South Oldham continues change

CRESTWOOD – A new building, a new league and plans to finish a new field all have the South Oldham Little League moving in a new      direction.

With nearly 800 kids involved in T-ball, baseball and softball, the league has survived recent growing pains and is hoping to continue to move forward.

“We’ve been a busy crew,” league president Daryl Baer said. “We’ve got T-ball kids playing at five and big league kids playing at 18, so it runs the course.”

The league just finished its first season of Greater Oldham County Baseball, a more competitive division for middle school boys.

“It was a fantastic season,” Baer said. “We had a lot of fun with it and the kids loved it.”

GOCB featured players from the local middle schools who go through an intensive tryout process much like the high school teams.

“It’s all being built to be a better feeder program for our high schools,” Baer said. “We hope we can help them and ensure they can have success in the future with this.”

The GOCB teams played each other and went into Jefferson County.

There are plans to expand the league to include other Eighth Region counties like Shelby, Henry, Trimble and Carroll counties in the next few years.

Baer said South Oldham is also considering taking the concept down to the machine pitch level in addition to the regular little league teams.

“It can be a way of keeping the kids together where they can become a better baseball club,” Baer said.

The league is having success on the field. Last week the 9-10 year-old and the 11-12 year-old all-stars won their respective district titles while the machine pitch starts finished as the district runner-up.

Baer said a lot of the credit goes to the league’s new RBI or “Raise the Bar Indefinitely,” concept that goes beyond what happens on the field.

“We’re very proud of it,” Baer said. “We are just trying to get our board members, our coaches, our parents and our players to raise the bar. We want everyone to perform better on and off the field. Hopefully are coaches are doing more than just teaching the sport and are serving as mentors and the kids are taking this back into our community to do things the right way.”

With the help of a big donation from the South Oldham Lions Club, the league dedicated a new indoor conference center building this year which houses a meeting room, concession stand and locker room for the umpires.

In addition to giving the league’s board of directors and coaches a central meeting place, it has allowed the league to improve and intensify training for its 76 umpires. The augmented training has seen the league move to supplying umpires to the Henry County Little League.

“Ron Henderson runs our umpire program and it has really been great,” Baer said. “Our umpires have been able to train more and have been taught so much more by having the building to work in for clinics and instruction.”

With the building, the league has been able to expand a program it started three years ago which starts training umpires at the age of 13.

“It’s another part of the RBI program where we are trying to think outside the box so to speak,” Baer said. “We are looking for role models for the younger kids as well. We require more out of our umpires than ever before and now we have a place to train them.”

South Oldham has six fields in its complex in Peggy Baker Park and is hoping to finish a seventh field by next season.

“It’s all volunteer work,” Baer said. “We have the hardest working board we have had in years and it goes right back down to our coaches. A lot of new people have stepped up and they want to be a part of our program. It used to be when kids hit 12 around here they were done. We plan to keep on offering more to keep them involved in something positive.”

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