Post-Season Review: 10 Numbers Commissioners Should Pull

Quick answers

What is a league season review? A short honest look at the numbers from the season that just ended — coverage, no-shows, fairness, retention, cost, complaints — so next season isn’t run on gut feel.

When should I do it? Within two weeks of the last game, while the details are still fresh and umps still remember what annoyed them.

What’s the single most important number? Coverage rate — the percentage of games that were fully crewed with the umps you intended, not scrambled together at the last minute.

How long does it take? A couple of hours if your data lives in one place. Longer if you’re reassembling it from texts and memory — which is itself a finding.

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Every season ends the same way for a commissioner: relief, a little fatigue, and a strong urge to close the laptop until January. Resist that urge for one afternoon.

The post-season review is the cheapest improvement you’ll ever make. You already lived through the whole season — you just haven’t written down what it taught you. An hour of honest arithmetic now becomes next winter’s plan: how many umps to recruit, what to budget, which fields caused the most pain, and which of your best people are quietly one bad season from quitting.

Here are the ten questions I answer every October, what each number means, and how to pull it from whatever you actually tracked — spreadsheet, app, or a shoebox of texts.

1. What was your coverage rate?

Coverage rate = games fully crewed as planned ÷ total games played. A “3-ump game” that went off with one guy who happened to show up is not covered — count it as a miss.

This is the headline number. Everything else is a footnote to whether games got officiated by the people you meant to send.

• 95%+ — you ran a tight ship.
• 85–95% — normal for a small league, but the gaps have a pattern worth finding.
• Under 85% — you were scrambling all year, and your umps felt it.

How to pull it: count your scheduled games, then subtract every one where you were short-handed or begging at the last minute. If you can’t reconstruct that from your records, write down “couldn’t measure coverage” — that’s a real finding about your system.

2. How many no-shows did you have?

A no-show is different from a cancellation. A cancellation gave you notice; a no-show left a game uncovered with nobody at the plate. Count them separately.

Then look at who. One or two umps almost always account for most no-shows. Naming that — even just to yourself — tells you who to have a conversation with before you assign them next season. I wrote a whole piece on the immediate fire drill and the prevention side in Umpire No-Show? What to Do Right Now — and How to Stop the Next One, and the number you pull here is what tells you whether it’s a systemic problem or one person.

3. What was the fairness spread between your most- and least-worked umps?

Take your most-worked ump’s game count and subtract your least-worked ump’s. That gap is your fairness spread.

A big spread — say, one guy worked 40 and another worked 9 — means your best, most available people carried the season and probably feel it. Those are exactly the umps you can’t afford to burn out. A tight spread means the load was shared, which is what keeps people coming back.

You can’t fix what you don’t count, and counting game totals by hand is the chore everyone skips. A running fairness dashboard does the tallying for you, and if you want the strategy behind evening the load without punishing your reliable veterans, How to Rotate Umpire Crews Fairly walks through it.

4. What was your retention rate?

Retention = umps who worked this year AND plan to return ÷ umps who worked this year. You may not know the “plan to return” half yet — so send a two-line message and ask. Do it now, not in March.

Losing a third of your umps every year means you’re running a permanent recruiting emergency. Retention below 70% is a flashing light. And retention problems are almost never about money first — they’re about feeling jerked around, over-worked, or unbacked when a coach got ugly.

5. How many new umps did you keep?

Break retention into two numbers: veterans who stayed, and rookies who came back for a second season. First-year retention is the one that predicts your future. A rookie who works one season and vanishes cost you a training investment and told you something about onboarding. If your teen or first-year umps are churning, the teen umpire recruiting guide and the training program are where I’d look next.

6. What did each game actually cost you?

Cost per game = total ump pay ÷ games played. Add mileage or plate stipends if you pay them.

This is your budgeting anchor. Multiply it by next year’s projected game count and you have a defensible number to bring to the board — instead of last year’s figure plus a guess. If you’re not sure your rates are even in the right range, cross-check against How Much Should You Pay Umpires before you lock in the budget.

While you’re in the money, tally your software and admin costs too. Flat annual tools are easy to line-item; per-game or per-text pricing quietly scales with your season, so make sure you know which one you’re on.

7. How many complaints did you log — and about what?

You don’t need a formal system. Just count the times a coach, parent, or ump came to you upset, and sort them into rough buckets:

• Umpiring quality (missed calls, rules disputes)
• Behavior toward umps (the ugly stuff)
• Scheduling (wrong field, wrong time, ump didn’t get the assignment)

The mix tells you where to spend the offseason. A pile of “quality” complaints points to training. A pile of “behavior” complaints means you owe your umps a better protection policy before next year. And if most of your complaints are scheduling mix-ups — wrong field, missed text, double-booked — that’s the cheapest category to fix.

8. Where did the scheduling actually break?

Look at your misses from questions 1 and 2 and find the pattern. It’s almost always one of a handful of things:

• A specific field or time slot nobody wants (early Saturday, the far diamond).
• Communication gaps — you sent the assignment, the ump never saw it.
• Availability you didn’t have — you scheduled someone onto a night they’d already blocked.
• Late scheduling — you assigned too close to game time to recover from a fall-through.

Each has a different fix. If the answer is “people didn’t see assignments,” the group text has finally outgrown you — I laid out why in The Umpire Group Text: Why It Works Until It Really Doesn’t. If it’s availability, the fix is collecting blackout dates properly before the schedule goes out.

9. How much of your time did this cost?

Estimate the hours you personally spent assigning, texting, chasing, and reshuffling. Even a rough number — “about four hours a week for fourteen weeks” — is worth writing down.

Volunteer commissioner time is the resource nobody budgets and everybody runs out of. If that number is why you’re tired, the volunteer commissioner’s time budget is the honest look at where the hours actually go and what’s worth automating.

10. What would your umps change?

The last question isn’t yours to answer. Ask three or four of your most reliable umps one open question: “What’s one thing that would’ve made this season better for you?”

You’ll hear about a field, a coach, a pay date, a scheduling habit you didn’t know was driving people nuts. This is where the real gold is, and it costs you a few text messages. Pair it with a genuine thank-you — the end-of-season wrap-up has the version that actually makes people want to come back.

Turn the answers into a one-page plan

Don’t let this become a folder you never open. Boil the ten answers into a single page with three columns: the number, what it tells me, one thing I’ll do differently. That page is your winter to-do list — the recruiting target, the budget ask, the field conversation, the tool decision.

The whole point of a season review is that next year you’re steering, not reacting.

Frequently asked questions

What if I didn’t track anything this season?

Then your first finding is: start tracking. You can still estimate coverage and no-shows from memory and get real cost and retention numbers with a couple of text messages. Next season, keep game counts and assignments in one place so the review takes an hour instead of a weekend.

How is this different from a mid-season check-in?

The mid-season check-in is about catching problems while you can still fix them this year; the post-season review is about learning the lessons that shape next year. Do both — the mid-season version is short and worth it.

Who should see the review?

A trimmed version goes to your board — coverage, cost per game, retention, and your plan. Keep the individual no-show and complaint details private; those are for your conversations, not the public record.

What’s a good target for next season?

Whatever moves your worst number. If coverage was 82%, aim for 90%. If your fairness spread was 30 games, aim to cut it in half. One or two concrete targets beat a vague “run it better.”

If pulling these numbers by hand sounds like the worst afternoon of your fall, start a free trial and let the dashboard count game totals, no-shows, and coverage for you next season.