After almost 25 years of teaching ‘life lessons,’ Little League leader to retire

When they were 10 years old, Aaron and Blake Buckner played on the same Little League baseball team in the Fort Worth Southside league. The twins anchored the infield, Aaron at first base and Blake at third.

Their mother, Debbie Buckner, was the coach.

During one game Blake and another teammate began scuffling in the dugout.

The Little League Pledge doesn’t specifically mention dugout behavior, but it’s understood that fighting for any reason will not be tolerated. So when the home plate umpire saw what was happening, he stopped the game, removed his mask and marched toward the dugout.

He warned the boys to behave.

“Or what?” Blake replied.

The arbiter fixed the kid with a steely gaze.

“Or I’ll throw you out,” he said.

The ump turned to walk away.

“Throw me out!” Blake called after him.

The man in blue ignored the spirited kid until he felt the thump of a batting helmet strike the back of his leg.

“You got your wish!” the umpire — Blake’s father — announced, and with the jerk of a hitchhiker’s thumb issued his first Little League ejection.

Blake, now a Navy sailor, learned a life lesson that summer day 21 years ago. His brother Aaron savors the memory because in his mind it clearly illustrates the essence of Charles Buckner.

“What you see with my dad is what you get,” Aaron said. “He always goes by the rules. He’s committed to being fair. That’s what has made him so successful.”

During 35 years of marriage, Debbie Buckner has questioned her husband’s vision but never his integrity or efforts to be evenhanded.

“He’d call strikes [against us] when the ball was way down here,” she recalled, pointing at her ankle.” Her spouse listened to her complaint in amused silence. “Anyone thinks I got any favors from him,” Debbie said, “they’re dead wrong.”

Taking his severance

A yellow sign is posted on the fenced backstop at a field in Dunlop Park, home of the North Arlington Little League.

PLEASE REMEMBER:

These are kids

This is a game

Our coaches are volunteers

Our umpires are volunteers

So is a 62-year-old grandfather who sat watchfully in the bleacher, a blue Little League World Series cap shielding his eyes from the late afternoon sun.

Charles Buckner has devoted almost a quarter-century to Little League baseball as a parent, coach, umpire, league president and district administrator for Texas District 7 Little League. District 7 includes 12 leagues in Fort Worth, Arlington, Azle, Weatherford, Mineral Wells and the Keller area.

The plainspoken district chief has served faithfully and judiciously in that role for the last 18 years. He will retire in October.

In his typed two-page resignation letter Buckner jokingly wrote that he has decided to “take my severance package.”

Of course, no severance package exists.

Buckner has worked countless hours in youth baseball without any monetary compensation.

Before retiring, he ran his own air-conditioning/heating company and lost revenue every time he took a summer week off or left a job early to tend to Little League matters.

Buckner believes strongly in the values of Little League participation. In his view the world’s largest youth sports organization is about more than teaching kids to hit a baseball or fostering in them the dream of playing in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa., which a team from the Westside Little League did in 2002.

“My philosophy about Little League is that we’re not here to make baseball players,” Buckner said. “We’re here to teach life lessons, not only to the kids but to the parents, coaches and anybody else that’s involved.”

One year a team with the Southside Little League went undefeated while another team in the same league lost every game.

Buckner, then league president, vowed that wouldn’t happen again. He devised a schedule for the next season that guaranteed parity.

“Every team should lose a game,” Buckner said. “There’s a certain amount of failure in life. It’s going to happen to everyone. If you can learn that when you’re 10 or 11 years old that’s a good thing.

“Ideally, in a 12-game schedule you want your first-place team to be 7-5 and your last-place team 5-7. That means anytime a team shows up at the ballpark those kids feel like they can win.”

Thankless job

Overseeing a Little League district can be a thankless — and at times tedious — job.

During the district tournament, which ended Saturday, Buckner was responsible for checking the birth records and signing off on the eligibility of every player in every age group, about 800 kids.

He routinely fields phone calls. A parent is upset that his or her child wasn’t selected to an all-star team. A coach wakes him at 4 a.m. to rant about a umpire’s call the night before. Buckner has summoned the police to ballparks to deal with unruly fans — parents, mostly.

“Charles has made a lot of friends — and some enemies,” said Jim Gildea, an umpire with the North Arlington Little League. Gildea laughed. “He will probably tell you that if he doesn’t get sued he’s had a good year.”

After Little League national headquarters instructed the district administrator to oust four players who lived outside their league’s residential boundaries, a woman approached Buckner at a ballpark.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

Buckner made the mistake of telling her.

“I’d like to shake your hand,” replied the mother of one of the players affected by the decision. She angrily latched onto Buckner’s right hand and started squeezing. Hard. Harder. Her nails, filed to spear points, dug deeply into the administrator’s skin, drawing blood.

“You can let go now,” he said, hoping to avoid a scene.

The woman refused.

“She kept squeezing, for five minutes,” Buckner recalled, “and telling me what a sorry —— I was.”

But those with axes to grind are likely far outnumbered by those who respect Buckner for his long-suffering and consistent leadership during his long tenure as a district administrator.

“Charles is as fair as he can be. He’s knowledgeable about the rules and he cares tremendously about the kids,” said Keith Covert, an assistant district administrator and the president of the Westside Little League. His departure, Covert said, will be Little League’s loss.

Buckner has touched thousands of young lives through a game he himself never played while growing up near Lake Worth in the 1950s. Those who benefited most of all are two boys, born the same day, grown men now.

Blake Buckner, 31, learned on a miniature ballfield that no one is above the rules.

As a youngster he listened to his dad say things — grownup things — things he knew were directed at him, like ground balls hit to third.

He shared his father’s advice, in an email sent from the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis, where he is stationed, a long way from home:

Never let anyone pay for the mistakes you have made.

Always be fair to everyone.

This story was originally published July 4, 2015 at 2:43 PM with the headline "After almost 25 years of teaching ‘life lessons,’ Little League leader to retire."