Winter Garden Squeeze GM Adam Bates to train umpires for Dubai Little League

Adam Bates wears a lot of hats. 

He’s the general manager of the Winter Garden Squeeze — West Orange County’s Florida Collegiate Summer League baseball team. He’s also on the advisory board of the Mordecai Brown Foundation and serves as a sales rep for Vertical Raise. 

Beyond all of that, he still finds time to serve as an umpire across the Central Florida region — something he’s done since 1994.

And now, he’s taking his expertise to the other side of the world. From Sept. 26-29, Bates is going to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience as he will travel across the Atlantic Ocean to the United Arab Emirates to help lead an umpire clinic for Dubai Little League. 

“I’m very excited, and as it gets closer, I am a little bit, for lack of a better term, nervous,” Bates said. “When I talked to Justin Rhodes, the guy leading this whole thing, I was intrigued. So, I asked my wife about it, just kind of thought about it and it lined up that I would be able to do it. It’s a quick trip — leaving Wednesday night and back Monday morning — but I’m just excited to make an impact. I’ve worked globally with a couple of other groups before, making a trip to Scotland in 2003 and then hosting a team from Scotland and a team from Russia in the mid-2000s. I’ve always enjoyed spreading the love of baseball wherever I can and trying to make an impact. 

“I’m also very passionate about officiating, as I’ve always said without officials, it’s just practice, and we want to be able to play games,” he said. “This clinic is an awesome opportunity to make an impact by training the umpires.”

The impact Bates wants to make starts with the basics, but he plans to do more than just give these aspiring umpires a crash course. He wants to give them the tools not only to earn their next assignment but also to want to get behind the plate again and again. 

“I want to introduce umpiring at an educational level, meaning like, give them the basics, and then hopefully give them the drive and resources to learn more,” he said. “The hours that I’m going to be with them over the weekend absolutely will give them a good footprint of what the basics of umpiring are. But ultimately, it’s not enough time to get anybody close to becoming a good official. My goal, when it comes to helping umpires, has always been to give them guidance to earn their next assignment and help them want to come back. … That process starts with identifying a couple of leaders and kind of teaching the teachers type thing by giving them not only the basics of officiating but by giving them the tools to teach the young officials. To do that, I’ve partnered with Ref Reps out of Indianapolis, which is the same program that we have at Olympia High School, to leave them with access to do online training.”

Beyond the clinic’s purpose of teaching umpires the basics and setting them up to develop further, Bates also wants to give coaches and parents more perspective on the role of an umpire, what goes into their preparation and what it’s like to officiate a game. 

“I’ve always said and still firmly stand on this belief: If any person learned the basics of being an umpire or just simply listened to an umpire’s perspective, you’ll understand the sport of baseball better,” Bates said. “For coaches, I think you’ll become a better coach if you do that because I believe good umpires are good coaches. … Because of that, I’m also planning on working with the coaches and the parents in the league to make sure that they learn that perspective, so everyone in the league has that strong respect for the umpires. I want to teach the people there to understand what’s happening in an umpire’s head, what they are seeing when they are behind the plate, and all aspects of what an umpire does.” 

To Bates, the role of an umpire is at the core of the sport of baseball, and this opportunity to help the Dubai Little League umpires learn more about how to effectively officiate a game — and teach its coaches, players, parents and officials more about the perspective of an umpire — is exactly what he hopes to establish in the growing league. 

“I just want to make the whole thing fun,” Bates said. “I’m very passionate about umpires because of what they do, and how they help the game grow, how they allow games to be played. Dubai has more than 500 kids in its Little League, so they need quality officials to be able to play games. I know I’ll learn a lot on Thursday and Friday before we go out there and execute this thing on Friday night, Saturday and parts of Sunday. Hopefully, we can leave knowing we made the impact we wanted.”