Iowa Amateur Softball Association Annual Meeting Saturday, March 5 th, 2016 10:00 A.M. Best Western Regency Inn Marshalltown, Iowa Meeting Minutes 9:00am 10:00am - Pick-Up Registration Materials for 2016 Season Iowa ASA State Office- 1524 Penrose St. 9:30-10:00am Check-In at Ahrens Family Foundation Center, 1510 Penrose St. 10:00am 1. Call to Order 2. Roll Call 3. Approve Agenda 4. Committee Meetings (10:15am-12:30pm) a. District Commissioners (Adult and Junior Olympic) b. Player Representatives Review of Player Appeals c. Umpires Luncheon (12:30pm 1:00pm) Annual Business Meeting 1:00pm 5. Approval of Minutes of 2015 Iowa ASA Council Meeting 6. Committee Reports Player Representatives, District Commissioners, Umpires, JO Commissioner 7. The ASA Program Benefits ASA National JO Workshop Report Ron Zimmerman 8. 2016 Code Changes 9. 2016 Rule Changes 10. Proposed Legislation s- see Proposals 1 & 2 below 11. Election of Officers President, Vice-President, Treasurer 12. New Business 13. Old Business 14. Adjournment 2:00pm 15. Continue Distribution of Registration Materials for 2016 Season 2016 State Council Meeting Attendance - Attendance Included Player Reps. (Chris Thomas), Josh Dobson. JO Commissioners Ron Zimmerman. District Commissioners Kirk Danforth, Gregg Obren, Jon Rowen, Jeff Sears, Chris Thomas, Josh Eggers. Umpire Committee Ed Murphy, George Davis, Curtis Iburg, Keith Schmitz, Brian Schmitz, Toni Lewis, Steve Petersen, Don Wilgenbush, Dave Myers. State Commissioner Tom Topping. Vice President Joe Cordt
Code Change Proposal # 1 Article: 201 Letter: B Number: 3 (New) Change to read as follows: All Junior Olympic teams playing in any Iowa ASA sanctioned tournament shall have at least one adult coach who is ACE certified. In addition, all other adult team personnel on the field or in the dugout shall have an ASA Background Check. Reason for proposed change: (Changes submitted without reason will not be presented to Iowa ASA Council) This is already a requirement in all ASA Championship Play, but the national ASA Code/Rules do not necessarily apply to non-championship events. This makes sure that the ACE & background check requirements apply to our locally sanctioned tournaments. It only makes sense that this protection of our youth players should be extended to all events that we sanction. Change Submitted By: Ron Zimmerman Iowa ASA Council Status: State JO Commissioner Motion: Ron Zimmerman, Second: Kirk Danforth Passed: Unanimous Code Change Proposal # 2 Article: 205 Letter: F Number: (New) Change to read as follows: Sanctioned Tournaments - Tournaments that are not part of Championship Play may be sanctioned by Iowa ASA. The tournament host will agree to all requirements as listed on the "Invitational Tournament Sanction Form" which must be completed and agreed to in order to receive the sanction. Teams and coaches participating in a sanctioned tournament must comply with all rules and regulations of ASA, Iowa ASA and the local tournament. The tournament host has the right to use any playing rules adaptations as they may desire. All sanctioned tournaments must be listed on the tournamentasa.com web site. Add a definition of a sanctioned non-championship tournament and the responsibilities of the host and participants. Change Submitted By: Ron Zimmerman - State JO Commissioner Motion: Ron Zimmerman, Second: Brian Schmitz Passed: Unanimous
2016 Iowa ASA Council Business Meeting 1. Call to order at 10:00 a.m. 2. Roll call was taken by sign-in sheet. 3. The agenda was approved. 4. Committee meetings were held. Lunch was served from 12:30pm 1:00pm 5. The approval of the minutes of the 2015 Iowa ASA Council Meeting. Motion, second, approved. 6. Committee reports were given by Joe Cordt for District Commissioners, Ed Murphy for Umpires, Ron Zimmerman for Junior Olympic and Chris Thomas for Player Representatives. 7. UIC Ed Murphy made a presentation on 2016 Rule Changes and ASA Umpire Benefits Program and the new Background Check procedure for Youth Umpires. 8. Tom Topping presented the new 2016 ASA Code Changes, TournamentASA, Background Check Policy, Fee Changes. District Commissioner Report: submitted by Joe Cordt The Iowa A.S.A. Commissioners met at 10:30 March 5,2015. Present were: Ron Zimmerman,Kirk Danforth, Jeff Sears, John Rowen the O'Bren boys and Joe Cordt. Gregg questioned why we are only using ACE certification for our youth coaches. Why not allow N.C.A.A. or Iowa High School certifications? Tom said A.C.E. has to be used so that has met the same standards/training - legal. Discussion followed concerning the efficiency of background checks. We discussed special rules that are used in our programs. John discussed the situation where a team is playing a team in a class above their normal class. The lower team gets their choice if 5 runs or an extra defensive player. This rule helps prevent blowouts. Jeff makes the team declare who will be using a courtesy runner when they come to the plate. This prevents abuse of the rule later in the game. Gregg uses the courtesy runner in all leagues. G Gregg uses the 2nd home plat in some of his leagues. This helps prevent injuries. Burlington does not charge a player fee to keep league fees low. They do charge $2.00 for everyone coming through the gate, including players. They charge this fee for all activities: ie: soccer, sand volleyball softball. They do offer a punch card with 12 admissions for the price of 10. Minimum age of players was explored. Burlington 16, Clinton some 18 some 16. Church league 14. Marshalltown 18 or a graduating senior. Umpire fees were $20/ game in Iowa City, 25 per game in Marshalltown, $17 / game in Clinton and $22 in Burlington. The helmets /chin strap rule led us to discuss requiring players to wear face masks in certain defensive positions. A.S.A. does not address this due to the fact that there are no certified fielder s masks. We can put masks in our league rules but should not specify a certain mask.
