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About WSL
Over 200 powerhouse travel baseball programs across the United States have agreed to join a concept that is taking summer baseball by storm: The World Scout League.
Prospect Wire founder Matt Bomeisl, and the original Team One Baseball founder Jeff Spelman combined their ideas over the past 12 months with the goal to change summer baseball for the better. The two industry pioneers went back to the drawing board in an attempt to fix the current summer baseball setup of expensive, cattle-call tournament play.
After careful consideration, and feedback from the nation's top travel baseball coaches, the World Scout League was born.
The summer of 2012 will mark the Inaugural Season of a concept that will forever change summer baseball for the better by reducing team expenses and travel while increasing the amount of meaningful games that can be played locally. The result will be a marked improvement over the current overall experience of summer baseball that includes watered down competition, rising entry fees, travel coach and player burnout, and disorganized overall structure.
"Travel Baseball is at a crossroads," Bomeisl said. "There is a lot that is good and a lot that is bad. And the way things are progressing, it is only going to get worse unless the structure changes."
Bomeisl and Spelman are of the belief that many pieces of summer baseball are broken: It has become too expensive. There are too many tournaments. It's become too disorganized. Coaches are burned out. Events are too watered down and teams often play too many meaningless games.
"Our goal has been to form something that the teams could participate in that resembles real baseball," Spelman said. "Tournament hosts don't draw college coaches and pro scouts - the talent does. So we're trying to get quality baseball people together so that they can always play each other in a competitive, meaningful environment. I think it's pretty special being tied into something nationally that a lot of the best teams from the rest of the country are participating in as well."
The World Scout League will offer approximately 100 team Leagues nationwide for the age groups 18U, 17U, 16U, 15U and 14U. Teams participate in local, regional and national events within their league structure.
A few of the big name programs that have agreed to join the World Scout League include Florida's 6-time WWBA champion Florida Bombers, Florida's Tampa Bay Warriors, North Carolina's East Coast Prospects, Midland's Redskins, Phillies Scout Team of California, Cal Club Baseball, Arizona's Angels, Arizona's Athletics, 520 Elite (AZ), SF Elite Squad, Connecticut Bombers, New York's South Troy Dodgers, North Carolina's Golden Spikes, Virginia's Prospect Stars, the Minnesota Stars, Missouri's St. Louis Pirates, and the names stretch from East Coast to West Coast.
"Some of the best teams have yet to be released," Bomeisl continued. "We have an extremely impressive list of teams nationwide committed to this concept. In fact, the real exciting thing is we haven't gotten a 'no' yet. It seems like this was the idea that everyone has been waiting for."
The World Scout League will change the current summer landscape by focusing on having small-scale, round-robin styled tournaments with games counting towards league standings. Those standings will serve towards seeding for a major end of the summer tournament that will be one of the better scouting events in amateur baseball.
"We felt it was important to offer flexible scheduling options so teams could still join a few of the major tournaments around the country that are a staple of their summer schedule," Spelman added. "The World Scout League does not dominate a team's summer schedule to where the participating team can't do anything else or join anything else."
Bomeisl and Spelman are proud of the scheduling model that they put together that allows teams to play 9 of their 14 games from the comfort of their own city or area - limiting the number of times families have to travel on road trips.
The World Scout League will have League scorekeepers present at every game played nationwide. While in attendance, these scorekeepers will be tracking real-time stats and scores from every game across the country using Sport NGIN's newly designed iPad Baseball Scorekeepeing app that will feed the data straight to the World Scout League website.
"The scorekeeping will help power league leaders across the nation in a ton of scouting categories, as well as MVP races, all division, all region and All-American teams," Spelman said. "Further, all stats, standings, scouting notes, and scores will be on one, easy-to-navigate state-of-the-art website. And best of all, the access to those stats will be free for parents, coaches, and players."
"The enrollment for the league continues and we have a lot of teams in for 2013 that couldn't make it happen this year," Bomeisl continued.
