As a spokesperson for the 25-member Gilroy Little League Board
of Directors, I wanted to express my disappointment regarding
Editor Mark Derry’s comments in Fridays’ paper regarding our
uniform buying practices.
Dear Editor,
As a spokesperson for the 25-member Gilroy Little League Board of Directors, I wanted to express my disappointment regarding Editor Mark Derry’s comments in Fridays’ paper regarding our uniform buying practices. In addition, we felt that your comments encouraging local sponsors to not support us pretty appalling. We didn’t find your comments “interesting”, only misguided and inaccurate, but we do feel they need to be answered.
Here are the facts about uniforms. We have purchased uniforms from a Bay Area company the past two years, and previously the uniforms were purchased from an online vendor located in Texas. However, the uniforms that came from the vendor in Texas were not silk screened, so we used a local silk-screening company.
However, the vendor we use now does the silk-screening for free! It is one-stop shopping for us and alleviates a lot of hassle and work for our volunteers in addition to cost. Our current uniform vendor not only donates the silk screening, but we also get a better quality uniform that we had in years past for the same or less cost. Local businesses here in Gilroy could not handle the large order or deliver at a price that would allow us to provide all the children with a complete uniform.
Gilroy Little League is one of the only leagues left in the greater Bay Area that provides their players with pants, belts, socks, hats, and jerseys so parents do not have any out-of-pocket expense. Most leagues only provide a hat and jersey and parents are responsible for the rest.
We also need all uniforms for 800-plus kids ordered, sorted, and delivered in the course of about five weeks, so this is a job that goes way beyond what a typical club or travel team would deal with. Suggesting that our sponsors re-think their donations to Gilroy Little League were frankly very disturbing and potentially damaging. The sponsorship money we collect constitutes 15 percent of our revenue. These companies make a donation to the league to help the children/players, not to determine where the league buys their uniforms. We appreciate every sponsorship dollar we receive and we do “have the backs of local businesses.”
Gilroy Little League is again one of the few leagues that still print sponsor names are on both the banner and the jerseys of the sponsored team. Asking local businesses to question their support will make the job of the dedicated volunteer on our board who is tasked to solicit and collect this sponsorship revenue even harder, and therefore implicitly reduce what we can provide for the players in the league. We are not a for-profit business, and our primary focus is providing for the players and minimizing costs for the families who participate in our league in order to maximize participation. That is our bottom line as an organization.
Our operating revenue comes primarily from registration fees, and we watch our expenses very carefully. We also provide financial aid to families in need of help so that the kids can play who otherwise couldn’t afford it. We approve a budget each year, and carefully scrutinize our expenses. It doesn’t make sense for us to spend thousands of dollars more to just to use a local vendor for anything.
Enacting by-laws that would force us to take on greater expense in order to favor local businesses invites cronyism and politics in an area where there is a lot of money involved, and doesn’t serve the needs of our players. Every dollar saved is another dollar we can spend on better equipment for the players, safety, field maintenance (which we share with the city), umpires, and many things that benefit the children that play Gilroy Little League.
Next time, please get the facts correct or at least contact the Board to get clarifications after hearing emotional pleas from community members who are not aware of the complexities of running a league of this size before condemning the operational practices of Gilroy Little League and the Board of Directors, as well as discouraging sponsors from supporting us.
Jeff Sosa, Gilroy Little League president
The Golden Quill is awarded occasionally for a well-written letter.