We had great interaction among a bunch of smart veteran recreation professionals. Umpire Committee Report Submitted by Ed Murphy Members present: Ed Murphy, Steve Petersen, Brian Schmitz, Keith Schmitz, George Davis, Curtis Iburg, Toni Lewis, Don Wilgenbusch, George Davis, Dave Myers. We discussed the rule changes. The one rule that many questioned, was the courtesy runner in slow pitch. Can a substitute be placed on base for an existing courtesy runner? We discussed and made the assignments for championship play in 2016. We discussed the upcoming Iowa ASA umpire clinics and mentioned that I would like everyone to be there by 10:00am. JO Committee Report submitted by Ron Zimmerman I recently attended the biannual Junior Olympic Commissioners Workshop in Oklahoma City. During the two days of the workshop we were presented with a great deal of very good information on a variety of subjects. A brief overview of the sessions follows: The workshop started with a presentation by Sue Enquist, ASA Hall of Fame member and former UCLA softball coach. Her presentation was basically a pep-talk designed to fire up her audience about ASA/USA Softball. Her main message was that ASA is the dominant softball organization and has been there from the beginning. No matter what any other organization may say, as she put it, ASA is in the DNA of softball. We must embrace that and remember that we are the National Governing Body of softball, and no other organization will ever be able to make that claim. Overall, her speech was an excellent way to get the workshop started and get us excited about our game. A J Morgan from Bollinger Insurance presented information on ASA s insurance plans. He reiterated that there is no better insurance coverage available from any other sports organization. One of the things discussed is that it is illegal for us or any other organization to require that a team purchase the organization s insurance as a condition of participating in that organization s events. We can force them to register individually as we do with our JO teams, and the insurance is part of the individual registration. If a team wants to use some other insurance coverage, they can do that, but they must get an additionally insured certificate naming ASA. We would then have Bollinger review that certificate to be sure it meets our minimum coverage. Rule and code changes were presented. We had a very good session on concussion training. Here in Iowa only high school sports are covered by mandatory training requirements, but that is not the case in many other states. Be aware that if you take a team or even umpire in another state, you may have to comply with the requirements of that state. Even though we are not required to do anything here in Iowa, I believe that we should be vigilant and err on the side of caution if we are in a situation where someone has a potential concussion. There was a session on registerasa.com updates. This only applies to ACE and background checks for us here in Iowa. There was a brainstorming session on establishing an 8-U division and a Class C division in the other age groups. After much discussion, an 8-U division will probably be proposed at next
fall s National Council meeting, but there was little support for establishing the Class C divisions. We saw a demonstration on how to live stream an event at little or no cost. On Saturday morning we heard from a panel of college coaches on what they are looking for when they attend any of our tournaments for recruiting. Two points they made emphatically is that they do not want they names used to promote an event, and when they go to a tournament or camp, they already know which players they want to look at. We next heard from a panel of travel team coaches about what they want from an organization, and why they have moved away from ASA in some cases. We had training session on dealing with National Championship paperwork. We had a session on using social media to promote ourselves. For those that don t know, I have an Iowa ASA JO Facebook page. We had a review of the tournamentasa.com web site. This is a terrific resource that we should all be using and promoting to our local invitational tournaments. We need to build it up to where it is the first place that teams go to find tournaments! Our closing discussion was with Craig Cress concerning the name change to USA Softball which will be effective on September 1, 2016, and the proposed realignment and reduction in number of regions which will probably be acted on at the April, 2016 Board of Directors meeting. Iowa will probably be placed in a region with North & South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The opportunity to network and exchange ideas with our counterparts from around the country, and to have access to the national office staff is an invaluable part of this experience. Thank you for allowing me to represent Iowa ASA at this workshop. Ron Zimmerman State J. O. Commissioner Election of Officers 1. Election of officers Bill Blanchard was re-elected President and Joe Cordt was re-elected Vice-President. Tom Topping was re-elected Secretary-Treasurer. 2. New Business State Umpire Clinics will be held in Iowa City on March 19 th and Urbandale on March 20 th. 2017 State Meeting Grinnell, IA, Sat. Feb.18, 2017, 10:00AM 3. Old Business None. 4. Adjournment MSA (motion, second, approved) Meeting was adjourned at 2:00pm. Registration packets and materials were distributed for the 2016 season.