Greater Huntsville Umpires Association Boston Butt Fundraiser

Purpose – Recruiting and Retaining Young Umpires

We are a group of umpires under the authority of the AHSAA serving your local schools as contest officials. As you may know, there is a critical officiating shortage all across the country, and the Huntsville-Madison County area is not immune to this problem. Games are getting canceled or moved because there are not enough officials to cover the games.

The average age of a high school umpire is 52 years old – young men and women are just not coming into the sport for a variety of reasons. Fan behavior and inconvenience are a couple of factors; however, the biggest reason officials do not begin is the cost of officiating baseball. To umpire baseball, he or she needs a uniform and a set of very expensive gear – usually, that cost can be $500-$700. 

Our goal with this fundraiser is to raise money to purchase 10-12 sets of gear for brand-new officials to help relieve some of the costs they incur to get started. We hope that lifting some of this burden from them will encourage them to give baseball officiating a try and stay for years to come.

In 2023 we were able to purchase seven sets of equipment for new officials, leaving them with only the expense of uniforms to purchase before the season started.  This year, we are planning on using the fundraiser to add uniforms to the equipment program.  This will help new officials with the entire start-up cost and allow them to purchase their uniforms over the entire season instead of having to invest several hundred dollars upfront on uniforms.  We believe this will help the current high schoolers, recent graduates, and college students, along with others looking to get into officiating.