CULater wrote:fastpitchdad05 - I agree with most of your points, with the exception of the qualifiers. If you look at the previous 2 year's qualifiers, I am not sure there were many teams from California that traveled to PGF qualifiers, with the exception maybe being the Arizona qualifier. PGF will need to keep the qualifiers with the appearance of being local. If you were to have 2 California teams qualify from each of the Indiana and Minnesota qualifiers and 3 more from the NE qualifier, you won't get as much participation from teams in those areas in the future. Because like you said, they have a greater shot at playing at ASA Gold.
The main issue I have with PGF is that they appear to change course midstream with regards to invited teams versus returning berths earned by finishing in top 8 (12 teams). Originally the invited teams were going to go away after year two and it was going to only be those 12 teams that earned return berths from the 2011 PGF national, no big deal. But then they went and invited the top 4 teams from ASA Gold (Funny I thought no good teams went there) and then invited I think 18 more teams half of which are California teams. IMHO this was done, because they cannot have a disproportionate amount of teams qualify at SoCal qualifiers, meaning the SoCal qualifier gets 8 berths while the SE qualifer gets 3.
Obviously they can run their event however they want, but changing things midstream to fit their agenda, doesn't make me think PGF is really all that different than any other organization.
You have a valid point, but it seems that that number is growing.
Here are the current numbers of CA teams that have begun the registration process in a qualifier outside their own (NorCal and SoCal excluded). I also listed non CA teams that were "out of their jurisdiction" so to speak:
PGF Qualifiers (Begun registration)
NW
12 - 0 of 0
14 - 3 of 7
16 - 5 of 12 (1 from NV also)
18 - 7 of 10 (1 from AZ also)
NTex
12 - 0 of 1
14 - 0 of 2
16 - 0 of 8
18 - 0 of 10
NE
12 - 0 of 1
14 - 0 of 6
16 - 0 of 0
18 - 0 of 0
Indiana
12 - 0 of 1
14 - 0 of 19 (1 from AZ)
16 - 0 of 12 (1 from OR)
18 - 0 of 17 (1 from TX and 1 from VA)
SE
12 - 0 of 3
14 - 0 of 2
16 - 0 of 1
18 - 1 of 7 (1 from TX also)
Minn
12 - 0 of 0
14 - 0 of 2
16 - 0 of 2
18 - 1 of 6
Colo
12 - 1 of 1
14 - 2 of 3 (1 from AZ also)
16 - 0 of 2 (1 from AZ)
18 - 0 of 5 (2 from AZ)
Tex
12 - 2 of 4 (2 from AZ also)
14 - 0 of 3 (1 from WA)
16 - 0 of 9 (1 from WA)
18 - 1 of 13
AZ
12 - 2 of 4
14 - 16 of 18
16 - 11 of 16 (1 from WA also)
18 - 3 of 9 (1 from TX also)
I realize that these numbers are subject to a lot of change and are premature. However, in its current state there's an 18U team in Minnesota that will likely be left out because a CA team is coming to town. And there's some potential problems in the SE, Colorado, and Indiana.
The NW region seems to be the hotspot (next to the nearby AZ of course) for CA teams to try and grab a berth that maybe they couldn't get at home.
As I said, the goal of PGF is to get the best of the best, for better or worse.