District Tournament Committee Meeting

The District 19 Tournament Committee Members meet recently at Alamo Cafe to review City and District Host Bids for the 2008 tournament season. The District Administrator worked with District Staff members and made Tournament assignments to the tournament host sites.

With the staggered starts of the 9-10 and 10-11 divisions the tournament committee was able to utilize one tournament site in some cases for more than one division of tournament.

In 2008 each site will have an overall site director and each tournament will have a tournament director.  The site director will coordinate paperwork and collections with all site tournament directors as well as serve as a tournament director to consolidate the handling of game reports and collections.

Another change will be that each site will be assigned a pool of umpires with the umpire supervisor and/or site director making game assignments for games the prior day.  This will eliminate the need for one person to handle all umpire assignments.  Plans are to rotate umpires within the pools after the first few days or first week of tournament.

Thanks to the host leagues for offering your Little League fields for use by all of the leagues and teams in our Little League District.  To the teams and leagues playing on those fields, please be sure and thank the host sites for their hard work and dedication to giving us these fine Little League Fields to utilize for our tournaments.

Also, thanks to all the volunteers who serve us by being our tournament directors, site directors, umpire supervisors and umpires.  Thanks to the District Staff for your work all year around.

District Staff Meeting

The District 19 Staff Members meet on Saturday, November 17th at Baseball Express to review the new format for the 2008 City and District Tournaments.  Using tournament schedules from the 2007 season,  the effect of the staggered start dates for the District Tournaments were reviewed.  These changes should prove to reduce the demand on the staffing of the tournaments and improve the flow of games for the host leagues. 

District Staff members have pledged to assist in making these changes a positive experience for all of our Little Leagues and all of the tournament teams.

These changes, along with a review of all of the rules changes, will be reviewed with League Presidents and District Staff members at our January Presidents Meeting on January 9th (Wednesday) evening at the Windcrest Civic Center.

The Southwestern Regional District Administrator's Seminar was held Friday, November 30th through Sunday, December 2nd, 2007.

Richard Buckelew, Tommy McDonald, Virginia Buckelew and Tina McDonald attended this year's Regional Seminar.  The Texas West State DA's Conference and our Section 3 Meetings were also held during this period in Waco.

All the current Regular Season and Tournament Rules changes were reviewed and explained at this seminar.  We will be able to pass on the latest information to our League Personnel at the January Meeting, so League Presidents and District Staff, please plan to attend so you can keep up to date on these changes.

Bruce Marburger receives an award honoring his more than 26 years of dedicated service to Little League Baseball and Softball from District Administrator, Richard Buckelew at the annual League Presidents Meeting held on October 11th, 2007.

After over 26 years of dedicated service to the Little League Program, Bruce Marburger has retired as the District 19 Umpire Consultant.

Richard Buckelew, District 19 Administrator, presents Bruce Marburger with a token of our appreciation for Bruce's dedicated service to Little League Baseball and Softball.

We wish Bruce Marburger the best in his retirement and hope he gets to take a summer vacation after all of these many years.

Bruce did state that he will continue to work with our District in umpire training and will remain active as a umpire.

Thank You Bruce from everyone in San Antonio Little League !

The Section 3 District Administrators met on Sunday, October 14th to review past Section Tournaments and make decisions on where the 2008 Texas West Section 3 Tournament would be hosted.  Pictures from left to right are Richard Buckelew, DA 19 from San Antonio, Barbara LeStougeon, DA 21 from Bandera and Duane Durst, DA 26 from Fredericksburg.  Not picture but in attendance was Gerald McCrary DA 35 from Del Rio.

District 19 will now host the Junior and Senior Baseball and Softball Section 3 Tournaments for 2008.  We were asked to take the tournaments which were to scheduled to be in District 21 and were more than happy to take them so that our District Winners will not have to travel for the Section Tournaments.

We are also excited to announce that District 19 and Alamo Heights were awarded the Little League Softball and Senior League Softball Southwestern Regional Tournaments again for 2008.  Please plan to offer your assistance in scorekeeping, announcing and Field Director Duties.  We need help from all of our District 19 Little Leagues.

Come out and help, it is a ton of fun and you get to meet the teams from the other 7 states in the Southwestern Region.  Remember the winners of these tournament go directly to their World Series from here.

NEWS !

NEWS !

Dave Mather has been appointed as the 2008 Tournament Coordinator.

The duties will include reviewing tournament proposals, reviewing tournament host sites, meeting with tournament hosts and working with the District Umpire Consultant to assure that umpires are assigned to cover all of the 2008 City and District Tournaments.

Another of Dave duties will be to assist the District Administrator in schedule preparation and securing additional Tournament Directors from the District 19 Leagues.

Congratulations to Dave Mather on his appointment to this most important position.

Tommy McDonald has been appointed as the District 19 Umpire Consultant to replace Bruce Marburger effective immediately.

Tommy will assume the duties of umpire training and development and will begin contacting each of the Little Leagues in District 19 immediately in an effort to promote and secure additional volunteer umpires who will be available for the upcoming City and District Tournaments.

Congratulations to Tommy McDonald on this very important position.  We will all be assisting Tommy when ever possible and ask that you do the same.

All League Presidents were asked to assist the District and our new Umpire Consultant, Tommy McDonald in finding and training additional volunteer Little league Umpires.

In addition, the District Administrator made it known that we are looking for 2 additional Baseball ADA's and 2 additional Softball ADA's from among the leagues in 2008 to assist us during Tournaments as Tournament or Game Directors.

It was announced at the Presidents Meeting on October 11th, 2007 that the All-Star Tournaments for 2008 will have staggered start dates.  The 9-10 Baseball and Softball and the 10-11 Baseball and Softball divisions will start their tournaments on June 21st.  All other divisions will start on June 28th.

The staggered start dates will allow us to maximize the use of the host facilities, our umpires and tournament staff.  In addition, it will assure that host leagues have more games each day and less days of single games.

On January 9th, 2008 the District held its annual Presidents and Staff meeting to review the 2008 Rules Changes and review the new staggered tournament start dates for 2008.

It was announced at the  Meeting that the annual District 19 Little League night at the Rampage Games at the ATT&T Center would be held on Friday, January 11th, 2008.

Everyone had a great time with a Spurs locker room tour and a great hockey game to boot.  We had a great crowd and everyone enjoyed themselves even our Regional Director, Mr. Mike Witherwax.  If you missed it this  year be sure and plan on going next year.