Yellow armband initiative boosting support for young Manitoba baseball umpires

Calling the game is a calling for 14-year-old Ryese Dreger.

“To help out with the sport and give back, and I love baseball,” Dreger said.

The teenager has played baseball his whole life and is now entering his third season as an umpire.

“I love being outside and being with friends,” Dreger said.

Dreger and 14 others are currently part of an off-season training program for umpires. The goal is to sharpen up their skills ahead of baseball season.

“Throughout the winter, we’ve been doing this program to get more umpires experience behind the plate and seeing live pitches,” Will Streilein, Baseball Manitoba Umpires communications lead, said. “We have high-performance instructors and Baseball Canada clinicians doing one-on-one instruction.”

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Part of developing young umpires includes supporting the longevity of their careers with supportive measures. An initiative to help with this was first introduced last season and has returned for another year.

“Anybody under the age of 18 umpiring baseball is wearing a yellow armband and it’s just a physical marker for anybody watching the game, in the game, to know that the umpire is a youth themselves,” Streilein said.

Dreger said he noticed a difference since wearing the arm band.

“It’s to show the coaches and parents and players and that I’m a younger kid and not to yell as much and be as mean to me,” Dreger said. “There’s been less arguing the calls.”

While this will only be the second year of the armbands, Streilein said they have already seen positive results.

“We saw a reduction overall in ejections and issues happening on the field,” Streilein said.

Veteran umpire Phil Habeck says it’s an initiative he wished existed when he first got started behind the plate.

“I think the yellow armband is a visual cue to the coaches to understand, ‘Oh, wait, this kid is learning. So are my players.’ We are all learning together,” Habeck said.

The hope is that fostering a supportive environment will make playing and umpiring a lifelong endeavour.

“I think I’m going to be an umpire for a long time,” Dreger said.