I don’t know if anyone notices it at the time.  How could they? It’s an hour of pure chaos, filled with shoulder taps, double checks, and frantic chicken scratch scribbles. But, in one hour a handful of people made the summer a whole lot busier for thousands of people. Welcome to the Little League scheduling meeting.

Representatives from area communities (Prairie du Chien, Wauzeka, Eastman, Seneca, Bloomington, Cassville, Lancaster, Boscobel, and Fennimore) converged upon Wauzeka’s Century Hall Sunday afternoon for the annual league meeting.  Per usual, it starts off with a quick glossing over the rules. Everyone fine with this? Yep.  Each year, this process goes pretty quick until the regular debate about legal bat size. This brief flap only serves as the appetizer for the beehive the meeting is about to turn into.

I don’t want to make this sound like this process is terrible.  It’s not at all.  But it does get your heart rate up a bit.  Schedules for multiple age groups, multiple teams, boys and girls must be balanced between two months (June and July) and the limited availability of ball fields.  Somehow, though, it all works out and is done in about an hour.

This year, I’m coaching Bloomington’s 9&10 year old “Coach Pitch” team. It’s a major step up from the 7&8 year olds that I helped out with the past two years. Most normal baseball rules apply and we actually keep the score.  We start practice in May.  In June, we’ll start games and I hope to find that my chicken scratch schedule turns out okay.