Friday, August 31, 2007

Announcing New Youth Fall League

Captains and Players,

I'm excited to announce the formation of a new youth league in the New Jersey and Philadelphia area. In order to strengthen the region's representation on a national scale (at the summer Youth Club Championships) and provide more opportunities for players and teams to play and recruit in the fall, this league is open to anyone born in 1989 or later. Any league participant is eligible to represent the region in either the Open, Girls, or Mixed divisions at the 2008 YCC's, provided they are born after May 31st, 1989. Also, the league is open to several categories of players and teams, combining aspects of both preselected and hat/draft leagues. Depending on interest, we are trying to develop both a Division I and Division II, as well as a Girls league. Registration will be open to any of the following:


Full Teams: Any group of 12 or more players may register in the league as a full team. This team will not pick up other registered players, and is a way for high school teams or groups of friends to play together in the fall. Roster additions will be permitted until late in the season, in order to accommodate any new recruits a team may be able to muster. In rare cases, if teams of 10 or 11 can guarantee attendance, they may petition to enter as full teams.

Partial Teams: Groups of 5 to 11 players that want to play together but can't field a full team. Or parts of high school teams that are splitting in order to get people more experience. Partial teams will combine with other partial teams, packages, and individuals in order to form teams large enough to compete.

Packages: 2 to 4 players who want to play together. Packages will be added to the rosters of partial teams, or combined in order to form teams of their own. These can be a couple of friends, the nucleus of a high school team, etc.

Individuals: Players signing up on their own. This is ideal for someone who has never played organized youth ultimate before and wants to get a taste of it before starting their own high school team, or someone out of high school who is still young enough to play, and so on. All girls must register as individuals.

Currently, we are trying to get each team to play two games per weekend, both on the same day. Depending on the number of teams and field availability, this may change. Right now our possible field locations are Edgely in Philadelphia, MCUDL in Trenton, and Washington Road in Princeton. Our tentative fall schedule starts play on September 22nd and ends with a league championship on November 10th and 11th. This will be (pending acceptance of our application) a UPA-sanctioned league.

If you are interested or able to play, please send me an email at thompsor@stanford.edu with your name and how many people you think you or your team will be able to send. More information will be released in the next two weeks.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks Ryan!!!

Anonymous said...

just out of curiousity, how come girls have to sign up individually?

The Pulse said...

The reasoning behind it is: there are fewer girls teams and players in the area. A lot fewer. So in order to ensure that we get enough players to have even teams and form a league. If interest is high enough, we should be able to place people in teams that they want, but here's the extreme example why I want individual registration:

CHS and Watchung girls register as a team - 20 girls on each team. Only 20 other girls even register. In order to make things "even" that's three teams of 20 and a lot of people don't get good PT or a chance to grow. But with 60 individual players, we can have 5 teams of 12 or 4 teams of 15, which are much better for a league.

Anonymous said...

this sounds great
is there a deadline for signing up?

The Pulse said...

I'm going to announce online registration in the next couple days - the normal registration deadline will probably be September 14th or 17th.