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May, 2020

Whiteford Cancels Spring Season

Whiteford Baseball has decided to cancel its Spring/Summer In-House season, effective today, May 29, 2020.

We did not take any of these decisions lightly. Frankly, our Board Meeting was a bit more spirited than usual as we worked out what could and could not be allowed for baseball this year, but we ultimately came to the conclusion that although Illinois has moved to open up more in Phase 3, this phase only allows what amounts to "practicing," while competition is still not allowed. With no clear timeline as to when a Phase 4 will be reached -- and no guarantee of what a Phase 4 will and will not allow -- we have determined a start date to the season would simply come too late to get in an acceptable amount of games for our patrons.

This decision hurts us as much as it hurts to have to make it for you, our parents, friends, and players who stick with us and support us season in and season out, but ultimately waiting any longer would be only hurting all of you.

On a secondary note, we wanted to make you aware of our plans for our part-time travel teams as well. Whiteford is -- and plans to remain -- an In-House baseball program, but as many of you know, we do have part-time travel teams at the park as well. Some/most of these teams had out-of-state tournaments that they fundraised and planned for dating back to last year. Because some of those tournaments are in places allowing baseball to be played, we feel it would be unfair to stop these kids from playing.  We obviously wish EVERY kid in our program could be back on a field right now, but that is something that is simply out of our control.

However, we want to be as completely transparent as we can and let you all know we will be allowing those teams to begin practice, to the extent it is allowed under Phase 3. There are severe restrictions on the amount of and types of practicing that can be done, and we will be severely limiting how often and how many of those practices will be at Whiteford, but, within the bounds of the State of Illinois Phase 3 Youth Sports guidelines, limited access to Whiteford for those teams will be allowed and they may begin practices.

As promised, we do have a refund process in place. As you can imagine, we had to get a bit creative with how to do this since 1.) This, the canceling of an entire season, has NEVER happened before in the history of Whiteford Baseball, and 2.) Our online system doesn't really have an option to "Refund All." It seems no one really prepared for the scenario we have all been living. That said, we have decided that the process would be best facilitated by having our families request a refund here, or via the button below.

Based on feedback from patrons and our own discussions, we have basically given you two options: A refund of whatever amount you have paid (minus the cost of the raffle tickets), or a tax deductible donation to Whiteford Baseball as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. There will be no roll over to a future season or any partial refunding options. Essentially, in order to keep the refund process orderly, we have decided to limit patrons to these two options and start fresh with our next registration.

Refunds must be requested by June 13, 2020 (the date of the raffle). Refunds will be mailed out after that deadline. We recognize this is slower than most people would like, but we are doing our best to be accurate and orderly in mass refunding to most of our 400+ families for what is hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime occurence . We appreciate your patience as we navigate this process.

As we have detailed before, each Whiteford family purchased their book of raffle tickets at the time of registration, and you have the chance to sell those tickets to recoup that cost. As stated earlier, the raffle will take place on Saturday, June 13, 2020. Pick up and drop off of tickets will continue until that day.  The next pick up/drop off time for tickets is this Saturday, May 30, from 9-10 am.

All that said, we do have some Good News to report: We WILL be starting registration for an EXTENDED Fall Ball season come June 13 as well, planned to start August 1 and run for 8-10 weeks.  More details will come out as we arrange things, but we plan to make our Fall season more like our typical Spring season, and we hope you will join us in making that happen.

Finally, we would like to say thank you to all of you who support Whiteford Baseball, especially over the past couple months.  As a thank you, we would like to offer you the chance to pick up your player's jersey as a token of our appreciation. It obviously doesn't bring back baseball or make up for lost time on/at the field, but it is a small thing we can do to help keep that Whiteford Bulldog spirit alive. The process for picking those up is still to be determined and will be subject to the same kinds of social distancing in place everywhere these days, but we plan to have them available for pick up on raffle day, June 13. More details will come out as we get closer to that date.

We are very sorry to send out such a long email, and sorry we have to send this email out at all, but we also wanted to be as transparent and thorough as we can with all of you.

Thanks for being the most important part of Whiteford Baseball. We look forward to a great Fall season and can't wait to see our friends and families again!

With tremendous gratitude,

The Whiteford Board