Kids should be coaching 1st base too, not the parents. Keeps their head in the game.
We have teens handle all of the officiating and line judging in vball. Very sensible.
sorry to hijack the soccer thread with LL talk. That gives me a yellow card, no? I'll admit I played one season of soccer as a youth and stopped, once I could play football. I helped volunteer with my kids in their one and only soccer season. It is organized to death, but there seems to be a pretty clear division between the 'rec league' and these 'travel' squads.
I've been feeling a little guilty about derailing things, too, but hey, my daughter has a soccer game tomorrow morning... (yes, outdoors; that's how California rolls).
ELA, 6 is really young to play any form of baseball. Yes, the leagues run t-ball at that age, but in my view, having had my kids in baseball and softball up through 12U, it's the very, very rare kid who gets anything other than run-around time in 6-year old baseball. These are skill (not effort) based games, and very few kids are even close to being able to reliably catch and throw the ball at 6-years old, let alone process even the basics of baseball strategy. Physical fine motor development is so steep in that age range that a 7-year old
might get something out of it, but a kid who is athletic and starts at age 8, won't have missed anything by skipping two years of silliness. The silliness includes tons of parents and coaches yelling to try to get Johnny to make the right play because virtually none of the kids understand the game. And the yelling is a terrible way to teach. So silliness. Seriously.
If they start at 8, It will take them 3-4 weeks to catch up on the basics, and if they have been watching any baseball on TV with you, or playing any catch with you, it won't even take that. Unless you are just looking for a place to park your kid for a couple of hours a week (and there's nothing wrong with that--though there are other options), consider taking a pass on it for another year or two.
The biggest downside I can think of to waiting is that a lot of these leagues (maybe all?) have little cabals of the "in" parents/volunteers, and that drives a lot of the all-star/select season opportunities. If your kid is a superstar it won't matter, but if he's borderline, it makes a difference. But this gets back to my earlier comments about parents as the problem in youth sports. So if you look forward to sacrificing your summers to travel baseball from age 9 through whenever (and while that sounded pejorative, there are lots of people who have a lot of fun doing it; some are very good friends of mine), you might consider making sure you get into that crowd earlier--but still, 6 is too early to worry about it. Unfortunately 7 isn't. Silly.
As for coaching standards, different organizations handle training differently. In our softball league, the theory was to get everyone trained up, then just do some easy maintenance as you move up levels. Our soccer league is the opposite: shorter training for younger ages, but pretty significant training commitments as you move up levels. Our baseball league (which isn't Little League, but operates very similarly) is a hybrid. I prefer the way our soccer league does it, but there are pluses and minuses.