There's going to be a vote on some important issues at this week's league meeting. Here are the notes I received from our commissioner, Paul Martin:
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"We have some items to vote on for next week:
1- Allowing each team to have up to 2 outside women play this year.
2- Allowing the “Untouchables” to have 1 outside man this year only.
3- Game days to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays instead of Wednesdays and Thursdays.
4- Allow the City team to participate this year? (If not allowed and we only have 9 teams, each team will have 1 bye week during the season, and the last place team will have to be eliminated from the playoffs.)
During the meeting, 4 teams had a need for about 2 additional women, prompting the vote for next week to allow 2 outside women per team. Darriel’s requesting a woman’s husband be allowed to play as his team is short men due to last minute roster losses. (He states he’s not a “ringer”)
We are looking for registration fees by May 13th (payday). The fee is $35 per player. I’m looking into what days we can have practice fields secured and will get back to everyone. A few teams were requesting Thursday only games, thus is why we are voting for Tuesday instead of Wednesday game days next week.
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Any thoughts?
Regarding item #1, there were some teams that didn't realize some of their women had left to join one of the two new teams. Now they might not have enough women to field a team.
ReplyDeleteI just learned today that Lena won't be playing at all this year. Also, Chiniqua told me today that she is probably going to miss the season as well. That leaves with only five women ourselves. We need to pick up at least two more or we might be one of the teams in need of outside help.
Would it harm the integrity of our league if we allow two women per team who don't work for SSA? Will they have to be relatives of team members by blood or marriage? Is it going to open the door to bringing in a bunch of ringers? I'm not so sure about this one.
For #2, we made an exception for SWAT the past few years so I don't see why we can't do this for the Untouchables. Darriel assures us this man (the husband of one of the women on the team) is not a ringer.
For #3, I have a hunch as to why one team wants to switch our Wednesday games to Tuesdays. One of their best players is playing in other leagues on Wednesdays and Thursdays and they don't want to lose him entirely.
Would anyone prefer to play Tuesday & Thursday instead of Wednesday & Thursday? Any objections to playing on Tuesdays? I know Mariza and Mandi are playing on Tuesdays in Pleasant Hill. That could be a problem for us.
For #4, I'd rather not have the City of Richmond's team in the league. They break the rules constantly and we know they bring in ringers who don't work for the city. I'd rather have a bye during the season than deal with them again.
On the other hand, are they going to get pissy with us if we don't let them play? If we do let them play, that gives us ten teams and five games per week. We'd have to expand our schedule to do this. We can only play four games with two diamonds and two days per week.
Just my two cents.
Thursday's meeting had some interesting surprises. Items #1 & #2 on the agenda were blended into one. Each team will be allowed two players on the roster who don't work for SSA or work at an SSA office. They don't have to be relatives of an SSA employee. The two extra players can be one woman and one man or two women but not two men.
ReplyDeleteWe also voted not to allow the City of Richmond team to remain in our league. With the addition of two SSA teams this year, we now have nine. Adding a tenth team would have required five league games per week. An expansion of our schedule would have been necessary to add a third game day or have one game played after another on one of our existing game days. Or the city would need to allow us the use of Nicholl Park #1 again (which they want used only for baseball).
We opted to go strictly with our own nine SSA teams. Since we're allowing each team two non-SSA employees on its roster, there are 18 spots that could potentially be filled by players from the Richmond Recreation Department. As we have teams struggling to fill their rosters, it seems a perfect solution in my opinion. The Richmond players who wish to play softball with us can still participate and the shorthanded teams can boost their rosters with some skilled players.
Each team will play an eight game schedule with one bye week (a week without a game). We're still going to allow all teams in the playoffs. The bottom two teams in the standings will play each other first with the winner being the eighth seed in our eight-team postseason tournament.
We didn't fully resolve our scheduling issues. Some teams will have difficulty playing on Wednesdays while others have a problem with Tuesdays (we're in the latter camp). Thursday seems to be a day that works well for everyone. Once we get our schedule set up, we will work to accommodate everyone and keep them off the days they would have trouble fielding a team.
There was some discussion of reinstating the roster limit of fifteen players per team that we had a few years ago. This was suggested because there are concerns some teams will have a surplus of players while others will have barely enough to fill a lineup card. We will revisit this issue at a future meeting.
Richie created quite a stir without even being there. Somehow, nearly every team in the league had Richie listed on its roster. (It must be nice to be coveted by so many teams.) It's not clear to me how the other teams were convinced Richie is playing for them but it doesn't really matter. Richie maintains he's still with us.
Regarding the two non-SSA employees we're allowed to add, they can't be replaced. Once we pick our two outsiders, they're locked in. If they drop out, we're not entitled to replace them with other outsiders. So if we're going to add players from outside SSA, we must be careful to avoid flakes or people with too many irons in the fire.
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