COMMENTS FROM THE PRESIDENT

MARCH 2009

 

It is that time of year where the tournament season will be winding down and before you know it we will be celebrating the 49th Annual State Closed Tournament being held at the Beverly Hills HSC. Eileen Fox and the members of BHHC have done a great job in getting ready for the State Tournament and they are looking forward to hosting this year’s event. Information about the various activities is printed elsewhere in the newsletter.

 

On a sadder note two of our members, Bob Skogseth and Glenn Rains (2006 Men’s State Champion) passed away. A past member Virgil Kincaid also passed away. All 3 were members of the Brevard HSC. My sympathy goes out to their families and they will be in my prayers during these difficult times.

 

Many of you are aware of the problems that surfaced with the Club Team Tournament causing it to be cancelled. Outlined below is a summary of how the council arrived at a team cap.

 

The Executive Council voted to change the Club Team Tournament to a count all handicap tournament instead of a cancellation tournament with the first tournament under the new format held in Clearwater on January 26, 2008. The reason for the change was to level the playing field to give the smaller clubs a chance to be more competitive. Past tournaments was dominated by two clubs, Clearwater and Brevard. The reason Clearwater and Brevard dominated the tournament was both these clubs would field 3 to five teams at each event. The more teams a club entered would give that club a better chance on winning the tournament. Smaller clubs would only send one team therefore had little or no chance on winning the event under the old format. That is the reason that we went to a count all handicap format.

 

Last year the rules were set up where a team’s total ringer percentage could not exceed 230. This caused a lot of complaints from several clubs that they would not be able to send teams with the 230 cap. We backed off the 230-ringer percentage cap but any club that had more than one team that the higher ringer percentage pitchers would be spread over all the teams submitted. The results from this tournament were analyzed.

 

The average entering ringer percentage of the 15 teams was 231.04. Brooksville was the high team with an entering ringer percentage of 290.76 and Beverly Hills with the lowest ringer team percentage at 194.62. The results for this tournament are listed below. Column A shows how each team finished and column D shows each team’s entering ringer percentage.

 

The tournament rules for this year’s tournament were finalized at our Executive Council meeting held on November 3, 2008. We spent a lot of time going over rule changes one of which was the entering team ringer percentage could not exceed 260. The council voted in favor of the cap by a 3 to 2 vote. The cap was not an arbitrary figure but based on data from the 2008 tournament. The data showed the top five teams with the highest entering ringer percentage finished in the top five. There was very few exceptions from six position to 15th, they were Clearwater Team 3 came in with the sixth highest average and finished 12th and Brevard Team 1 thirteenth in ringer percentage and tied for 5th. All other teams finished one, two or three places from their entering ringer percentage. As you can see without a team cap, clubs with a low ringer percentage have little chance on being competitive.

 

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