Every season a small group of baseball enthusiasts volunteer over 100 hours of their time to prepare for the spring season. Some volunteers have children that play within our league while others are Little League graduates or are just keen to give to a sport that teaches players fine motor skills, patience, focus, respect and accountability. Please feel free to help out in any way by contacting any OWLL executive member.
Sort Out Schedule
The Spring sort-outs occur in April. TBall and GOBL players do not need to attend a sort-out. SPRING 2025 SORT OUTS ARE DETAILS WILL BE PUBLISHED IN MARCH 2025
The sort-out sessions begin after registration - date and location TBC. Each player will be sent a specific time, date, and location. You must attend the time slot given. We do not have any other available date
- Rookie -
- Minor -
- Major -
- Junior - Senior -
- Girls Rookie –
- Junior/Senior –
Spectators are not permitted in the venue at any time during the 50 minute evaluation. Players under the age of 18 can have 1 parent near the field but not on the field.
- We ask that players arrive no earlier than 10 minutes before their designated session.
- Upon arrival, please check in with the registration table.
- The volunteer will direct you to the proper entrance and exit for the field.
The player must come prepared with the following:
- Helmet
- Glove
- Bat
- Jock/Jill
- Long pants
- Indoor running shoes
- Water
The Player Evaluation Process
The process for evaluation has been designed to help players start/continue their skill development in a safe and supportive environment. Players get an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and skill of the game in several age-appropriate game situation drills. Volunteer coaches will assess each player’s skill on a 4-3-2-1 scale based on prescribed “look for” or criteria.
Players are to arrive to the evaluation at least 15 minutes early with glove, helmet, and jock/jill. Bats will be provided. Athletes must sign in, collect their number or numbered pinnie and prepare for warm up and the evaluation activities.
After completing the drills, OWLL executives will compile the data for use in placing each player in one of the two streams of play at each level — Canadian or National.
The distribution of athletes between the two streams or tiers will depend on the total number of players, the skill level of the players and the age division of play. In general, one third to one half of players will be assigned to the Canadian tier.
Team Selection Process
Each division convenor is paired with an OWLLBA executive member. The division convenor is responsible for drafting teams based on the results of the evaluations. Team selection occurs in a number of stages:
- Tiering: The first step of the team selection process is to allocate the required number of players to each tier, based on their evaluation scores. Based on how many players are registered for a given level, the league will decide the best distribution of A/Canadian tier teams and B/National tier teams. Based on the number of teams per tier, the players will be split into 2 lists, with the higher evaluated players going to the A/Canadian tier and the rest going to the B/National tier. For example: if we have 36 players, with a distribution of 1 A/Canadian and 2 B/National, then the top 12 players will be placed in A/Canadian and the remaining 24 will be placed in B/National.
- Rookie to major: The minimum is 3 teams per tier to support tiering within OWLLBA, but 4 or more is the ideal. If a level does not have 6 or more teams, the level will not be tiered.
- Junior to senior: Since OWLL interlocks with other leagues at junior and senior, we will have 1-2 A/Canadian teams and 1 or more B/national level teams depending on the number of players registered in those levels.
- If a returning player misses the sort-out sessions, the league may use their previous year's evaluation as a gauge to their placement or contact their previous coach for a relative placement. If a new player misses a sort-out session, the league may contact the parents for a view of the player's baseball experience. Most new players that miss sort-outs will likely be placed in the B/National tier.
- The Card Shuffle Approach: Once the players are placed in either A/Canadian or B/National, the teams are drafted so that each teams numeric player evaluation total is relatively the same. The A/Canadian teams are drafted first. This is done much like when dealing a deck of cards except that once every team has one player, the dealing does not restart at the first team, but rather the last team gets the next player and the dealing then goes backwards to the first team, and so on.
- Depending on the level (junior and senior), pitching and catching abilities will also be considered. For instance, we strive to have the same number of pitchers/catchers per team, if possible.
- Coaches: Next, players are moved based on whether or not their parent has volunteered to coach. The purpose of doing this is to ensure that each team has at least one coach and obviously, so that the parent is coaching their child's team. Sometimes, when not enough volunteers have stepped forward to head coach teams, the league has to promote assistant coaches so that we can field teams. When a player is moved to a team, a player with a comparable score is swapped so that the overall team evaluation total remains the same.
- Siblings and Friend Requests: The next stage of the draft involves addressing sibling and friend requests.
- Siblings: Siblings will always be placed on the same team unless otherwise requested (this applies to ALL levels). However, if the siblings do not evaluate to the same tier, the higher tier sibling will be moved to the lower tier as it would be unsafe to place a lower tiered player in the higher tier. If time allows, the parents of the players will be contacted to ask if they would like to have their children play on different teams to allow each to play in the tier in which they evaluated. Once again, player swaps are made to maintain a comparable overall team evaluation totals.
- Friend requests: The convenor will record all the friend requests, highlighting the reciprocal requests. Only reciprocal requests will be honoured. If the players in a reciprocal friend request have evaluated to the same tier, then swaps are made between teams so that team balance is maintained. If the players in the reciprocal friend request did not evaluate to the same tier, the friend request will not be honoured as we will not move players up or down based on a friend requests.
- At this point, the teams are reviewed by the level's executive member for balance, friend requests, etc. After any final changes are made, the convenor will forward the team lists to our registrar and president for final review and for official roster creation. Coaches are then given their rosters and asked to contact their players. The league tries to complete the team drafts as quickly as possible to give the coaches as much lead time as they can before the season starts but often players will only find out their teams in the week before the start of the season.
Due to the short duration of the LL Spring season, re-drafting of teams is not possible.