Growing Pains

Adapting youth-sports operations and programs during a population boom

By Shea Sengelmann

In a recent meeting with a city whose personnel were only in the beginning stages of developing a recreation program, I was asked what I thought the biggest challenge would be for new staff members. As I’m sure is the case with most professionals post-conversation, I realized on the drive home that I had a better response to that question than the one I gave. The simple response I wish I had given—growing pains.

© Can Stock Photo / lmphot

That small city was assembling its recreation department to keep up with its rapid population growth, thanks to its sprawling metro neighbor. Additionally, the city of Celina (Texas) is in the heart of one of the fastest-growing regions in the U.S., bordered by booming cities like Plano, Frisco, and McKinney. When I began as an intern for Celina in 2016, the service population was 7,000 residents. Fast forward to 2022, and city officials estimate the service population at around 30,000. The total build-out population for Celina is just over 350,000.

When I was hired full-time in 2017, Celina had two recreation staff members, including me. We managed the entire youth-sports operation, including flag football, baseball, and softball. Since then, we have added soccer and basketball. To give an example of how league growth has matched the growing population, let’s examine flag football and soccer. In 2017, flag football had 50 teams in the league. In 2022, there were 113. When the soccer league was added in 2019, it began with 12 teams. In 2022, the league had 60 teams.

The rapidly growing youth-sports programs have presented a host of obstacles to navigate in providing high-quality recreation experiences for participants. How do we operate our one and only sports complex to efficiently host these massive events? How do we staff these programs? How do we become more efficient? Here are a few of the major issues in regard to operations and how we have managed to keep up with the unprecedented growth:

Space

As the population has grown, our lone sports complex has seemingly shrunk. This observation comes even as we recently completed an expansion to the park of more multi-use space and a four-plex of turf baseball/softball fields. While additions and new facilities are great, they are slow to come online. By the time they are operational, we have nearly outgrown them. To work through the space issue, we’ve used two major strategies: creative/priority scheduling and an intergovernmental agreement.

The format to schedule the facility for games and practices has changed nearly every year. For practices, we schedule many of the recreational teams together and encourage them to scrimmage and use a skill/station approach. This maximizes space, as opposed to scheduling one team to use an entire field for an hour. Additionally, on game days in the fall, we do not take any reservations on the baseball/softball fields, even though they are not being used. This allows us to dedicate the entire parking lot, which constantly overflows, for patrons attending league games.

In addition to creative scheduling, we have a great working relationship with the local school district. This intergovernmental agreement provides extra baseball/softball diamonds, football/soccer fields, and even a handful of basketball gyms. Without this agreement, we would not be able to offer programming for the entire community.

Cassie Lee Photography

Staff

Staffing may be the most difficult obstacle to navigate. Being a municipal department, staffing decisions must be planned at least a year in advance. Participation numbers can grow by hundreds from season to season, and a staff of two professionals can quickly become overwhelmed. Our approach to the issue has consisted of two parts: future and immediate.

In planning for future staffing, the ability to forecast the needs of the organization effectively and accurately is imperative. Our current staff members have worked with city leaders to develop a five-year staffing plan. This plan lays out what our expected participation rates will reach for each season, as well as detailing any new facilities that may come online. Using these forecasts, we were able to determine, based on our desired level of service, how many positions are needed each year. Since the implementation of this plan, we have added several full-time and part-time positions that were justified in advance, which has had a tremendous impact on the quality of our programs.

To address immediate needs, while waiting for new staff members to be added, we became creative in using the resources already available. For example, we took advantage of the flagfootball referee assignor. We requested, on our dime, that an extra official on game days serve as a “Head Referee.” This extra referee does not call games on any fields but floats around, serving as a front-line extension of the recreation staff. Instead of asking one of our city staff members, patrons can go to this “Head Referee” with questions and concerns. Additionally, we work one member of the maintenance staff into the schedule each Saturday. Prior to this arrangement, our short-handed staff members were required to do all of the set-up and take-down, which took valuable time away from other administrative tasks. It has made a huge difference in the flow of game-day operations to have both the “parks” and “recreation” sides working together.

Efficiency

When managing multiple, large youth-sports leagues, efficiency is, arguably, the most important aspect of managing rapid participation growth. To our department specifically, increasing efficiency meant eliminating gray areas, formalizing, and streamlining. 

When the numbers were still relatively small, we were able to leave a “gray area” in certain forms of operation, allowing us to easily make changes on the fly. For example, we may not advertise the format of the post-season tournament during registration, so we can determine the best format closer to the end of the program. Examples like that, along with many other administrative tasks, were not written or publicized in order to leave decision-making up to the league operators. 

Over the past couple of years, we have begun to formalize everything. Even if a certain aspect of a program wasn’t changing, it was put in writing. We added operations plans for full-time and part-time staff members, created written emergency-action plans, and even formalized the management of concession-stand workers through manuals and orientations. 

Streamlining the processes has significantly reduced the number of headaches caused by trying to manage hundreds of emails, texts, and phone calls from coaches, parents, and players during registration, as well as actual program times. We developed communication trees and policies, informational packets for all people associated with our leagues, and specified in detail the procedures for team formation. Formalizing and streamlining have had a tremendous impact on both the quality of our product and the stress levels of our under-sized staff.

It is always exciting to see growth. More population means more participants in recreation programs. That usually leads to more resources and a higher-quality product. But managing rapid growth is a challenge. In Celina, where we are just getting started, we continue to take that challenge head-on and fight through those bothersome growing pains.

Shea Sengelmann is the Athletics Supervisor for the city of Celina’s Parks & Recreation Department in Texas. Reach him at ssengelmann@celina-tx.gov.