What I am about to write is exactly how the "Aryn's Helping Hands" softball tournament was being planned for this weekend at Camp Upland by Shannon Strigle, Aryn's Mother and tournament director Larry McFadden.

First, I need to mention that I personally ran this tournament four years ago at the Ballpark on Main Street in Upland at the request of the family.

The one-day tournament went well and was a lot of fun for everyone involved and raised $1,015 and that number was expected to increase with further donations.

Check out the link below from that 1st tournament.

Kirby's Lawn Care/Upland A.C. dedicates Memorial Day Weekend Charity Tournament championship to Aryn

http://members5.boardhost.com/delcosports/msg/1243291696.html

So this year would not have been the 4th annual tournament, but the 2nd tournament held for the fundrasier.

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Here's how I was approached to become involved with the tournament, once again, four years later.

After Upland A.C. won the Millennium Upland Slow Pitch League Championship, I went back to the club, congratulated the team and bought everyone a round.

Before I left the team asked did I have any Charity Challenge T-shirts with me, which I had just picked up earlier in the day.

After selling a whole bunch of shirts and wristbands, Shannon Strigle asked me if I could help organize the tournament with Larry.

I offered to have her tournament information uploaded and posted on the message board, but reminded her that I thought it was the worst weekend of the year to try and have a tournament since teams had just got done playing in the Charity Challenge and were preparing to get money from their sponsors for Millennium Fall Ball.

But she wanted to give it a try anyway and work in conjunction with the event being held at the Marine Corp League in Upland that was part of the fundraiser.

Shannon called and emailed me over the last week and I recommended to her if she couldn't get six teams she may want to cancel the tournament, but if she wanted to do the tournament with four teams, that she could.

I explained thoroughly the following to her.

1. The $40 ASA of PA sanctioning fee would be waived because it was a charity tournament and that I would submit the sanctioning form for her.

2. That she would need to purchase Bollinger Liability Insurance for a cost of only $50.

Now let me make this perfectly clear, that Delaware County and every borough, township, school district requires liability insurance and that they as field owners are to be listed as additional insured in order to have a permit issued.

There is no way of getting around this policy with the field owners in Delaware County.

3. The tournament would need to use ASA umpires in order to be officially sanctioned and immediately Billy Kirby offered to work as many games as he could to help out and at the same time I had gotten another ASA umpire to donate his time.

4. Once a team registers in the ASA of PA as either a league or tournament team they do not need to register again in that calendar year.

Now, if a new team was being formed or a team who was not previously registered they would have to register for a $25 fee.

This once again is required for the tournament to be sanctioned.

But, that was not going to be the case with this tournament because all the teams who said they were getting in were already registered ASA of PA teams.

So what would the cost have been to run this as an ASA of PA tournament?

A whopping $50 for Bollinger Insurance!!!

Try getting a tournament run for that cheap anywhere else.

It's unfortunate that this weekend, some misinformed people with an obvious agenda, convinced Shannon that the ASA was charging her fees that were unnecessary.

Which of course was furthest from the truth.