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In the exclusive interview with Baseball.it in which you announced your candidacy, you referred to ideas for the structure of the championships. Can you explain in detail what the proposals are for Serie A baseball and softball?
Before illustrating the ideas and proposals that the “Conto Pieno 2024” group and I have prepared for the structure of the new championships, I would like to make an important premise. I consider the decision of the outgoing Federal Council to already define the structure and characteristics of the next Serie A1 baseball and softball 27 days before the elections a lack of respect for the entire movement, given that the clubs have not been “officially” consulted or maybe just a few. Leaving aside the fact that managerial discontent towards the federal policies of the last 8 years is increasingly strong – as we learned in meetings with all Italian clubs – it would have been more appropriate to wait until the day after the November 16th elections to define the new championships , allowing whoever was elected to work and plan the championships for the next four years. The companies these days are already organizing themselves for future activities and radically changing the structure and rules of the events a few months after their start, I don’t know how feasible and correct it will be. Certainly our objective for the Serie A1 baseball championship is to return to playing, over the four-year period, 3 weekly matches of 9 rounds each, thus giving life to a serious and balanced project that can be told and disseminated thanks to a precise and careful communication and marketing activity, vitally important sectors left too much to chance in recent years. We also believe it is of great importance that the COG is managed and organized in close collaboration with the clubs and that there is also strong interaction and sharing between it, the RAARs and the staff of the National Teams for the planning of the season, thus allowing everyone the protagonists of the movement to know with certainty and in advance what will happen during the year.
Once upon a time there were ASIs, today there are AFIs. Do you think the current regulation should be maintained or would reform be necessary?
I believe that it is essential to redefine once and for all the prerogatives of the AFI athlete as it is essential to best protect and enhance the Italian school, which has often been deliberately neglected precisely by virtue of this acronym. I also consider the attempt, which took place in the last Federal Council, to pass over the possible “AFI” qualification for anyone with an Italian passport as “clumsy”. Our goal is to ensure that young men and women athletes find more and more space starting from the lower categories, as also demonstrated by our idea of including the use of the Under-18s in the lower leagues of baseball as a binding condition for promotion
The youth championships also deserve a separate discussion as they represent a precious opportunity for relaunching. How can we make the most of them?
For us the youth sector must be about fun, flexibility and development. This is because girls and boys – especially at younger ages – must come to the camp to have fun, socialize and learn the values of our sports. Playing to “win”, which is certainly an important focus, is achieved by growing and developing all aspects of the athlete over the years. It is no coincidence that as Federal President, if the clubs want it, my task will be to start the LTADP, Long-Term Athlete Development, an activity that is successfully used abroad, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, which presupposes basing the training, competition and recovery system on respect for the stages of physical, cognitive and emotional development, rather than on division by age. Precisely for this reason we will also launch workshops for coaches mainly in the off-season so as to compare different experiences and learn new physical, technical and mental training strategies, thanks also to the experiences provided by guests of international standing. It is no coincidence that, for us, developing the talent available is much more important than winning a championship in the youth sectors. For this reason we will also have to work on the training of our technicians to review teaching methodologies in that direction.
Going into specifics, what do you have in mind at an organizational level?
At youth level our objective is to get the teams to play as much as possible, through the federal championships and the tournaments that are organized by the clubs during the period in which the season is awaiting the final stages. We envisage the possibility of diversified calendars for those regions where there are few teams, with the possibility of resorting to concentrated phases, and regulate all summer tournaments so that they can represent a reference throughout the year thanks to an appropriate calendaring agreed with the organizing bodies at the time of drawing up the calendars in March, with the aim of playing them in particular in the Center and South. Precisely for this reason the Federation will take charge of relaunching the promotion of summer camps for non-member children and the organization of «Draft» Tournaments for members, a format experimented with great success by the Torre Pedrera Falcons, always at the forefront of these activities, in recent months, taking care of their vast distribution throughout the territory. It is no coincidence that we want to rationalize the intervention in schools in order to optimize existing projects to bring together a greater number of children through an ad hoc Commission that deals with the training of teachers throughout the national territory and give impetus and vigor to the Baseball5 activity taking advantage of every opportunity represented by events, fairs, demonstrations in the square in order to broaden the knowledge of our sports especially towards those who don’t know us.
When we talk about the youth sector we cannot help but talk about the Federal Academies. What do you have in mind from this point of view?
Since the Tirrenia Academy was unfortunately closed by the current FIBS President – a choice that is still inexplicable, considering that he was envied by the entire Italian sporting world – 12 Federal Academies have been created scattered across the territory which often have not produced the results hoped for the search and development of talent. For this reason we will start by monitoring the work carried out and the results obtained by the individual Academies, carrying out a careful and objective analysis based on the cost/benefit concept and optimizing the project and perhaps thinking about extending the project to softball girls too. It will also be necessary to establish appropriate communication with the clubs to which the athletes involved belong and involve technicians and managers in the project, creating a sort of parallel training that involves all the protagonists of our movement.
