Thinking about proposing an off season/in season mentoring program for our Association. Would welcome any ideas and input.
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Please be more specific. Details?
Ill take a shot at it....
First off its a great idea!......It will reap benefits for your association. Now on to your difficulties..........and there are many. Often it isn't just as easy as "hey Bill, can you work with Joe a few games",......although that was how it worked for me many years ago....
Do you have any sort of evaluation program or discussion?. You will need to have this discussion to do a ranking of your active umpires and the umpires entering into the mentoring program. Mentoring does not take the place of clinics or rules training. Mentoring is a good extra step to allow up and coming umpires to avoid common pitfalls byt being advised by a more experienced umpire.
I've seen it broken out in many ways, and each is individual to each association. For example purposes...lets assume 30 umpires.
- 1-10 / 11-20 / 21-30
- Group 1 / Group 2 / Group 3
- Veterans/ Prospects/ Rookies
- Good / Bad / Ugly
From that list a good bench strength chart is imperative in setting up a good mentor program. Once you have this list of mentor umpires each section should be discussed. strengths and weaknesses......game mgmt., rules, Balls and strikes....
Match your mentors/prospects carefully using what you have seen from them. Now some of my rules.....
- My rule one, we have clients to serve. The leagues need to be considered first. Our mentoring program should be a positive offshoot of our umpire services to the league. Our mentoring situation should never put the league at an umpiring quality disadvantage.
- 2. Some people can DO but NOT teach....same with Mentoring...
- Don't throw prospects into games over their head......and don't burn out your mentor in too low levels.
- Your mentor program should yield improvement from one level to the next......at the end of the year, a rookie should be a prospect and a prospect could make veteran........don't rush it..
I don't expect this to be all inclusive but more just a few ideas to get you started........
great stuff piaa-ump. I was thinking of off season mentoring also, so that in the spring there is a bit of a head start. Of course the logistics of all this can be a head scratcher. I also want to put some emphasis on the mental/attitude aspect. We had a program in our Association before but it went by the wayside. You are correct about the teaching part, not all of us have that gift. Thanks for the great ideas.