Hey all. I will be the commissioner of a youth baseball league this spring. The age of the kids are 5th and 6th graders, so the league is kid pitch. The league is wanting to really stress building teams as even as possible. The reason is obvious, you want as many kids having a positive experience as possible, and having one or two teams that totally dominate while 1 or 2 teams are total doormats, leads to too many kids not having fun playing baseball.
Now as many of your know, this all SOUNDS good, but making it happen isn't quite that easy. The league is mandating the draft be a blind draft, which means I assign the teams. One rule we will implement and I support, is limiting coaching pair-ups. I won't, nor should I, guarantee coaches who want to coach together that they will be paired up. The obvious reason for this is if both the coaches have strong players, it might be better to have the players on seperate teams to help spread out the talent.
What has experience has any of you learned about the best way to build teams to make as competitve a league as possible? My initial plan is to evenly divide up the pitchers so no team has too many top pitchers. We will have league evaluations before the draft to get an idea of each player.
I'll then divide up catchers, so each team has at least one experienced catcher. After that, I'll divide up the remaining hitters and try to balence out the overall hitting of each team.
Sounds simple enough, but it is still very easy to build a league that has too many strong teams and too many very weak teams. So I ask, what advice do any of you have in assigning out teams that are as balanced as possible?