In Scarsdale, Umpiring Little League Is A Business

Since childhood, Evan Gross and Matt Ursillo have been entrepreneurs, teaming up to earn money shoveling snow on winter breaks, or selling big game tickets to sports fans.

So it's only natural the Scarsdale natives moved on to become business majors who now run a town institution like a corporation.

Ursillo, 20, and Gross, 19, run Scarsdale's Little League umpiring crew from afar, texting out game assignments from their Blackberries and drafting schedules from their dorm rooms at Boston College and upstate Union College. They oversee a crew of 38 middle- and high-school age kids from Scarsdale, who serve as umpires for the town's Little League. And they answer to a Little League board of directors populated by CEOs, lawyers and doctors.

Both are heading into junior year, and both have schedules that leave little time for other activities – in addition to classroom time and studies, Ursillo plays college football, and Gross works as a real estate agent. They make time to manage the league's umpires, they say, because they love baseball.

"We probably spend less time on Facebook than the average kids, but we're a lot more productive," said Ursillo, who often handles umpire business at 5:45 a.m. before he heads off to football practice.

Ursillo and Gross devote their spring breaks – two weeks each – to training their umpiring crews ahead of the season, conducting drills and reviewing situations in a sport governed by often arcane and obscure rules. Because it's Little League, some rules that are rarely enforced in a Major League game become central when kids are running the base paths and fielding.

There are also odd quirks – like fields that don't have foul lines, and the absence of a catcher in games at the second-grade level.

"When both teams wear the same color, it makes it interesting," Gross said. "One year we had five teams that wore the color red."

As the league's head umpires, it's up to Gross and Ursillo to make adjustments from uniform colors to a redundant system that allows games to be held even when the inevitable happens and an umpire calls in sick. When they deal with the board, "everything we send is double- and triple-checked," and official correspondence between the two business majors and Little League board doesn't look much different than a corporation's internal memos.

"We make sure we're doing this as if we were on the board of a major company," Ursillo said. "I think that's a very important thing, and it's great practice for us."

When they return home from college, Gross and Ursillo get down to the work of turning 13-year-old kids into authoritative umpires who control the pace and flow of the games they call. Gross says a typical practice includes about an hour of reading and interpreting rules, and another hour of simulating plays for the kids to call.

And while the umpiring crews have never had to deal with the extreme reactions from spectating parents that have made headlines in other communities, Ursillo and Gross prepare their young umpiring crews to deal with the inevitable pressure they'll face when fans in the bleachers don't like a call.

"I always tell the guys, these parents may be making $400,000, but for the next hour and a half you're the boss," Ursillo said.

Last year, the pair coordinated 170 Little League games in Scarsdale. In a typical week, there are 11 games on Saturday and 11 more on weekdays, contests played by two dozen teams spanning two different age groups. As a result, Ursillo and Gross get to know a lot of kids.

That's part of the satisfaction for them, because some of the same kids who participated in the games as players go on to become umpires. While neither Gross or Ursillo is old enough yet to legally buy a beer, they joke about being aging veterans when they see players mature.

"We've watched them grow up," Ursillo said, "and that's something that makes us feel old and it's kind of funny."