i tried to talk rick into it but it doesnt look like he will. hes convinced he wont win. of course we have our leader, our captain, our rock, mr. baker, but somebody else should run for the board to try and do something good with our league. just a thought.

id make ms. ulty do it but shes leaving town.

2)Planning ahead and organizing things so that which was the first morning session of spring league this year doesn't happen.

What was this? I don't understand

Ah, that's an issue with the Forest Preserve and one that has also happened in the past once or twice. I don't know that there is really anything the board can do if the FP lets 2 different groups reserve the same grove.

As an aside, the FP doesn't even know what the boundaries for the groves are which really complicates the situation.

[quote][cite]Posted By: pbgipper[/cite]

5) Speaking of which, earlier in the spring there were warnings of serious changes in the structure of summer league, but none of these changes have been communicated to the membership and its May next week. As I have said before, I am all for making changes if deemed necessary to meet the goals of the organization, but if such changes are made it is best if they are communicated early. As an example the approx.150 men who can play random pickup, rather than having the time to form a separate league.[/quote]

+1

What happened here? I told a girl last night that I play ultimate and she said, "oh cool, i've played pickup a few times and it was fun." With that kind of attitude she could probably auction off her summer league buddy services to the highest male bidder. Or get her registration paid for, at least.

Posted By: brown bearWe got there and every fat softball player in Chicago was already there. There was a big fight over who had the right permit, etc. etc. Fields weren't set up till about 45 min. into the day and they were crammed onto the west side.

However, the problem was rectified, and since it came as a surprise, I'm not sure what could have been done to "prevent" it. Except get rid of softball as a sport. Seriously. (except for 16-inch...that's balla)

Someone needs to get King to post his version on here. Because it HILARIOUS. And very clearly someone(s) F-ed up.

Well Baker definitely smokes a lot of rock's... I don't know about being one.... Just kidding Dan.

Rick, or anyone else for that matter, should definitely run for the board. There will definitely be at least two completely vacated spots--four if Steve and Mike don't run again. With the possibility of 50% turnover, there's a lot of possibility for change if you want to lead the charge. But keep in mind; you don't actually need to be on the board to influence things. The leagues themselves are run by committees. For example, the Spring League committee consists of 2 board members and two non-board members--I'm a board member but I had no involvement in running spring league this year. To be on the committee, you pretty much just need to volunteer. We try to give the committees pretty wide latitude on how they run things.

As for the FP. Relative to CPD fields they are extraordinarily cheap. In other words we don't have a ton of bargaining power... we pay them so little I doubt they'd notice if we didn't return. My understanding of what happened the first day of Spring is as follows: The Fat softball player "FSP's” were not permitted or insured. We had League people there early but it took forever to resolve because the FP office is not open on weekends to arbitrate disputes. Therefore, the FP police involve themselves and apparently ignored the fact that we had written permits and the FSP's did not. Additionally, the fields were completely waterlogged so finding enough field space wasn't easy... I think there was also a high school tourney out there that day. In any case, it was a bad situation and the guys and girls on the ground really did the best they could. They followed up with the FP in writing then I think Ernie met with our FP contact to discuss the issue.

The FP also re-configured there "groves" this year. The groves don't have clear boundaries and groves we've used in the past no longer technically exist which confused things further. In general however, our relationship with the FP has been very good and they were very concerned about the incident and the action that the Police took.

As for other alternatives... I don't know the answer. I've focused primarily on CPD fields and expanding our field options within the city. I'm not familiar with suburbs. From what I understand, we are getting some great traction in the west though thanks to Lisa (Carol Stream).

Gary... on the Open league thing...The reason it didn't happen is because we ended up denying far fewer men than we anticipated. Don't quote me on these numbers because I can't remember precisely but I think it broke down like so:
Simsons - no men were cut.
Seinfeld -35 guys were cut. For these guys, we did reserve extra space for pickup but I have no idea if they use it. We had a huge growth in new women sign-ups that drove this... don't have the figures handy but I know we need to a better job of communicating such things.

For Summer... there is going to be and Open League and you'll have the option to sign-up for it as your primary choice instead of as a catch-all. I don't anticipate that it will be OPEN in the way that competitive club Men's ultimate is OPEN. I think it will end up being more casual with a random gender mix. We'll see how things fall out during registration which he hope to have announced shortly.

-Ben