BUNT Introduction Final
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast, Patrick Faerber, your host again from Umpire Classroom, and today I'm talking about getting ready for the 2025 season and a new initiative that I'm taking with Umpire Classroom focused on assisting trainers and association leaders with developing their training for the 2025 season and moving forward.
So quickly before going through all of this, be sure wherever you're watching this to subscribe and like or leave a comment. Anything to help promote the podcast is greatly appreciated. So to give you some background and context, let me explain how I got involved with Umpire training and development. In 2019, the local park where I grew up playing, where I started my umpiring, the operator passed away unexpectedly and things started to really fall apart.
So in 2020, the park asked me to take over their assigning and training of umpires. So to get ready for that season, we had a big in person training [00:01:00] planned. We were going to do four trainings in person that were inside classroom trainings, as well as two on the field trainings. And we had it all laid out and we ended up having about 20 umpires that signed up and went through the training and I think they got a lot out of it.
But as you know, 2020 did not end up being a normal year and we ended up not having a spring season. Now we were fortunate that we had baseball pick up in the summer again, but at that time we had then lost a lot of our umpires because they'd gone off to do something else. Or they had just lost their interest.
Pretty quickly, I found out I was going to have to train all our umpires again. Obviously, that's not sustainable. We can't constantly be running effective, really high quality umpire training. So I decided I needed to come up with a way to deliver effective, On demand training to these umpires that they [00:02:00] can take year round as soon as they're interested in becoming an umpire.
And from that, I developed the Umpire 101 course that you can find on Umpire Classroom. The idea of it was that an on demand, efficient training that is purposely built to be delivered as such provides a lot more quality with a lot more convenience. And at the same time, I didn't want this to be a 30 hour online course.
This is not pro school and you're not working professional baseball. We need to be able to quickly and effectively take individuals that don't know a lot about umpiring or sports officiating and get them quickly onto a field once they have that interest so that they don't fall off. So to do that in a brief, more concise training, we focused, yes, on mechanics and a lot of the basic rules.
But then we cover a lot of things that are left out of basic training, but that any assigner knows, and any umpire [00:03:00] finds out, is super important for these umpires to know. That includes how scheduling typically works, how payments work, how uniforms work, all the ins and outs of being an independent contractor, what gets you better games.
All of this is stuff that we need our umpires to know that's often left out of a lot of basic training. So, I put all of this into an Umpire 101 course that an umpire could take in less than 4 hours, take it on demand, and be at least capable of going out and working a 12 year old baseball game for the first time.
Now, this doesn't necessarily replace on field training, that is important, but But you can still get a lot of the training done that you need to just through our virtual Umpire 101 course. And of course, for an assigner, this is great. Again, you reduce the workload on your association leadership because they don't have to schedule constant in person trainings.
Instead, somebody shows they're interested, quickly get them [00:04:00] onto the course. And let them quickly take it. This allows you to constantly be recruiting throughout the year and not losing that interest when you have to tell them, we won't do training for a couple of months. And this is certainly more effective than doing a lot of phone calls, emails, in person meetings that all our associations are mostly run by volunteers.
They just don't have the time to commit that and that's not necessary. If we're using all the modern technology out there. Even better, for associations, there's no cost to implementing it. The Umpire 101 course is paid for by the students. Actually, if your association signs up to be an Umpire Classroom Affiliate, Then, there's a discount on that, as well as an affiliate feed that goes back to the association, so that the association can use some of that funding for running their operations and their training.
Now, I don't want to get too caught up on that, but that's kind of the origin story of the online training, and the start of where [00:05:00] Umpire Classroom was developing. Now, if you want to try out the Umpire 101 course, you can find it on Umpire Classroom. Or if you want to talk about using it for your association, send me an email, patrick at umpireclassroom.
com. Now, around the same time in 2020 is when I joined a high school association and Marietta Umpires. I joined Marietta Umpires after my time in professional baseball and ran into a lot of the same situations that cause people to not keep with umpiring. First of all, the association only had. One type of new member.
