EMSL Umpire Course – A Great Success

This past weekend saw the EMSL run their annual Umpiring course, the course was held earlier this year so we could include the Nottingham and Loughborough Universities due to their heavy Softball and Baseball schedules in March.

The course was delivered by Chris Moon from BASU and the league Umpire in Chief Jason Smith, this was Jason’s first time in running a course and great to see someone from our own league involved in delivering the course content alongside Chris.

The course was attended by delegates from the Arrows, Loughborough University, Pyros, Rangers, Redbacks/Raptors, Royals and Sheriffs.  The course itself was delivered at a faster pace than normal due to shorter hours at the training venue than previous years, however the course was still a great success with lots of interaction, examples of plays and questions.  The shorter time also did not detract from the quiz scores with all but one delegate scoring in the 90% range and the other was still a high score at 84%.  The biggest score of the day was 100%.

Moving on to the practical assessment, the course joined in with the Arrows training session on Sunday afternoon which gave each of our first time delegates the chance to put their newly learned skills and knowledge to practice, and as always we deliberately asked the teams to create some interesting plays to keep the Umpires on their toes.  Our new umpires showed that they had taken in all the information presented over the weekend and put in some good displays in the very short time they had on the diamond.

The league would like to say a huge thank you to everyone that gave up their free time this weekend to attend the course, it is greatly appreciated.  We would also like to say thank you to the Arrows for being great hosts on Sunday and providing a great turn out for the game, there must have been close to 25 University students who attended.

Our final thank you is to Chris Moon for running the course.  Chris’s training was exceptional as always, he was willing to share his vast knowledge and experience with the class and answered all questions with great examples.

We look forward to seeing you all on the diamond in the new season.