STAR OF THE WEEK
24 October 2005
| Ottawa Citizen STAR OF THE WEEK 24 October 2005 |
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Hello! I'm Jim Dean, and back in October 2005 I became the District Administrator for Little League Ontario District 2. In 2008 I was elected to the position of President of Little League Ontario. The 2011 season will be the sixth of my D.A. career, and since we elect D.A.s every three years, we'll have an election in June. In 2005 I wrote up a blurb about who I was and a little bit about what I've done, baseball-wise. Six years later I think it is about time I expand on that and share a little bit more of my baseball past.
The D.A. is not involved in the day-to-day operation of an individual League. Rather, the role of the D.A. is act as the liaison between Leagues and Little League Headquarters. It is also to co-ordinate the activities of the different Leagues in the District where more than one League is affected. This means working with the Leagues to make sure boundaries are set and respected. And it means coordinating several important events throughout the year, such as the Little League Road Show, an interlocking summer schedule, and any Provincial and Canadian championship tournaments held in our district. And paper-work. Lots and lots of paper-work.
District 2 is approximately "Ottawa West", which means Ottawa and area west of the Rideau River. That now consists of 4 leagues: Carlingwood-Frank Ryan Park, East Nepean, Kanata, and Pinecrest. The Presidents of the leagues in this area form an Executive Board to run things in the District, while the D.A. serves as a sort of Chairman of the Board. The board is assisted by its District Umpire Consultant, and the Assistant D.A. We meet once a month throughout the year, minus July when we are too busy with Districts, and December when we have a supper instead.
Following in the footsteps of Glen Bradley, our previous D.A., was a daunting challenge. Fortunately for all of us, but especially for me, Glen is still with us as our Assistant D.A., which ensured a smooth, consistent, and effective transition. Glen continues to serve as Tournament Director for Districts, mostly at the Minor and Major level. Equally as important to me and to the District, Ken Allen continues as our District Umpire Consultant, webmaster, and my sounding board.
As always, if you have suggestions or questions for me, or would like to help the District or your League in some way, including by volunteering at one of our events, please send an e-mail to me at: jimdean@littleleague.ca
Yours in Baseball,
Jim Dean,
District Administrator,
Little League Ontario District 2
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I am the son of a Navy Officer and a Nurse/Church Organist. I have one brother, two years younger. We moved every 3 or 4 years while I was growing up. After starting in Victoria, BC and then Monterey, California, we bounced between Ottawa, ON and Halifax, NS. Ottawa was the placed I loved most, and so I chose to settle here when I was old enough to leave the nest. I have a degree in Mathematics from Acadia U. and a masters in Computer Science from Carleton U. I worked at Bell-Northern Research/Nortel for 15 years, then a start-up called Catena Networks for 2.5 years, and since Mar 2003 I have been with Cadence Design Systems, where I develop software used by Electrical Engineers to design chips.
In 1970, when I was 8, a bigger boy in the neighbourhood taught some of us how to play baseball on a small field next to the tennis courts on Navaho Drive. We had only a broken goalie stick for a bat, and a tennis ball. But instantly I knew that baseball was the perfect game for me, and I was immediately hooked. I have played and enjoyed many sports, and still play "old guy" hockey, but nothing else ever reached the level of obsession that I have with baseball.
My parents enrolled me in Little League was in 1971, when I played in what was then called "Carlingwood Little League". You can see in the first picture at the left that my Dad, who didn't know much about baseball, bought his little boy a massive 36-inch bat at Canadian Tire. I don't thnk I could swing it until I was 16 or so, and even then never against live pitching. After that season we moved to Halifax. I was lucky enough to play Little League there, too. In 1973 I won an MVP award. As that was the pinnacle of my baseball acheivements, I still have the trophy! :-)
If you want to see something cute (and slightly ego-centric) check out this letter I wrote to my Grandma. It was found a couple of years ago in a family Bible, several years after she passed away. I was really touched that she kept that letter in such an honoured place. It is spooky that in it, at age 11 I was explaining pitching rules to her. I guess I was on the fast track to becoming a D.A. even back then.
In the second picture you can see me at the plate in Halifax. Notice that the catcher has an old-style facemask and no helmet, just his regular cap turned backwards.
