Hi All,

I went down to Clarkston last night to discuss the state 12 year old tournament for 2021. The crew down there is excited and the COVID situation is pretty good. The stores and restaurants were very lax in their requirements for masks and all the COVID restrictions (the café I was in for lunch didn’t have anyone wearing masks including the staff!).

So – we are good to go I think unless something changes… The fields looked good, the town was pretty “open”, and on the Idaho side, they have never been shutdown so Lewiston is wide open. This led me to think of a couple things I wanted to put out to the group.

How heavy should we hit pre-publicity? The reason I ask is that if we tout that “Clarkston/ACLL is open – come on down and get out from underneath COVID rules and play some baseball” will that cause a backlash and damage the openness of the situation? The whole town seemed normal…. I don’t want to create a situation where we “make the news”…. If you know what I mean… yet at the same time it’s great that life is “normal” down in extreme southeast Washington.
One thing to promote to your leagues in your districts is that it is very “Open” in Asotin county and Nez Perce county in Idaho… (They never shutdown)… This may be a chance for families to have an extended vacation and use the State Tournament as an excuse to spend some time out in the open for a change.
I did meet with a member of the Board for the Lewiston Little League to start exploring the idea that if things do get tamped down as far as holding the tournament in Washington, would they be open to helping us to use their fields in Lewiston. For those of you that don’t know… the difference between Clarkston Washington and Lewiston Idaho is about 400’ of river. You can get from one town to the other in about 5 minutes from just about anywhere in either town. Lewiston has never been shutdown so the people in Clarkston went to Idaho for fun and dining out when the Governor of Washington closed down Washington. It was no difference. So we COULD (I think) use the field in Lewiston for the Washington state tournament if it came down to it.

The Board at ACLL is fired up to do the tournament. Their Chief Umpire will be reaching out to Dennis for help in lining up umpires as they are kind of remote and don’t know a lot of people around the state that can help with umpires. I think they have a handle on everything else as they have done a lot of tournaments of different sizes including state level. Their facilities don’t need anything and are in near perfect shape… They have lots of practice facilities, bullpens, batting cages, parking, etc.

Your thoughts?

DA WA 5/13