- October 2, 2024
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Rich Yoegel had been umpiring youth baseball games for a short time in Flagler County when he posed a question to some of his fellow umpires.
“Why don’t we have an umpire association here?” he asked. The response he got was, nobody wants to organize one.
So, Yoegel got some umpires together and launched the Flagler County Umpire Association. The FCUA took over scheduling for Flagler Babe Ruth Baseball last spring. Now, beginning with the Palm Coast Little League’s fall season opening day on Oct. 5, the new association will also cover that league.
“I cannot say enough good things about Rich and that organization,” said Forrest Hahn, the president of Flagler Babe Ruth Baseball. “We had an association that dissolved about four years ago. Then it was just on us to schedule the umpires. After I met Rich, he mentioned wanting to start an association. He took the idea and ran with it.”
The FCUA takes the scheduling load off the youth baseball organizations and has provided consistent umpiring, Hahn said.
Meanwhile, the leagues are paying the same rates to umpires that they paid before when they had to hire umps individually.
“It will be extremely helpful making sure we have umpires at every game,” Palm Coast Little League President Tiffany Schmidt said. “It will also will help with consistency. The umpires will be trained the same and know all the rules.”
Yoegel, the FCUA’s umpire in chief, said the organization has more than 25 member umpires. Yoegel, who has owned a house in Palm Coast for 12 years, moved here full time about three years ago. He now works remotely as vice president of merchandizing for Qurate Retail Inc., the parent company of QVC and HSN. He umpired in Pennsylvania and St. Petersburg before moving here.
He said his 10 years of umpiring experience is about average for the association. But they are also training and mentoring high-school aged umpires.
“We have umpires on our roster that have done college games and high school games and those that have only done youth games,” Yoegel said. “We also have five high school kids, and their engagement level is really high.”
Hahn said, “It’s really wonderful having youthful umpires on the field, 17-18 years old.”
The FCUA does training twice a year for its umpires and also has monthly meetings, Yoegel said.
“It’s non-stop learning from each other. We’re making sure we’re getting better as a group and making the game better for everybody involved,” he said.
Schmidt said it’s always been hard for the PCLL to find umpires.
“First we had 100% volunteers,” she said. “But there are parents and coaches that can be disgruntled, so people didn’t want to volunteer. About a year ago, we started paying them. Now (the FCUA) will schedule themselves. Their job is so very, very important for the games.”
Hahn said the FCUA is doing more than umpiring games, it is integrating into the league itself, bonding with coaches, players and parents. In the spring, they told Hahn they wanted to give out a sportsmanship award to a deserving player. They nominated three or four candidates, Hahn said, and the Flagler Babe Ruth Baseball board chose 9-year-old Kellan Ball as the first Flagler County Umpire Association Sportsmanship Award winner.
“So they really do care and strive to be not just an umpire association but part of the league,” Hahn said.
Yoegel emphasized that the association does not want to compete with the A-1 Officials Association, which provides high school officials in Flagler, Volusia and other counties.
“We’re not trying to conflict with what they do,” he said. “We started our group to support the youth baseball in Flagler County.”
