PRESIDENT'S
MESSAGE
October 2008
Welcome to the 2008
winter ball season! My name is Paul Corrales and I am the new
President of Chino Hills Little League. I am excited with the
large turnout of players registering to participate in Little
League this winter!
I have been involved with youth sports for
several years. I have been a member of the Chino Hills Little
Board of Directors for the past four years. I have served as
Lower and upper Divisions Vice President.
My family and I have enjoyed our Little
League Baseball experience and, as your new League President, I
will strive to make yours an enjoyable one also.
I am completely aware of challenges I will
encounter as your league’s President. I will do my very best to
accept those challenges and overcome common misperception, and
clarify miscommunication through our web site and the board of
directors.
I am fortunate to be working with a full
compliment of board directors during this term. Almost every
position on our Board of Directors is currently filled. It is a
clear message that Chino Hills Little League has parents that care
and want to volunteer their time to make a difference. I will
work closely with each of the directors to help our league improve
and succeed at all levels.
The league’s Executive Vice President Alex
Baez will assist me with the presidential duties in various areas
to ensure we keep up with the administration and oversight of our
league in all areas. Alex also has broad experience with the
league, serving as President and Executive Vice President over the
past six years.
The winter ball season presents many
challenges for our Board of Directors: projecting the number of
players and teams, coordinating interleague play with other
leagues, honoring requests, working logistics, negotiating
limited field allocations, preparing schedules for multiple
leagues, just to name a few. The Directors have met these
challenges and have completed the tasks in admirable fashion. It
takes countless hours of volunteer time to make this all happen
and I applaud them for being up to the task. Because Little
League is a volunteer-based organization I encourage you to always
take the time to thank each and every volunteer in this league.
If it weren’t for them our kids would not have a little league
baseball program.
We recently held a managers/coaches
baseball clinic. The clinic was facilitated by Joe Caira and his
staff of coaches that included Head Varsity Coaches, current
professional players and more. We also added a manager’s
organization portion facilitated by our experienced managers. The
clinic was a huge success and all who attended took away a great
chunk of baseball knowledge they will be able to use with their
own teams. Our league has also updated and restructured our
Coaches Box link on our web site. It now offers many new coaching
tools to give managers and coaches a resource area to help them
organize practices and help to better manage there time. This all
equates to managers having more knowledge to teach our kids to be
better baseball players.
Our league is currently negotiating
several clinics to be held prior to the upcoming spring season.
The board of directors is also discussing sending managers with
their pitchers and catchers to additional clinics to learn better
mechanics as they prepare for the spring season. Our objective is
to provide our managers and coaches all the resources we can to
help them instruct our kids about this great game called
baseball.
Our league will look into requiring
managers at certain levels to be certified as managers and coaches
by attending the clinics our league will offer to them at no
cost. I am very excited about this process. I believe our kids
will be the winners from this new process. There will be numerous
managers that will improve their ability to teach kids and manage
their teams.
Our board of directors is currently
discussing the upcoming spring season fundraiser. Our fundraiser
helps offset the cost involved in having our kids play at our
great facility and all the other cost involved with running a
Little League program. The Board will also be exploring and
debating new ideas to help improve the level of competition in
each division and also working on ideas to help our all-star
program succeed in tournament play this upcoming summer.
Finally, we are aware that our pledge to
honor requests during the winter ball season sometimes results in
teams that are less balanced than what we see during the Spring
season. Please remember winter ball is about instructional
baseball, where friends and siblings, cousins, and neighbors can
play with each other without the competitiveness of keeping
score. The Board of Directors will continue to monitor member
feedback and examine our protocols each season in order to
implement ideas and rules that will help facilitate an enjoyable
baseball experience for everyone.
In conclusion, I hope each of you enjoy
your winter ball experience this season! Thank you all for your
participation and support. Until the next time, don’t forget to
always keep your eyes on the ball.
GO CHINO HILLS LITTLE LEAGUE!
Paul Corrales
Alex Baez
