Youth Leagues

After years of planning and building and one name change, Freedom Park opens officially at 4 p.m. today.County and state officials, the Liberty High Marching Band and the Freedom Recreation Council players and coaches will celebrate the opening of the park, which will be home to about 6,000 children participating in several athletic programs.The 125-acre park at Raincliffe Road near Route 32 in Sykesville is "the result of a lot of hard work by many citizens and county and state officials," said Del. Richard N. Dixon, a Carroll Democrat who initiated the project in 1989 at the request of Thomas Lee, a volunteer coach in the Sykesville Youth League.

The Anne Arundel Youth Football Association has begun requiring all its volunteer coaches to wear identification badges and to take a class on handling threats or violence from parents or players. Security concerns were raised after a shooting last fall during a prep game at Annapolis High School. The season for more than 4,000 players ages 6 to 15 begins this weekend with new rules on punting, a new playoff system for the youngest athletes and a more exciting location for at least half its championship games.

Leslie and Tom Fraley are fond of living next to Kiwanis-Wallas Park in western Ellicott City, but they say they have grown irritated with the advertising signs that hang from the ball field's fences. "They're not very attractive to look at. They're kind of like big billboards," Leslie Fraley said, adding that the signs "flap around on windy days" and make too much noise. That's why the Fraleys oppose a County Council bill that would legalize the signs, which are used to raise money for two private recreational sports leagues.

Several poorly maintained school baseball fields in western Howard County are about to get unusual, possibly precedent-setting face-lifts in time for play this spring, thanks to a sizable youth group in the area and a little quiet political leverage. The work, which is about to start at Bushy Park Elementary and Glenwood Middle schools, will be paid for by Western Howard County Youth Baseball and Softball League in a deal reached this month with the county's Department of Education. The project, estimated to cost about $40,000, is a first for the county, certainly in the past decade, in that the group will hire its own contractors to improve the fields' playing quality while satisfying county liability requirements.

Baseball, softball and tee-ball fans get ready! Opening Day has arrived in Brooklyn Park!The Brooklyn Park Youth Athletic Associationwill sponsor its first Opening Day Parade on Saturday.The parade will begin at 8:30 a.m. from the parking lot behind Ritchie Shopping Center, proceed down Morgan Road to 10th Avenue, and continue to the Brooklyn Park Fields.The parade will include about700 baseball, softball and tee-ball players between the ages of 5 and 16, the fire department, McGruff the Crime Dog, the DARE Bear, clowns sponsored by the Children's Cancer Society, a color guard presented by the VFW and Junior Girl Scouts from Troop 738, the Bronco Cheerleaders, and a majorette group from Brooklyn.

North Carroll teams are making an early splash in the Carroll CountyFootball League.Two teams are battling for first place in their respective age divisions in the youth league, which is made up of four teams from Carroll and three from Baltimore County.The Panthers' B team, for primarily 11- and 12-year-olds, is tiedwith Reisterstown for that division lead with a 4-0 record.The only unbeaten Carroll team after a month of play, the Panther B's havean early season showdown with Reisterstown on Saturday at Hannah More School in Reisterstown.

Maryland's Commission on Indian Affairs is turning up the heat on schools and athletic leagues that use Indian mascot names - even calling for an economic boycott of a baseball Little League that uses major-league nicknames. The commission - a quasi-independent board of the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, appointed by the governor - wants to boycott the 64 corporate sponsors of the Germantown Athletic Club baseball leagues. That includes companies as large as Giant Food and as small as the Germantown Copy Center and Montgomery Investigative Services.

In a move that could help ease the shortage of recreational facilities in northwestern Baltimore County, a local developer said yesterday that ground would be broken this week for a 40,000-square-foot indoor sports arena in the Reisterstown area.The Owings Mills Sports Arena at 12400 Glynowings Drive is scheduled to open Jan. 23 for the second session of indoor winter soccer, developers say.The arena will feature two artificial-turf fields, a sports grill, a video arcade and an office for a sports medicine practitioner.

The phone calls start around 7 a.m. for David Marcus and Rick Peacock. What time is practice? Where do we play? What kind of equipment does my son need? Why doesn't my son get more playing time? "My cell phone is ringing off the hook non-stop until midnight," said Peacock, who runs the Anne Arundel Youth Football Association and coaches a Gambrills-Odenton Recreation Council team. Marcus, founder and president of the Brooklyn Park Broncos recreation football program, faces the same all-day litany of questions.

It's the height of tax season, the last weekend before April 15, and accountant Tim Dougherty should have been poring over forms and punching a calculator. But his son, Michael, was playing baseball this weekend against some of the best 11-year-olds in the country. So there Dougherty was yesterday, at a ball field in Jacksonville, keeping score instead of hunting for deductions in his Towson office. "I guess it's a matter of priorities, isn't it?" Dougherty said. The "Maryland Orioles 1999 Early Bird Tournament," which ends today, pits the youth league Maryland Orioles against five other teams from all over -- Connecticut, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Puerto Rico.