If you were a new member to the association, they considered you as having no experience. So, even though I had worked in professional baseball, I still had to go through the four basic trainings on how to get assigned games, how do payments work, what are the basic two man [00:06:00] mechanics, what are the basic rules.
All of these things that ultimately make a lot of umpires not want to stick with it, especially with working in higher organizations, because they don't want to go through all of that. And a lot of associations build their training off that every year. So this was something that when I took over training shortly after, I knew I wanted to address it, and joining Marietta Umpires and then taking over the training, there were a lot of other traditional training challenges that we needed to overcome.
First of all, we are the largest association in our state, covering 60 plus schools. And with that many schools, we obviously have a large geographical area, and we're in Metro Atlanta. And for any of you familiar with Metro Atlanta, you know that traffic here is crazy. Horrendous. And as our footprint continued to grow because we were a healthy association, and as others fell apart, those [00:07:00] members were considering joining Marietta Umpires, but they didn't want to drive to the middle of our region where we had traditionally held our meetings.
So the question then became, how do we take over training 120 plus umpires that live in a far geographical area and it's not practical to have them all meeting in person multiple times in the preseason. Now, before I get into solving that, I want to give you the third part of what got me into umpire training, which was at the same time that I was going through very basic newcomer training for Marietta Umpires, I was joining the staff of GHSA Baseball's Umpire Development.
And taking over rules training for umpires across the state. This only compounded the difficulty of in person training not being practical for Marietta umpires, yet alone for every umpire in the state. And so that led to my experimentation with online training, videotaping [00:08:00] myself and talking to a camera like this.
And then moving on to developing Umpire Classroom. As you can see how all of this starts to come together, I want to talk about the solutions that we came up for Marietta Umpires. The biggest part of our strategy was breaking training down for our existing members into two different categories. Instead of doing just we all meet in a big classroom or auditorium every year for four Mondays in a row before the season starts and you get nothing out of it, we split our training into two different types.
Umpire Classroom We do online on demand training, and then we do satellite training. So let me break down those two. So let's start with the digital on demand training. The idea behind this was that instead of us all getting 120 of us into an auditorium, playing Stump the Ump, being way too basic in our training, being way too disorganized, instead, our umpires, on their own, at their own convenience, can take a well [00:09:00] organized online training course that covers a lot of new and interesting as well as important information for the upcoming season.
And inside of that, they have quizzes that go along with the lessons so that they can demonstrate one that they're taking in the material, but also learn how to effectively apply it inside of their games. And this is a lot more effective than Zoom training, which is still not on demand, which often has a lot of lagging and poor presentations.
And then watching a Zoom recording is about as miserable as it gets. This is a lot more effective, a lot more efficient. And now we're making it available to other associations through the Umpire Classroom site in our 2025 preseason training. And that's what our umpires for MUA are going to do for this upcoming season.
We cut down on a lot of the inconvenient in person trainings. We get rid of the bad, unaffected Zoom trainings. And instead, they have to go through an [00:10:00] online course that only takes two, three, four hours at most, but they can do on demand over the course of three plus weeks. And we'll get them way more ready for the season than really anything else out there.
And what's great about this is that our umpires for our local associations, so not just Marietta, umpires, the high school group, But for other GHSA groups, umpires for other rec and travel umpire groups, they can use the same pre season training for all their associations. This is way more efficient for umpires because instead of them having to take five different trainings for five different groups, one training applies to all five, and we know that they're getting better training in that one online course.
Then they'd ever get, even if they did go to all five in person trainings. And because it's way more efficient and way more effective and way more reliable that umpires will actually take it, then assigners know that umpires will actually do the training they [00:11:00] need to get and will continue to develop as they need to have a better association.
So if you want to try out this course that we're doing for Marietta umpires, and you want to look at using it for your group. Again, check out umpireclassroom. com or shoot me an email, patrick at umpireclassroom. com. Now I talked about the online on demand training, but we do another cool thing with our in person training, which is satellite training.
