule, PBA involvement, and the experience. It won’t be long until the plans for 2017 start getting put into place. Make sure to check out www.underthelights.ca this upcoming April and watch out for this years fall ball registration.