Dawn of a New Era: Changing The Format

"Enjoying success requires the ability to adapt. Only by being open to change will you have a true opportunity to get the most from your talent." - Nolan Ryan

I started this league with a dozen friends five years ago. It has since bloomed into a nationally recognized league with appearances in tournaments and in the highest spots in national rankings. Before we started this league in 2012 I ran a league in Hurricane, WV for ten years. And during the past fifteen years we've played on a weekly basis in a conventional season format. The amount of success in the old league was minimal. We never had more than four teams at a time during that entire decade. In this league we seem to have hit a ceiling of eight teams in 2014 as we did not grow beyond that. One could argue that we only had six teams in 2015 as two of the eight teams did not consistently play due to attendance issues.

I was always frustrated that many could not commit one night of the week for a few hours of fun a few months out of the year. As I have aged I have found that schedule as difficult as that many others who declined to play in the past. I dealt with this time crunch last season and I was burning the candle at both ends (something I've done especially hard the past few years) was becoming too difficult and that 2015 would be my last season at the helm, regardless of whether or not I had someone to hand the league over to. Fortunately, I did have someone to hand the league off to so the league may live on.

A few weeks ago the league rules council (Patrick Rayl, Greg Sowards, Jeremy Litton, and myself) got together and recorded a podcast and Patrick threw out an idea that sounded both crazy and brilliant: lets change the format. As soon as the idea was brought up I was immediately against it until he explained the changes. Then something amazing happened, we all agreed. Historically, we've argued about changes since we started this league. We debated the entire 2013 offseason about switching to yellow bats. And we debated the need for a talent cap system through the second half of 2015. Those changes were less dramatic than the change proposed by Patrick.

So why did we all agree?

It was apparent that a lot of things we did had run it's course. It was becoming an insane request to expect people to get to the field on time on a work day to maybe be there late and go to work the next morning. Some teams wanted to consolidate talented players on same teams, which discourages other teams that cannot compete, and kills teams in the process. We had attendance issues from at least one team just about every season. It was hard for the people who ran the league to get to the field and set up in time on a work day. Seasons dragged on for weeks (and even longer if it rained) which led to burnout. We could not continue to succeed if we did not change up something about the way we do things.

So enough about the need for change. What are the changes coming for this season? They are as follows:

We will no longer be playing on Tuesday nights. Instead, we will be playing one Saturday a month from April through July.
We will not be playing a conventional season. Instead, we will be playing a tournament format each month. 4 round robin games followed by seeding and then a single elimination bracket.
Players/Teams will pay as they play instead of for the whole season. Cost TBA in the near future.
We will not be pursuing the talent cap (aka the "star system") this year (possibly ever).
The tournament in July is the tournament of tournaments and any team that has participated in any of the three earlier tournaments get free admission.
We will not be fast pitch, we will be overhand lob (similar to style for our Hallowiffle tournament). The ball must have an arc to be considered legal.
Most of our other rules and processes will remain the same.

It goes without saying that some of these changes have been less than popular with some of our existing players. While that is regrettable the big picture here is to stay in action and attract more players. We have had modest success using our old format and we have had much difficulty in retaining players, perhaps this change will help with that in the future. The change is a gamble, but one worth taking. We could not last another year with the old format. We would have had probably four teams and one of them would have been whipping the other three. That's not worth running. With these changes, we have an exciting future and will no doubt attract a lot of new teams and players, even if some of the existing ones no longer agree with our philosophies. We may see a return to the old format one day, but it won't be this year. So get used to it. It's a new year and this is a new league.

You can listen to our podcast that has more details below: