Town Lax Organizations

Today's youth sports organizations take on loads of responsibilities (managing people, funds, other organizations) and increased risks (vendors going out of business, misconduct or behavior).  Here are a few ideas to help manage the league activities and mitigate some of the risk. Most towns combine their boys and girls programs into one organization to leverage scale and shared activities.  Other town run them separately, while still other towns manage all youth sports under a town youth services organization.

Legal Status - Incorporate as a 501 (C) (3) non-profit organization.  This allows you tax exempt status as well as the ability to raise funds through charitable donations. Key Point - if your organization does not do this, the IRS can come after your player registrations and other income streams as revenue that you will have to pay taxes on!  You still must file a tax return as a 501 (C) (3), but are not obligated to pay taxes.  You should seek the advice of Legal Counsel and a CPA to fill out and file the paper work. Here is a useful IRS document.

By-Laws - Draft (borrowing existing ones work well) by laws for your organization that describe the objectives, officers, how the organization will be governed, how often the officers will meet and how decisions will be made. Legal review of theses documents should be made before you file them with the state.
Sample table of contents:

I. Name. 1

II. Affiliations. 1

III. Mission. 1

IV. Membership. 1

Residence Requirements. 1

Voting Members. 1

Non-Voting Members. 2

V. Governing Body. 2

VI. Amendments to the Constitution. 2

VII. Provisions Required for Taxexempt Status Under Section 501(c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code  2

VIII. Conflict Of Interest 3

IX. By Laws

1.     BOARD OF DIRECTORS. 5

2.     ELECTIONS. 6

3.     MEETINGS. 6

4.     AMENDMENTS TO THE BYLAWS. 7

5.     COMMITTEES. 7

6.     GENERAL.. 7

7.     ELECTED OFFICERS DUTIES. 8

8.     SELECTION OF COACHES. 11

9.     TEAM MEMBERSHIP / FINANCES. 12

Board of Directors - generally governs and manages the activities of the organization. Here is a sample list of directors and key responsibilities and are described in detail in the By Laws.

• President - the CEO of the organization with signature authority
• Vice President - Boys Program Director - coordinates and manages the league affiliations, coaches and teams for the boys division, 
• Vice President - Girls Program Director - coordinates and manages the league affiliations, coaches and teams for the girls division
• Treasurer - the CFO of the organization with signature authority. Manages all inflows and outflows of cash. Must be highly trustworthy since tens of thousands of dollars will pass through the organization.
• Secretary - manages all of the meeting scheduling, invitations, documentation, assistant the president
• Fields Director - manages and coordinates playing fields and facilities with the town, other sports organizations and 3rd parties. Manages maintenance budgets and coordinates field markings and accessibility.
• Equipment Director - manages the player equipment (if provided), goals, uniforms, balls and storage of same
• Registrar - manages the communications, setup and controls for player and team registrations
• Tournament Director - manages the enrollment of teams at tournaments, works with the registrar to collect fees, and coordinates volunteers.

Running the organization takes a dedicated board to make it all work. Most all of this activity occurs behind the scenes with little fanfare or appreciation.  It is all worth it once the season begins and the players get on the fields.

My admiration goes out to all town youth sports administrators who help grow this great game.

Let the games begin

As we kick-off our 2011 spring season, I want to extend my profound thanks to the countless hours of effort put into the league by the players, parents, coaches, town administrators, division directors, schedulers, umpires, and board members who make MBGLL possible. Our league simply does not happen without the contributions of all parties in the chain. So I tip my hat to all of you who do make it happen and make a difference in the lives of our daughters. A special thanks to Christine who rides herd on all of the ongoing activity and does it all with good humor and grace, all the while attending to the minute details. Thank you Christine.

It has been a long winter, the college seasons are underway, high schools are prepping for their seasons, and MBGLL opens its 10th year.  It must be spring! I understand that there may be some difficulty with fields for the for first couple of weeks of the season.  I would encourage towns to simply not cancel these games and attempt to reschedule them in SportsManager.  This is best achieved by leaving the original game in the schedule so it can be rescheduled. Once a game is deleted, it can not be 'resurrected' and can only be 're-created' as a scrimmage game.  Work with your opponent, find a practice time during the week that works for both teams and reschedule the game.  Give the umpire assignors at least 2 weeks notice to assign an umpire. Tip: find a high school game in your area when you could  schedule your MBGLL game to follow.

Now let's finally get rid of this snow and play some lax!   See you on the field.

Best Behavior

As we embark on a new season, we need to ensure fair play and honoring the game at all levels. Whether it is a first year player in a U9 game just learning the rules or experienced 7/8 players going at it full tilt, we must both encourage and enforce MBGLL's league rules and zero tolerance conduct policy.  We often hear 'feedback' in verbal format when talking to coaches and administrators during the course of the year.  Occasionally, the information is regarding player or coach misconduct, whether it is running up the score, yelling at officials, opponents, coaches or blatant disregard for the rules.  As a league, we will not condone misbehavior, but in order for us to act on it, we must get the facts related to any incidents.

Our tool for information collection is the incident report form. The league division director and sportsmanship director review and resolve all incident reports filed with the league in a timely and confidential manner.  Sometimes, the resolution is to simply speak with a parent, coach or player about certain behaviors that must be modified.  At worst, it involves suspension from the league for one or more games.  And other cases are resolved with no finding if there are insufficient facts to back up a claim.

Oftentimes, we hear that people do not want to 'be on the record' by filing a report.  Please understand, the league cannot act on rumor, stories or verbal reports and can only act on documented cases where the facts are noted and the league can follow up with the parties involved and get to a satisfactory resolution. Matters are handled confidentially and our goal is to serve the program and protect the integrity of the game.

We need your help in honoring the game.  Let's make this the best year of lacrosse that we can.  Please report incidents to the league that you believe to be in violation of MBGLL's rules or code of conduct.

Select League Double Goal - nurturing the next generation of lax leaders

New in 2011, MBGLL offers a select league for the 5th through 8th grade teams for its more advanced players. Athletes who play on these teams must also commit to MBGLL's recreational practices and games. 


Our reasons for creating the new leagues was to provide the opportunity for the more advanced players to continue to learn the game, play higher levels of competition, and leverage the league scale and infrastructure.


Our requirement to have the players play in both the rec league and the select league is for these players to understand that it is their duty and responsibility to help promote and grow the sport by helping new players learn the game.  Rather than allowing these players to become an elite clique of select players, strive to have them become leaders on the rec team and help teach the game to the less skilled players. This carries over to 'off the field' activities and eventually these players become our next generation of coaches, administrators and keepers of the flame. 


We score the 'Double Goal' as the players continue to learn and love the sport while they learn life's lessons and become the best people and players they can be.

Scheduling Update

Since releasing the schedule last week and getting the feedback from the division meetings, it is clear that we need to improve the process for the scheduling pools with the low numbers of Advanced and Beginner teams in the 5/6 & 7/8 leagues.  Here are 2 options:

1. recruit other teams into the Advanced (and Beginner?) division so there would be a minimum of 8 teams or ideally 8 towns
2. if we could not recruit enough teams to get the minimum, then we should have combined the Advanced division with the Intermediate division to avoid the repeat games.  

We will continue on course to eliminate the repeat games and schedule more cross-division  games between the Advanced and Intermediate divisions. 

In 2010 we spent dozens of volunteer hours attempting to scrub the abnormalities out of the schedule before it was released, but we still received 680 change requests, which is 54% of the 1269 games in the original schedule.  This year, knowing that we were scheduling divisions without many teams and we were going to have to make changes to eliminate the repeat games, we decided to publish the initial draft after making sure every team had the minimum 8 (or 6 for the 1-2 league) games.  We felt it best to release the schedule on-time, get the feedback from the towns, and then implement our change process. We will probably still end up changing a significant amount of games but we hope to be under the 54% change rate from last year.  If you have ever had to reschedule games in SportsManager, then you know this is a manual activity - one game at a time, and can take dozens of hours to complete.

Lastly, it was suggested that we let each SportsManager region (MBGLL division) create their own schedule.  This has the obvious benefit of getting more towns involved.  But unless every town is willing to spend the required time to build a schedule and negotiate all of the conflicts, I am skeptical that it could work.  However, the board would consider regions submitting their own MBGLL division schedule in 2012 as long as they meet the deadlines imposed by the league and work out any cross-division issues.    Any takers?

Ted Kelley
President, MBGLL

Scheduling Blues

The scheduling committee has been hard at work building the first release of the game schedule and it is a lot of work. It's like trying to solve a very complex problem using fairly crude tools. Having worked on the schedule the last two years, here are a few tidbits that I have learned along the way.

