League News

SCHEDULE CHANGES
Simple & Verifiable Process That All Must Follow

Schedule reliability is the hallmark of any quality league. Schedule reliability means playing the games on your schedule as scheduled or, when that is impossible, to follow the league's established procedures for either obtaining a legal schedule change or forfeiting the game. Failure to follow these procedures will result in a fine of $75 per occurrence. Nobody likes to pay fines but w/o fines and enforcement numerous additional games would be canceled at the last second to the point that everyone in the league or at least those who actually are responsible enough to adhere to a schedule would be greatly discouraged. How do I know this? Fines were instituted about 10 years ago when I observed that 75% of all scheduled games were not being played as scheduled. People ask who gets the fine money. It gets returned to the members at large in the form of ENYTB's free tournaments each year e.g., June/July MADNESS and SUPERR 8. While fine money pays only a fraction of those costs, it is still significant.

Golden Rule 1 - Once the schedule is released, don’t come to me to make changes unless I scheduled you inconsistent with your scheduling inputs. Instead, there is a separate process, as described next, for requesting schedule changes.

There are two general types of requests for a schedule change:

A – Most common are those between you and your opponent. These include:

(i) Non-weather postponements (NWP) - where team A requests that team B grants them a change of date or time (if more than 2 hours). Team B is NOT obligated to grant such requests but may do so if they wish.

(ii) No harm, no foul cancellations (NHNFC) - this is a request to cancel the game w/o penalty w/o any intention to make the game up at a later date or time. If team B is agreeable to losing this game from its schedule, it would approve a request of this type but, again, it is under no obligation to do so. The only obligation in this process is for each team to play all the games on its schedule, as scheduled, weather permitting. When team A can npot do so and team B is unwilling to grant any of its requests, team A is obligated to play the game as schedule or forfeit the game. If team A forfeits the game and fails to enter the forfeit to the website (a favorite trick of some) team B may enter the forfeit on behalf of team A. This should be done within 24 hours of being notified by team A that it is forfeiting said game but you have as long as 7 days following the scheduled date of the game to actually do so. By acting swiftly, however, any misunderstanding will be realized and corrected before the date of the game.

(iii) A few other miscellaneous types are available.

EXAMPLE of a Tyoe A Request For A Schedule Chane:

Team A requests a non-weather postponement/reschedule.

Procedure:

1 – Team A would contact the primary contact of its opponent (team B) by phone/email to make the request (seek approval).

2 – if (1) = yes, then the transaction needs to be documented on the website by BOTH parties to the agreement so that there can be no misunderstanding of what was agreed to. Team A goes to its schedule and finds the game it wishes to change. (NOTE: Every scheduled game includes a set of schedule change icons pertaining to that game.)
Team A then clicks on the appropriate reschedule icon, in this case the NWP icon, and enters its pre-approved request on the form.

3 – Team B receives an email from system notifying it that a pending request for a schedule change has been submitted and that action is required to approve/reject teh request. When team B acts, the schedule for both teams will be automatically updated by the system and all parties, including the league, will be automatically notified by email.

NOTE: Should team B fail to reply via (3), the system will automatically approve request but not until a day before the scheduled game so best in such cases for team A to call team B a few days beforehand and remind him/her to go online and enter a reply so that the schedule is updated, thus ensuring that nobody goes to a game that has been moved to a different date/time/place.


B – Certain other schedule changes (type B) require approval by the league instead of a opponent. These include:

(i) Weather Postponements (WP) - These are not requested ahead of time of the league but nonetheless, are reported to the league via the WP icon. Approval is generally granted unless the request was for a good weather day and/or you are the only team asking for a WP for the given date. Then further investigation ensues.

(ii) Cancellations w/o penalty due to conflicts with school baseball programs or ENYTB sponsored tournaments or sanctioned tournaments that ENYTB teams registered for via ENYTB registration.

EXAMPLE: Had above request been a type B request, you would follow the exact same procedure as for a type A request except you would call the league instead of your opponent and you would select a different icon to document your request to the website.


GENERAL: More Golden Rules

1 - All requests for change must be made at least 48 hours in advance of the scheduled start time of the game. Once the 48 hour window begins, the website is programmed to block new requests from being initiated. The sooner the request is initiated and entered the better obviously. The sooner a team is notified that the game will not be played as scheduled, the better it is for the team families for revising their activities for that date.

2 - All games must be brought to current status within 7 days of the game's scheduled start time.

3 - Teams can forfeit games w/o permission but they still need to inform their opponent ASAP and document the forfeit on the website.

Failure to follow any of these rules for schedule changes and updates will result in fines at the rate of $75 per occurrence.

Ed