About FALL BALL USA

OUR MISSION

     "To provide an organized and instructional baseball & softball program for boys and girls.
      To honor God through friendly competition and teach kids of all ages to be good sportsmen.
      To have a program that highlights team and individual acheivement and recognize them for their efforts.
      To improve the quality of baseball and softball for kids of all ages and prepare them for the Spring Season."

HISTORY

It all started with an idea and with that idea, a question. Can we develop a fall baseball program? It began in the minds of Jim Perkovich and David Dicks. While working together on a construction project in the Des Moines area Each week one would pass the other in the halls and say, "we should start a fall program at Grandview Little League." Afterall, the fields sat empty begining in August and through the winter. Wouldn't it be nice to see kids playing baseball in September. It had been talked about before, but no one had ever done it.

In 2007 that all changed. Jim and David plotted a course and started telling everyone at Grandview that they were planning on having a Fall baseball program. With the help of several people from the Little League, they began to put the pieces together for the first ever Fall Ball Program. It was a success! There were 28 boys teams that first year. And it was the institution of the first annual Home Run Derby Contest.

While it was great that the boys got to play in 2007, the girls wanted to play in 2008. So, registrations were taken for the first ever Fall Ball program for the girls at Grandview Little League. In fact, 2008 was a much bigger success than 2007, with the addition of the girls program, there were 43 teams. Many awards were given out at the end of the season including a brand new bat for the kid in each division with the highest season batting average.

In 2009 Fall Ball USA reached outside of the fields of Grandview and welcomed Altoona Little League as host for the 12 U and Senior programs. In all there were 54 teams that participated in the Fall Ball baseball program.

Also in 2008, Fall Ball USA was trade marked and incorporated as an official athletic sanction. With this sanction it has become the hope for its leaders to expand the Fall Ball Concept.

FALL BALL CONCEPT

It wasn't enough to simply tell people that we were going to play one more season of baseball. Life can get crazy for families in the Fall. Part of that craziness includes kids playing football. It was never our goal to get kids to not play football, its just that a lot of kids want to keep playing baseball and softball. So one hurdle we faced was, how do we get enough kids to play, and yes, even some who play football.

It wasn't an easy decision the first year out. We came up with some ideas. The first thought was to make sure and play at least 10 to 12 games. We figured the best time to do that would be on the weekends since school and football practices would interfere on the week nights. Not to mention, it starts getting dark earlier. So, we decided to play double headers. This would also allow kids who play football a chance to play at least one game. Second, we wanted it to be as organized and well planned as possible. We concluded that in order to keep order, we better provide paid umpires. Once we implimented that, we then toyed around with the idea of creating an "incentive program" for the kids. The idea was to make it so much fun, they wouldn't want to miss.

Our incintive program is based on a reward system. We give out team and individual awards. There is no such thing as a perfect system, but we know one thing, kids love a pat on the back. This is what makes us different from any other program, we track certain statistics of each kid. For the ones who excell and finish the best in their category, they get recognized with a reward in front of all their peers. We only focus on possative stats and possative rewards.

This year we plan on adding some new elements to the program. One of these additions is the "Great Play" awards in each game. The award is given to various kids in each game that is played. It is pretty simple. The umpire will be given a hand full of hat pins. Whenever he sees an "great play" made by any player in the field, the umpire will hand that kid a pin between innings and let the player know that the umpire thought he/she did a great job. Wait until you see the smile on their faces. What is great about this fun award is that any player can be presented with a pin. In fact, this will encourage each player to strive to do their best.

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