Kids sports leagues losing money, stuck in limbo

Best-case scenario has soccer and baseball players returning to local fields for modified seasons

WATERLOO REGION — Mark Schram is feeling the heat and it’s not coming from a fastball delivered off the pitcher’s mound.

The Waterloo Minor Baseball Association president is trying to cut costs and save money as he deals with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“My main focus the last 10 days is trying to mitigate the financial loss,” he said.

Schram was forced to cancel the popular fundamentals program that teaches baseball basics to four- and five-year-old kids across Waterloo Region. He has also halted training for coaches and umpires. And he’s asking rep teams to return sponsorship money to local businesses.

Years of prudent bookkeeping means the association will survive, but it’s facing a loss this season.

“We’re in good financial shape, but we could have a $50,000 loss,” he said. “It’ll be annoying and painful, but it won’t bury us.”

Schram isn’t alone.

Kids baseball and soccer leagues in Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge are all feeling the pinch after municipal governments in each city closed all fields and diamonds until June 30 in an attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

House league and rep games were supposed to kick off next month but are on hold until organizations get the all-clear from all three levels of government, as well as their respective provincial and national sports

bodies.

“A lot of parents are emailing and wondering what’s going on and we don’t have a full answer yet,” said Cambridge Youth Soccer general manager Derek Bridgman. Most of the more than 10,000 kids that play soccer and baseball in Waterloo Region register for spring and summer leagues in April. And those fees make up the bulk of the annual revenue for nonprofit sports groups.

“It’s everything,” said Schram. But with season start dates in flux, the sign-up rates have plummeted. And every league is hurting because of it.

“We’re looking at a substantial loss,” said Bridgman, whose club recently donated $500,000 to help build a new 12-field soccer complex in Preston. “We have been very fortunate over the years to have built quite a reserve. There are a number of other soccer organizations that may not recover from this.”

The Kitchener Soccer Club did not respond to an interview request but Cambridge Youth Soccer and the Waterloo Minor Soccer Club both feel they can salvage some sort of a season if they’re back on the fields by mid-July.

Local baseball leagues, which include T-ball, are also confident they can modify their schedules given the same time frame at the house league level, but rep teams likely won’t travel outside of the region or participate in provincial and national finals.

“Our plan is that we’re going to have some sort of season in July,” said Paul Burns, executive director of the Waterloo Minor Soccer Club. “We’re still going down that road of being prepared. It will have a different look and feel to a normal year.”

Even if fields are opened, league organizers say they’ll need at least a couple of weeks to orchestrate a return and get players back in game mode.

“We have zero expectations of actually being on the diamond on July 1,” said Schram. “Right now they’re not maintaining them, which is no big deal because it’s still cold and stuff is barely growing. But I’d hate to think about what those places will look like in two months.”

Most leagues usually wrap up in July, but an altered season will likely mean more games per week and extending the schedule into August or even September, where possible.

Rep leagues have been hit the hardest since those players have already paid for the season and, in some cases, have been training together since October, until last month when they went into isolation. House leagues, which cater to the more casual athlete, usually don’t start until mid-May.

All local leagues are looking into or have applied for financial relief. For now, they’re asking parents who signed up their kids to remain patient until they know if there is going to be a season or not. Though, refunds are available for families in dire need.

The hope is that players will flock to the fields when the ban is lifted. The reality is that no one knows how long it will take for families to feel comfortable in large gatherings again.

“Everybody just kind of went into a holding pattern,” said Cambridge Minor Baseball Association president Matt Durocher, whose league sends about 750 kids onto the diamond per year.

“We’re hoping for everybody’s sake that we can get baseball in. We’re looking at that as some sort of normalcy for people.”

One thing is clear — the sooner leagues know when they can return, the better.

“If we don’t know by June 1, I think we kill the season just to save the system,” said Schram. “We’ll lose people next year because of this. Everybody will.”