After the 1974 season we moved back to Ottawa, and back to Carlingwood Little League. In the 3rd picture I am again at the plate, this time in a Senior game at Carlingwood. If you do the math, you'll notice I am in Seniors at the age of 14. That's because back then Junior was 13 only. This is a picture from the 1976 house league season. Notice that there are no fences at all, the home plate area is not professionally cut out, the umpire is in shorts and using the old style "balloon" protector, but it was still a great deal of fun. That field was located where the soccer field, or perhaps the transit way, is now, between Woodroffe High School and the Hanlon Junior field. In the 4th picture, you can see my little brother and I later that season in our summer uniforms. He was a Major, I was a Senior. Maybe you can't tell, but I sure remember, that my neck looks oddly fat. That is because I had mumps and as a result I think I missed the Districts -- but got to watch all of the Montreal 1976 Olympics on TV.
That bit about Seniors being 14 to 16 back then meant that for one year, the house league season of 1978, my brother and I were in the same age group. They put us on different teams, probably so we wouldn't kill each other. This lead to one of the happiest moments of my baseball life... I was pitching and my brother was the runner on 1st base. I picked him off. Our father was the umpire who called him 'Out!'. That should be one of those MasterCard "Priceless" commercials.
After the 1978 spring season, it was back to Halifax. My high school there had a fast-pitch softball team, so I played that. The next year it was off to University, and I played intramural softball. During a co-op job back in Ottawa in 1982, I played in the R.A. softball league. But no real baseball. After moving back to Ottawa for good in 1983, I played one more year of fast pitch. Out of all that, my only claim to fame was that twice, once in high school and once in that 1983 season, I got the only hit when my team was one-hit.
Also in 1983, I tried out for and joined the SunDevils of the Ottawa Recreational Baseball League (ORBL). This was a league that was founded two years earlier as a place for adult ball players who could not crack the Senior Interprovincial Baseball League (SIBL), which had a higher calibre of play than most of us could aspire to. I played for the SunDevils for 14 seasons, minus 1989 when the SunDevils folded and I had to play for a team called the Bashers. The 4th and 5th pictures show baseball cards that were made up by a teammate. I guess there is not much chance of me ever fitting into those uniforms ever again. The backs of the cards are kind of neat, too, done up like old 60s style cards. One has a cartoon showing my Grandma throwing a baseball and me saying, "Yikes, even she throws faster than I do." The SunDevils were a big part of my life. For example, it was through them I met my wife.
In 1989 I became the President of the ORBL, which by this time had grown to 11 teams, some of which were clearly better than others. The SIBL, on the other hand, had fallen to just 5 teams. I decided that what we had to do was merge the ORBL and SIBL and then operate a tiered league. I successfully negotiated a one-year trial of an Interlocked schedule between the two leagues. I am proud to say that my Bashers was the only team in either league to win all of its games against all of the teams in the other league. I guess we weren't as bad as we thought. So in 1990 the merger of the ORBL and the SIBL was completed, forming the National Capital Baseball League (NCBL) with me as its President.
The NCBL grew from the original 11+5 to a total of 34 teams in 3 tiers then (now 4), by the time I stepped down after the 1993 season. I did a lot of things as President, inclduing being the Treasurer when necessary and one year writing & publishing the entire league yearbook. And I learned a lot of things. This helped me get on the management path at work, of all things. I had never really entertained the notion of going into management, but my boss told me that he could overhear my phone conversations and it was clear I had learned how to bring people to a consensus, how to do budgeting, and how to effectively communicate. So baseball was actually a big helper in preparing me for management at BNR/Nortel. Subsequently, the training and experience I got from Nortel I have been able to pour back into baseball.
I am proud to say there is a "Jim Dean" Division in the NCBL. The SunDevils lived on for a few years after all of us original guys were long gone but folded in the mid 2000s. And now my son plays in the NCBL and people still ask him, "Are you Jim's son?"
The bottom picture at the left shows me pitching in my final season as a SunDevil. That was a game at SouthGate field.
In 1990/1991 or so, one of the Umpires in the NCBL was Bill Martin, then the Executive Director of Baseball Canada. I got to know him a little, and as a result he decided I liked the way I did things and asked me if I would host Baseball Canada's under-19 "Selects" Championship in 1993. For some reason I agreed, even though it had nothing to do with the NCBL. I had some help from some really good folks, like my brother, and fellow NCBLer David Barras, and a volunteer named Bob Hillier.
