During a recent visit to a youth baseball tournament in Bangor, Maine, Little League International CEO Steve Keener was telling a coach from Ohio how excited the organization was about the $4 million in grants it would fund for local leagues as a result of increases in rights fees paid by ESPN. “Does our league even know about it?” the coach asked. One of the great challenges for those who sanction youth sports at the national level is the inherently local nature of the competitions. Keener discussed that, along with other issues, on the eve of this year’s Little League World Series, which opened last week in Williamsport, Pa.
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When we doubled our rights fees, that was the catalyst for the Grow the Game initiative. That’s all money that will filter down to our local leagues, whether it’s to improve a secondary field to be able to play more games and get more kids playing, or to create a fall program that gives more kids a chance to give Little League a try.”
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Photo by: MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
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On managing issues while allowing leagues autonomy: A lot of it is communication, and we’ve learned the best way to do that when we can is to go directly to the parents. We now have over 1.1 million parents subscribing to our Parent Connection newsletter. That’s a lot of opportunity to speak directly to mom and dad.
On travel teams and year-round play: In the baseball hotbed areas, it’s a task for some kids just to make their high school team. Parents start seeing that when the kid is playing Little League at 8, 9 and 10. ... So they do what they think will get him that opportunity. The answer is probably getting parents to understand that the reality is, the talented kids are going to evolve anyway. There’s really not much you can do.
On the response to recent age-limit changes: When we adopted International Baseball Federation age guidelines [determining player eligibility by birth year, regardless of month], that aligned us with everyone around the world. However, in reality, a large majority of our programs are in the United States. We began to hear a lot from parents who didn’t like that. So we went back to our field personnel and surveyed them on some different options we might consider. We’re at a point now where we’re going to look at some of those options … quite possibly putting us back where we were previously, going back 75 years, with a program that really was intended to be for kids 12 and under.
On the value of exposure on ESPN: We want people to see Little League Baseball and understand what we’re about. I’m not naïve. It’s not always going to be exactly as we’d like it to be. But that’s our time to market why Little League is different and why Little League can be an asset to a community. And it’s been very good for us