Game Match-ups
Basically, every team in a division (region in SM) and scheduling category (division  in SM) gets matched up against every other team.  So if you have 4 teams, you get 12 match-ups that look like:

Team 1 - Team 1 v Team 2, Team 1 v Team 3, Team 1 v Team 4
Team 2 - Team 2 v Team 1, Team 2 v Team 3, Team 2 v Team 4

Team 3 - Team 3 v Team 1, Team 3 v Team 2, Team 3 v Team 4

Team 4 - Team 4 v Team 1, Team 4 v Team 2, Team 4 v Team 3

The scheduling tool simply picks up the first 8 entries in the list and attempts to drop them into the first 8 available field and time slots for that region/division, alternating home and away.  This is why the towns whose names begin with "A' may never get a game against the towns whose names begin with 'W'.  This issue we exacerbated with the scheduling pools this year since we had a fairly small set of teams in the Advanced and Beginner pools which forced them into a small set of match-ups.

If the slot is filled either by capacity or blackout, the scheduling tool does not try to move the match-up to the opponents field, it simply moves to the next week to attempt to slot the game. If it runs out of time (game dates) then it simply stops scheduling games.  The tool can generate about 85% of the schedule in a couple of hours. Unfortunately, it takes another 20 hours or so to work out the final 15%.

Blackouts 

I have been told that blackouts were a bad thing, but not until this year did I realize how they affect the schedule (especially since we did not allow them last year). Blackouts do not mean that you will get home games on the days that aren't blacked out. In fact, you are more 50%  likely to not get a home game at all on a field.  Blackouts will cause you to have fewer home games.

Odd numbers of teams

The other major complexity to manage is when a region has an odd numbers of teams for a league. The math is simple - you need an even amount of teams to give every team a game. Take the total number of teams and divide by 2. If there is any remainder - then you will have a team without a game.  We want every team to play a minimum of 8 games so we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to schedule these teams.  Our first option is to look at an adjacent region/division and see if they also have an odd number we can pair up.  If that option is not available, then we look to schedule double headers within a region/division. We look to find towns that have more than  one team in a league (ie 2 U13 teams) playing at home, and schedule the extra game against that town so they can form a mixed team and play the extra game.  Most players enjoy the extra games - and remember - without doubleheaders, some teams don't get a game and that team could be yours!

Block scheduling 

This is another complex issue and it got more complicated this year with scheduling pools (divisions) since the blocks now had to match towns that had the same team categories.

For example Town A has an Advanced 7/8 team and an Intermediate 5/6 team.  They could not be block scheduled against a town that had a Beginner 7/8 team and an Intermediate 5/6 team. The numbers of team that could be blocked this year was reduced as a result.

Home/Away splits

Generally speaking the home and away splits tend to even out over a town's slate of games, even though a particular team might have 3/5, another might have 5/3.  Luckily, my wife Lisa graphed the home/away ratios for the league in a bell curve and one can see that 95% (2 std deviations) of the towns have between 40% and 60% home games (3-5). Thank you Lisa!

Solo Games

Finally, solo games are another factor to consider since there are 180 games every weekend and approximately 70 umpires. We try to pair up the games to a minimum of 2 games per umpire (down to 90) or three (down to 60), so obviously we do not have sufficient umpire capacity to have solo game son the schedule.  

When you factor in all of these constraints, it makes a a seemingly simple task more difficult.  Thankfully, we had a dedicated team this year led by Ken Kolhberg, Kim Perry and Marianna Whitson who put in some long hours in order to get the schedule produced.  I pitched in a little bit as well.  Thanks to all!

Now let's get ready to play some lax!

361 Registered Teams!

With registration winding down, I am excited to report that we have 361 teams registered for the 2011 spring lacrosse season in the following divisions and leagues (grades):

Division	1-2 Grade	3-4 Grade	5-6 Grade	7-8 Grade	Grand Total
MetNorth	9	25	26	32	92
MetWest	11	40	34	31	116
North	9	32	33	32	106
South		14	16	17	47
Grand Total	29	111	109	112	361

We have posted the division (schedule pool categories) here: www.mbgll.org/for-coaches/2011-team-breakdowns.  Teams shaded yellow need to be categorized (placed in a SM division).

We are preparing the first schedule build, and running the initial reports to check the system configuration for teams, fields, coaches, black out dates, etc.  Please follow the procedures outlined in Christine's email to make sure your teams, fields and coaches are ready to go.

63 days until the season opener. Can't Wait.