5 Mistakes Commissioners Make When Assigning Umpires (and How to Fix Each One)

I’ve run a church softball league for a while now, and I’ve made every one of these mistakes myself. Some of them more than once. Assigning umpires looks simple from the outside — you’ve got games, you’ve got umps, you put one with the other. But the gap between “looks simple” and “actually works all season” is where commissioners lose their evenings.

Here are the five mistakes I see most, including the ones I learned the hard way. Each one comes with a fix you can use this week.

Mistake 1: Assigning by habit instead of fairness

This is the quiet one, because it doesn’t feel like a mistake. You’ve got two or three reliable umps, they always answer the phone, they never complain, so they get the plate every week. Meanwhile the newer folks get a game here and there and slowly drift away because they figure you don’t need them.

Then one of your reliables burns out mid-July and tells you they’re done. Now you’ve got a hole you can’t fill, because you never developed a bench.

The fix: track games worked per ump and actually look at it. Not a vibe — a number. The umpire who’s worked 14 games and the one who’s worked 4 should not be getting the same shrug when you’re filling next weekend. Spread the work. Your veterans last longer, your newer umps stick around, and nobody’s keeping a private tally of how they got passed over (trust me, they’re keeping that tally).

If you want this done for you, a fairness dashboard that ranks umps by fewest games worked turns “I think Dave’s done a lot lately” into a hard count you can assign from.

Mistake 2: No confirmation, so you find out at game time

You sent the schedule. You emailed it, maybe you posted it in the group. So everyone knows, right?

No. “I sent it” is not “they saw it, read it, and put it on their calendar.” There’s a long road between those two things, and on that road lives the 9 a.m. no-show while two teams stand around looking at you.

An assignment that nobody confirmed is just a hope. And hope doesn’t show up to call balls and strikes.

The fix: close the loop. Every assignment needs to land somewhere the ump will actually see it, with the specifics — date, time, field, who’s playing — and ideally a reminder before the game so it doesn’t fall off their radar. Email gets buried. A text doesn’t.

This is exactly why we built instant SMS notifications: the moment an ump is assigned, they get a text and a push with all the game details and a one-tap calendar link, plus an automatic reminder before game time. Knowing they got the message is half the battle, and a text on their phone wins that battle far more often than an email they’ll “check later.”

Mistake 3: Ignoring blackout dates

Your best plate ump told you back in April that he’s out the last weekend of June for his daughter’s wedding. You wrote it on a sticky note. The sticky note is gone. You assigned him the wedding weekend.

Now you’ve got an awkward conversation, a scramble for a replacement, and an ump who’s quietly wondering whether telling you things even matters.

Multiply that by 20 umps over a full season and you’ve got a steady drip of conflicts that all could have been avoided.

The fix: collect availability once, in one place, and make it the umps’ job to keep it current — not yours to remember. When someone says “I can’t do Tuesdays in May,” that needs to live somewhere your assignment process can’t ignore, not in your head and not on paper that gets lost.

The cleanest version of this is letting umps mark their own blackout dates so a conflicting assignment never gets made in the first place. The fewer things you’re personally holding in memory, the fewer cracks things fall through.

Mistake 4: Assigning at the last minute

Friday night assignments for Saturday morning games are a special kind of stress. The umps with families and second jobs — which is most of them — already made other plans. You’re left begging whoever’s free, which circles you right back to Mistake 1: the same two reliables, overworked again.

Last-minute scheduling isn’t just stressful. It’s the root system that feeds half the other problems on this list.

The fix: get assignments out as early as the schedule allows. When an ump has two weeks of notice instead of twelve hours, you get:

• Fewer declines, because they haven’t committed elsewhere yet
• Time to fill a hole if someone does decline
• Umps who feel respected instead of treated like an afterthought

If you import your whole season at once and assign in batches, you stop living game-to-game. The work happens on a quiet Sunday afternoon, not in a panic Friday night. Get the season in early and your future self will thank you.

Mistake 5: Keeping it all in your head (or a spreadsheet only you can read)

This is the big one, because it makes you the single point of failure for the entire league.

The spreadsheet works — until you’re on vacation, or sick, or just unreachable for a day, and nobody else can make heads or tails of it. The color coding makes sense to you. The notes in column F make sense to you. To anyone else it’s hieroglyphics, and the whole operation stops the moment you do.

I’ve been the guy answering “who’s got the 11 o’clock game?” texts from a beach chair. It’s not relaxing.

The fix: get the schedule out of your head and into something other people can see and act on. Umps should be able to look up their own games without texting you. Open games should be visible so someone can claim one instead of you chasing volunteers. The system should keep working when you’re not looking at it.

A spreadsheet can’t text an ump, can’t take a blackout date, can’t let someone claim an open game, and can’t count games worked for you. Once your league outgrows what a spreadsheet can do — and most leagues do faster than they expect — it’s worth moving to something built for the job.

The pattern underneath all five

Notice that these aren’t really five separate problems. They’re one problem wearing five hats: too much depends on you remembering, sending, and chasing. Habit, no confirmations, lost blackout dates, last-minute scrambles, the spreadsheet only you can read — every one of them traces back to a process that lives in your head and runs on your nights and weekends.

Fix the process and the mistakes mostly fix themselves. Spread the work fairly, confirm every assignment, respect the dates umps gave you, get ahead of the schedule, and put it all somewhere others can see. You don’t need software to do any of that — plenty of good commissioners do it with discipline and a shared calendar.

But if you’d rather not hold all of it in your head, that’s the gap UmpCrew was built to fill: import the season, assign by fairness, and let every ump get an instant text the moment they’re on a game. It’s for baseball and softball leagues like yours, run by people who already have a day job.

Want to see it on your own schedule? Start a free 14-day trial — no credit card — or have us set it up for you.