So as you can see here, we cover a wide geographical area. I have it mapped out on a Google map. You can see where all our members are and just how much of a wide area it is. So instead of all of us meeting in person. Instead, two Mondays before the season starts, we meet in satellite groups. And you can think of these as like, a smaller association inside the big one, or however you want to imagine it, but the idea is that it's way more impactful and beneficial if instead of driving to that one location, [00:12:00] you meet with anywhere from 6 to 20 of the umpires in your area.
at a local sports bar. And that's a great opportunity to go over the rules training, get to know your fellow umpires more, develop that bonding. And it's convenient in that you're able to get dinner and beer while you're at it because umpiring, as a lot of you know, is as much about the social experience for umpires.
So trainings, it makes it way easier to get that community feeling. Makes it a lot less intimidating for new umpires who don't really know anyone yet. And because we do our rules training and more importantly, our test study guides at this training, it fosters a lot more discussion than you would get in a big auditorium or if you were doing your meeting on a zoom call.
So there's a lot of benefit to this, but I think for most associations out there, you should really focus on splitting your [00:13:00] training. away from the big conglomerate training in one room and break it down into a combination of digital on demand training and satellite sessions. Now, I didn't talk about our first year umpire training yet, so let me break that down real quickly.
First of all, our umpires are split into two different groups. They're either a tier one or a tier two, and the importance of that is that group one is umpires with little to no umpire experience and group two has significant experience. And it's really important to give umpires this separation because when associations disband, when people move, especially good qualified umpires, they can be really turned off by thinking that, They're going to be treated as a brand new umpire.
They're no longer going to see good baseball. They're going to be treated as a brand new rookie. And a lot of people don't want that and they don't deserve that. They need to be treated for the respect that they have gained through their [00:14:00] experience umpiring. But that doesn't take away from the fact that we still have a lot of new umpires that do need to get a significant amount of training in.
So by splitting our umpires into one of those two groups, They either have to go through just one in person training that covers the basics of our association and how we operate and all of that fun stuff, versus the other umpires that have to go through all the basic training such as the Umpire 101 course, our basic in person field trainings, and of course, more of the rudimentary basics of umpiring.
It's really detrimental to your ability to recruit and retain members, When you make experienced umpires go through that a lot, so we need to have that distinction. And for our umpires that are joining with significant experience, we remove a lot of those basic requirements and really only have them go through a introduction to our association meeting, which covers a lot of the basics that you're just not going to get across in any other way.
So [00:15:00] moving on from this is where we get to the exciting announcement for Umpire Classroom this year. Umpire Classroom And that's that we're going to be creating the Baseball Umpire Network of Trainers, BUNT. And the hope with this group is that we can connect trainers and assigners from across the country to share resources, to open up discussions about how to do effective training, to share training agendas for in person trainings that are on field.
We need a network where we can support the many volunteers across the country that step up to the plate to lead this training and development of umpires. Groups that have often been unsupported and really left on their own to lead the training. So to do that, we're creating the Baseball Empire Network of Trainers, BUND, and we want to invite anyone out there who's involved in association leadership or umpire training to come join us.
The group is on Facebook. You can look for the Baseball Empire [00:16:00] Network of Trainers, and I'll have it linked in the video description or the podcast description. But go ahead and look, you can apply if you meet the requirements of being responsible for umpire training. And inside of that group, we can share all of these resources.
We can also give you more information about the Umpire 101 course, about our 2025 preseason training, and you can reach out to me with topics that you want to see covered for your association. If you want to join Umpire Classroom and developing training for umpires or join us on the podcast. Or if you want to try guest writing for Referee Magazine in the baseball section, this is a great opportunity for you to share with me, discuss, discuss with others what we need to get across to our umpires and how we can make training umpires a lot easier for all the volunteers that sign up to lead this for their associations.
So, if this interests you, follow one of those links, sign up to join, or [00:17:00] email me about any of these topics. Patrick at umpireclassroom. com and hopefully I'll be seeing you all very soon as we get ready for an excellent and exciting 2025 season.
