A committee of Ultimate Hoops players met with league officials Thursday night at the Fridley Life Time Fitness to discuss the State Of Ultimate Hoops and to brainstorm new enhancements to the league.
One of League Commissioner Paul Kruse and UH Founder Alan Arlt's big items on their agenda to discuss was a possible new "Draft League" where interested UH GMs would draft players who have entered their names in the draft pool. The new draft league proposal would be an additional offering to the Recreational and Top-Flight Division and not a replacement.
"With our current deep statisical interface, we have the tools in place to create a very compelling and engaging draft league," said Arlt, who addressed the players at the start of the meeting. "The key will be framing a format that fits best with our current UH membership base and most importantly, is the most fun."
The proposed Draft League format is proposed to start as a weekend tournament in the Minnesota region in late November or early December. The draft for the tournamant teams would be held a week prior. Additional tournaments and possible full 8-game league format could start as early as Winter Season 2010 starting in January.
Other highlights from the meeting:
- Bobcats and Rapture point guard Nick Roell delivered a proposal of changing the Recreational Division skill-salary structure to be based on Ultimate Hoops Player Performance Ratings . This would allow for players with college-level basketball experience to participate in Recreational Division
- The idea of bringing the Competitive Division back to the Minnesota Region as a replacement for the Top-Flight Division was also discussed
- There was an overwhelming request for more media coverage at games, including video and post-game recaps and interviews.
The committee plans to meet again in the coming weeks to continue their talks and possibly approve some new changes discussed Thursday night.
If you're an existing Ultimate Hoops player or Life Time Fitness member and would like to be a part of the Ultimate Hoops committee, please contact Paul Kruse at pkruse@lifetimefitness.com
Overall, I think if more media and video coverage are provided that it will bring more interest in the league. This is truely what I think would seperate this league from other leagues in the metro areas nationwide. Some of the website features are nice but its not very engaging with how other teams are doing as a whole. Box scores can only tell you so much of what happended during a game. Recaps for all games would hopefully provide an objective opinion about how the game was played in which people would express their opinions.
Currently, the weekly recaps are subjective to what the league wants to write about. For instance, I'm sure this Chad Chum guy is a good basketball player but should he be the only one to get coverage in AZ during the regular season?