Major Announcement

Happy New Year one and all!

Tired of cold and snow yet? How about some hot stove league talk, local style!

I am pleased to announce the following expansion teams into our band of brothers and sisters of The McHenry Christian Fellowship Softball League.

1.) Willow Creek Community Church, Crystal Lake

2.) Shepherd of the Prairie Lutheran Church, Huntley

3.) Grace Fellowship Church, Woodstock (they played several years ago.)

4.) Joyful Harvest Lutheran Church, Johnsburg

With the addition of the McHenry Shamrock ball field complex, comes the opportunity to grow our league. To God be the Glory!

I'm excited about what the Lord has done to this league in the last few years and look forward to working with all of you as we continue to grow and welcome these new teams. Managers of these teams are TBD and will be formally introduced in late February at the Winter meeting.

I'm in Hawaii early February and the 14th is Valentines day, so a tentative date for the Winter Meeting is Saturday February 21st. at 10am. Meeting location TBD as my house I believe is now too small to handle this crowd!

As President, I'm very mindful of the model of leading by serving and I thoroughly enjoy serving this league. As a rule, I believe having a consensus is important and should be the norm rather than the exception. From time to time though, when leaders recognize the need too, they need to make an exception and make a decision based on what they feel is best, not withstanding a consensus or public opinion.

A few years back, we had discussed forming divisions in the league and this was narrowly defeated as I recall.

Our league has grown to the point now that I feel it is harmful to NOT have divisional play.

Accordingly, for the 2009 season, the following divisions will be established for our league. The dividing line is roughly Illinois Rt. 120, but a few exceptions were made in order to balance out the divisions. Keep in mind this is tentative and subject to a final adjustment based on confirmation that all teams are fielding a team for the 09 season. To see how these divisions balance out, I have placed last years won-loss record next to their name.

Tentative North Division Teams;
1. St. Patrick's Catholic Church 11-1
2. Maranatha Assembly of God 8-3
3. McHenry Evangelical Free Church 7-5
4. Mt. Hope United Methodist Church 6-5
5. Crosspoint Church 6-6
6. Anchor Baptist Church 5-5
7. Fox Lake Community Church 5-7
8. Faith Presbyterian Church 3-9
9. Joyful Harvest Lutheran Church N/A
10. Grace Fellowship Church N/A
11. 1st Baptist Church of McHenry 7-5
12. The Chapel 2-10

Tentative South Division Teams;
1.,2. Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church Teams 1 and 2 2-9 and 10-2
3.,4. Fellowship of Faith Lutheran Church Teams 1 and 2 10-2 and 2-9
5. Alliance Bible Church 8-4
6. Holy Apostles Catholic Church 5-5
7. First United Methodist Church 4-7
8. St. Paul United Church of Christ 4-7
9. Joy Community Presbyterian Church 4-8
10. Willow Creek Community Church-McHenry County N/A
11. Shepherd of the Prairie Lutheran Church N/A

How the schedule will look will be determined on technical factors and your input. We could do 1 game against every team in your division PLUS 2 inter-league games for 12 games. Or?

The ? is your queue to submit ballot items for the winter meeting. All ballot items should be e-mailed to me and not the league. E-mail them to dougp59 at gmail .com Ballot items should be limited to rules change/add/deletes as well as how to schedule games this season.

For the current full league rules, checkout www.churchsoftball.org

One ballot item I will be putting forth is a final adjustment to the aluminum bat rule from the current 55 years of age to 50 years of age. All other ages of men will be wood only bats. No changes to the ladies rule where any age can use aluminum bats.

One final item for this e-mail announcement is that the 2009 Summer Tournament will now be an OPT IN tournament. Historically, all teams were automatically in the tournament. This year, your team will NOT be in unless you pay a $10 fee to be in the tournament. The $10 fee should be just enough to nudge managers to canvass their teams to make sure they can field a team for EVERY play date of the tournament.
Tournament dates and times will be provided well in advance.

Last year, there were 3 different teams that forfeited games during the tournament due to a lack of players. Had these teams not been in the tournament because they new they were not going to be able to field a team, the tournament schedule would have been dramatically different.

This years tournaments will feature a 500 and over tournament with teams from BOTH divisions in the upper tier and a separate under 500 tournament with the teams from BOTH divisions with an under 500 record. There will be two separate 1st place trophies and the 1st place teams will NOT play each other. With 22 teams, I feel it is very unrealistic to believe that a bottom tier team can come up against a top tier team and win. Thus, we're going to try this out for this year and see how well it works out. It should provide a more competitive and level playing field for the lower tier teams. The top tier tournament will be super competitive I expect.

ps. It is 3 months and 18 days till Opening Night :-)