Sunday, March 14, 2004

Costs keep scrutiny limited

Little League officials say price high for deep checks

By Fred Girard / The Detroit News

Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

Little League baseball is proud of its leadership role in becoming the first national organization to demand criminal record checks for all coaches and team officials.

But Little League’s checks are nothing more than crossing an applicant’s name against a state’s sex offender registry — which includes no other felony convictions, even those involving a minor, and excludes many sex crimes.

Despite claims that they routinely and thoroughly conduct background checks on their coaches, organizations like Little League Baseball, PONY and Pop Warner either do minimal checks that consist solely of state records or no checks at all.

Background checks that cover almost the entire nation are available on the Internet for as little as $1.50 a name for Little League Baseball and Pop Warner football, with no monthly sign-up fee. But some Little League officials say even that price is too steep.

“Are they asking their parents about this?” said Camille Gamble of Rapsheets.com, which conducts criminal history checks on thousands of youth sports coaches each year. “I guarantee, if they had a parents meeting and said, ‘Is your child’s safety worth the price of a soft drink?,’ they wouldn’t think the price was too high.”

Other youth sports organizations would pay Rapsheets.com between $3 and $4 per search with no monthly sign-up fee. Corporate accounts and others pay as much as $30 per check, plus a monthly fee.

Still, only 394 of Michigan’s 17,000 Little League coaches were checked through Rapsheets.com last year — 262 by Grosse Pointe Woods and 132 by Marquette, Gamble said.

None of the 1,200 Pop Warner Little Scholars coaches in Michigan was checked through Rapsheets.com.

“The price Rapsheets wants for lookups is a little stiff,” said Ron DeCoopman, Little League administrator for northeast Wayne and Macomb counties, where 1,750 volunteers coached 7,500 athletes last year.

“A lot of these leagues have to pinch their pennies. They say, if they’re doing 600 lookups, that’s $900, money they could be using for equipment or something else.”

Vetting the backgrounds of volunteer coaches — even those who are parents — is critical to the safety of children, said Rob Erb of the Hartford Community Soccer Association. “We’re sorry to do it, but we have had to fire parents before,” he said.