September 2019:

The AVRS school has begun its last semester of the school year last week. The next couple of months will see a number of changes taking place at the Uganda Little League Complex. One of the major events has been that the NGO Board of Uganda has finally agreed to renew our NGO for another number of years. As we continue to learn from our experiences over the years, we will now be able to formally apply with the Uganda Revenue Service concerning our current status, and that should eliminate some of the taxes we have been asked to pay in past years. This has to be done formally, which in the past we had failed to do. By having this renewed NGO, we can now continue with getting our Memo of Understanding with the Uganda Commissioner of Sports moving to implementation. This has been held up since June of 2018 due to the fact that our old NGO had expired and we had not been able to get it renewed until August of this year.

We have begun construction of the last major building at the complex in July. This is a reception building which will have two floors. The bottom floor will have offices for the school and the Dodger coaches, in addition to being the official reception center for all our visitors. It will have a wide open room on the top floor that will have potential seating for about 150 to 200 students to watch videos and other presentations. The completion date is expected to be by the start of the 2020 school year, about mid January. This will allow us to convert the current room that we use for videos to be converted to a large computer classroom with about 50 computers.

The Dodger coaches have already worked out a plan for recruiting the incoming S1 class of January 2020. They will be working in October and November on the final selection of incoming students. The change is that the Dodger organization is working on the bases of the schools original intent, and that was to bring students into the school regardless of their family's economic conditions. They are going further, and that is to not only give the students complete scholarships to cover their tuition and room and board, but also to pay for their travel expenses of getting to the school and returning home after each semester in the school. Once the students are selected, they want nothing to get in the way of the students attending the school for the full six year program.

In regard to the baseball program, we have had discussions with the Dodger organization in August. The wish is to build a complete locker room facility and also an enclosed structure to house 6 or 8 batting cages and 8 pitching mounds where the most modern electronic equipment will be set to monitor pitching motions and spin and speed of the pitched ball, in addition to monitoring the swings of the batters. The intent is make this equal to or better than the academy they run in the Dominican Republic. Nothing like this exists any where in the world for students as young as 11 years old who are just coming to secondary school. The discussions also focused on teaching methods we need to change in order to get these students producing top results on the SAT exams that they will be taking over the course of their secondary career at the school. While we would like every incoming students to reach 1600 on the combined Math and English scores, we are currently putting in place a program that we expect will get them to a combined score of at least 1250.

Starting in January, we will continue to work on getting field 5 ready for planting the right kind of grass. We need to get it to the standards that major league baseball has for its fields. Once this is done, we will be able to work on improving the conditions on field 4, and finally on field 3. In November, we hope to have a meeting with the head of the Ugandan Soccer Federation in how they would like the field that they wish we put in which will be surrounded by the eight lane, 400 meter track. We hope to be working on this also starting in January. We need to have the expertise of growing and maintaining the best grass fields in Uganda, not only for baseball and softball, but also for soccer people as they want to base their U17 team on this new field we will be building under their guidance. Our goal is to have the best athletic facilities in all of Uganda. We already have that for all the indoor sports, now we need the best facilities for the outdoor sports. While we currently have the best baseball and softball fields in Uganda, they are far from being good enough. The same goes for soccer. We need to make them equal to the best in the world. The netball people want to hold international tournaments in Uganda, and the only place in Uganda where that can happen now is at the arena at the complex. It is also the best place for basketball, volley ball and other indoor sports and activities.