In the 7th picture at the left, Bill Martin had arranged for me and my brother to be the designated "Ringers" for a team of politicians versus a team of Media players, many of whom I knew played on a team in the NCBL. Bill got the uniforms that had been used in the 1998 Olympics in Seoul, Korea, for us to wear. We played on the artificial turf at Lansdowne Park, the day before the Toronto Blue Jays came to town for an Exhibition game. This was all in support of drumming up interest in baseball in Ottawa, and it worked, as Howard Darwin got his expansion franchise from the International League.
But I digress. In order to host the National Selects tournament, I had to incorporate a chapter of the Ontario Baseball Association here. We called it the National Capital Senior Baseball Association. It still exists today as the local OBA association. It was incorporated as a non-profit with the help of a lawyer, Debbie Lavigne, who was both a Sundevils wife and an Orleans Little League mom (-to-be, back then). I was the President of the NCSBA for a couple of years, and the Chairman of the 1993 National Selects Tournament. Once all that settled down, I resigned the Presidency and stayed on as a Director for a few years. I was very humbled when they created an annual "Jim Dean Volunteer of the Year Award". After Bob Hillier passed away at the all-too-early age of 46, I asked that the award be re-named after him.
You'll note the date of the tournament was to be in 1993 -- the same year as the Ottawa Lynx first season. Imagine my surprise one day in 1992 when my phone rang at work, and a voice said to me, "Jim, this is Howard Darwin." Yeah, right, I said. "No, it is really me. Baseball Canada tells me you are hosting a tournament for them next year. I want you to have it at the stadium and the Expos and I will help fund you to some extent." I'm sure it took me all of 2 seconds to stammer out a "Yes, sir!" Through that I met the Lynx first G.M., Tom Maloney, and started a long time association with the Lynx.
In late 1992 I was promoted to management at BNR/Nortel. Tom Maloney heard me express a regret that I would not be developing software myself any more, and asked if I would become the Ottawa Lynx scoreboard operator. I sure did. For the next 15 seasons, I was a game-day employee of the Ottawa Lynx, for whom I ran the scoreboard room from Day One back in 1993, right up until their final game in 2007. My brother worked with me for about half of that, and the sound guy for all 15 years was a fellow SunDevil. After a couple of years, I decided I would keep doing this until I could share the job with my son. This finally happened when he turned 15, and he got to work a number of games in the final 3 seasons. I have some terrific memories of those years and am very sad not to have the Ottawa Lynx around any more. My 1995 International League Championship ring is one of my most treasure possessions.
In the first year of the club, I was the back-up Official Scorer. I ended up doing about 10 games. (Doing the scoreboard paid a little bit better than being the Official Scorer, and managers didn't call you to complain about judgement calls on the scoreboard!)
If you look back at the above, you can see that in 1993, I was:
And I may not have mentioned this, but my daughter was born on June 5th that year. Very inconvenient timing! I began to detect some resentment on my wife's part towards baseball. (What can I say, I'm a sensitive guy.) So at the end of the season, I stepped back from the Presidencies of both the NCBL and NCSBA, and just kept on being a SunDevil player/manager and Lynx scoreboard guy.
It turned out I could only slow down for one year, 1994. In 1995 we enrolled my son in T-ball at Pinecrest Little League, and I began my coaching career. Two years of T-ball and two years of coach-pitch with my son, and then another year of T-ball and one more of coach pitch with my daughter. By the end of 2000, I realized my future was not in coaching. I loved the practices but not the games. I started being a team manager, a scorekeeper, a barbecuer -- whatever was needed.
Prior to the 2005 season, my son's first year of Senior, Glen Bradley stepped down as D.A. The League Presidents at the time tried to run the District without a D.A. As a result, the 2005 Senior Districts ended up being kind of a bad experience. I thought to myself, "A strong D.A. wouldn't have allowed that," and decided to submit my baseball resume to the District board for consideration. They voted me in, and they won't let me leave even though I have tried.
At the end of the 2008 season, I was elected President of Little League Ontario, and in 2010 Little League Canada asked me to chair a committee to review and revise its By-Laws. As much as I miss my playing days, I take much satisfaction from doing these activies.
So that's my baseball story. I hope you've enjoyed my self-indulgent walk down memory lane. And again, if you have comments or questions, don't hesitate to contact me.
