With Opening Day just four weeks away, we hope you’re as excited about National’s 71st spring as we are! We have many updates to share with you – and more on the way – so let’s get right to it:

Waitlist Registration Begins April 3

Standard registration for Spring 2023 will end at midnight on Sunday, April 2. 

While registration will remain open, all new registrants after April 2 will be waitlisted and placed on teams at the discretion of the board based on remaining player vacancies and divisional needs. This means we will not be able to immediately guarantee waitlisted players a spot on a team, but we will do everything we reasonably can to accommodate all players.

Do not delay! Register now to ensure your place on a team.

Opening Day Pancakes and Parade!

Our annual Opening Day parade will kick off from the Ancient Order of Hibernians parking lot on Ontario Street at 11 a.m. sharp on April 22 (an hour later than usual), preceded by the much-loved annual Hibernian pancake breakfast.

We’ll share more details about both events as we get closer to Opening Day. We’ve moved our parade back an hour to allow our friends at Westland Hills to join us after theirs to mark our first spring as official partners.

The first games will follow at 1 p.m.

Tryouts

There will be no tryouts this year for Farm, AAA or Majors. We’ll see you at the Spring Clean-up on April 15!

Our Partnership with Westland Hills

By now, we hope you’ve heard about our exciting new partnership with our friends over at Westland Hills. No, we’re not merging! But we will be working much more closely together this season, and we think it will be great for the kids in both leagues. 

For our players in Farm, AAA and Majors, this means we’ll be playing regular home and away games with Westland Hills, and occasionally with Rensselaer, eliminating much of the furthest inter-league travel for AAA and Majors. While inter-league play will be new for Farm, it will make for a more interesting schedule with more teams to compete against.

The baseball operations folks in both leagues are hard at work on a unified set of rules that will govern play between our teams at all three levels. We are truly excited about the ability to give our players the chance to share the field with some of their crosstown friends and classmates, and we hope you are, too.

For our youngest players in Tee-ball and Rookie ball, nothing will change. All your games will be played at National.

Other Important Dates

April 15 – Spring clean-up! Be there and be ready to roll up your sleeves to help us reclaim the fields from winter. We really (really) do need your help!

April 18 - Coaches safety meeting. More details to come.

June 23 - We *tentatively* (stress tentatively) expect National’s regular season to end by June 23. A brief post-season tournament may follow, but the details of that are still being discussed with Westland Hills. We know many families are trying to plan summer vacations, so we will get this information to you as soon as it is confirmed.

We Need Your Help!

Our goal is to get you information about team assignments and schedules as soon as possible, but this is an all-volunteer organization, and more hands make lighter work. 

Please, please, PLEASE consider volunteering to coach, help out in the concession stand, assist with ballpark clean-up/repairs or any other roles. Whatever your skills, we can almost certainly use them!

For our newest National families in Tee-ball and Rookie: You may think you don’t know enough about baseball to coach. You’d be wrong! For our youngest players, the experience is more about having fun with their friends than skill development. If you can hand out freeze pops, you have what it takes!

You can register to volunteer here.

We’ll see you all soon!