The First Pitch By Irv Porter

March 2003

In my February 1st Pitch I was total wrong. I stated that nothing was going to be done about the player's safety concerning bats and ball until next year. A few days after I posted my thoughts the U.S.S.S.A. came out with their new bat testing standards to meet the existing 1.20 BPF. This new and hopefully improved way of testing bats has created a list of bats that are no longer approved for use in U.S.S.S.A. Tournament play.
Last year it was the A.S.A. that took the strongest stance on bat compliance and hopefully before the year is out all softball association will meet or better yet excided the new U.S.S.S.A. standard and help bring some sanity back to out game of softball.
2003 Illinois tournament information has been coming into the Illinois Softball Report's (I.S.R.) office and today there are over eight hundred and fifty 2003 Illinois Softball Tournaments (both fast pitch & slow pitch) listed on this web sit.
More than eight thousand hits were recorded on the I.S.R. home page in February 2003 a new high water mark for this web site. The I.S.R. message board has been extremely active especially with the sixteen-inch player's. I.S.R. is glad to be able to supply a fun and at times a very useful tool to its readers. Hopefully the twelve-inch player will also discover this message board as your softball web site strives to become the site that Illinois softball players use for their exchange of information.
Being that is now March, softball season in Illinois will be underway in a month. Currently several teams have traveled out of state to get a jump on the season. Those that have turned in the results (the indoor sixteen inch tournament in Michigan and Snap On/B&J/Worth's championship at the Bruce Meade Open in Phoenix, AZ) to I.S.R. have those results listed under Tournament Results on the left hand side of the home page. Sportin' Wood has won out West also and I.S.R. expects to have the detail posted shortly.
I.S.R. is in the final stages of setting up several twelve-inch money tournaments for 2003. As soon as the dates and sites are finalized they will be added to the 2003 upcoming tournament list on this web site. The format will be different; a four game guarantee will be used. Using a four-field complex with a field of twenty-four teams that will be will be divided into six groups of four with each group playing a round robin on Saturday (3 games in a four or five hour time span). All of these Saturday games will be worth $25.00 to the winner plus a bonus to the pool winner. On Sunday all twenty-four teams will be seeded into a single elimination tournament based on how they finished within their pool play competition on Satrurday (all four teams from your pool play group will be sent to different quarter brackets so as to avoid playing the same team twice in the tournament unless two from the same pool make it to the semi or finals). All Sunday game will be worth $50.00 to the game winner with bonus money being added to the final four teams. The downside to this tournament is the team that wins will not get as big a cash prize since money was distributed to all teams who have won one game or more. The upside side is a minimum of eighteen of the twenty-four teams will receive some money back and it is conceivable (but highly unlikely) that all twenty-four teams could receive some money back in this type of an event. The entry fee will be about $250.00 per team with 50% ($3000.00) being paid back to the teams.

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