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| An era in Solent Softball comes to an end |
A defining era in the history of softball on the south coast of England will come to an end next February with the resignation of Solent Softball League Chair Andy “Beefy” Burgess after 10 years in the job, and Andy was honoured with a special presentation at the league's End of Season Party recently. Andy's not going anywhere: he'll still be playing, he'll remain on the League Committee and he'll be concentrating on recruitment to help the league grow. But his successor will have a lot to live up to: the Solent League won two Glover Cup awards for progressive development during Andy's reign, and Andy himself won a personal Glover Cup for long-standing service to softball. Below, Andy gives his thoughts on those 10 eventful years.
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The Solent League's End of Season Party has been a formal affair for some years -- an innovation the members seem to enjoy!
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For Andy Burgess, the evening of Saturday, October 17, was pleasure and pain all rolled into one. It was the Solent Softball League's annual End of Season Party, the biggest social event of the year, and it was also nearing the end of Andy's ten years as League Chair, a planned retirement that he had announced at the beginning of the year and that will kick in after next February's Solent League AGM.
But what Andy didn't anticipate was the surprise “This is Your Life”-style celebration that his fellow Committee members had planned, complete with a ten-year photo history on Powerpoint that Andy described as “exquisite torture”. Those photos of one's long-haired youth will do that to you....
Nor had he anticipated the feelings of regret that came over him as soon as he decided to step down from the top position. “After I announced it,” Andy said, “I asked myself 'What have I done?' There's a long tradition in our family about doing a job yourself if you want it done properly, and it's hard to break away from that mentality.” But he also knew it was probably the right thing to do.
Small Beginnings
When he finally steps down, Andy will have been one of the longest-serving league heads in the 25-year history of British softball, and only the second person to head the Solent League. The league was founded in 1995 by Chris O'Connor, who moved from London to Portsmouth and missed playing softball so much that he decided to try setting up a league in his new home.
Chris put up posters for a series of winter sessions in January 1995, people turned up (including a young Andy Burgess and a few of his mates who had once played Little League and adult baseball in Chichester and then softball for a year at secondary school), and two teams that later became the Southsea Sharks and the Portsmouth Dodgers were formed. By the summer, there were four or five teams and a small league that's been going, with ups and downs, ever since.
Four years later, the five or six people who called themselves the League Committee were sitting in the pub when Chris O'Connor announced he was stepping down. There was the usual silence that happens on those occasions, with everyone looking down at the beer mats. Then Graham Cooper said, “Andy – you'd be good at running the league!” and everyone else nodded enthusiastically and looked relieved. And the rest is history....
Weekend Play
There have always been some unusual aspects to the Solent League, and it's taken some creative thinking and a willingness to take risks to respond to circumstances and keep the league on course. This has been one of the hallmarks of the last 10 years – but it didn't start out that way.
“When I agreed to become Chair,” Andy said, “I didn't really have any aims or goals – I was just playing it by ear. But I always felt committed to the league as well as to my own team, the Southsea Sharks. It wasn't just about winning cups and trophies; I always knew the league would be important.”
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Most recreational leagues play their games on weekday evenings, but the Solent League started out as a Sunday league and has largely remained that way, though teams now have the option to play home fixtures on weeknights and some do. Being a Sunday league allowed teams to be spread out geographically, and the Solent League has had teams based as far away from Portsmouth as Brighton and Southampton, as well as in places like Hursley and Bordon in the Hampshire hinterlands.
“We've never let boundaries restrict us,” Andy said. “We started as a weekend league and it's always stayed that way. But when we started going to BSF AGMs, we realised we were in a minority, and that most teams played midweek. Now our teams have that option, so we've incorporated that a bit more as the years have gone on. But we have always accepted weekend play.”
Creative Thinking
However, being a weekend league made it difficult for keener Solent players and teams to get involved in the burgeoning weekend tournament scene around the UK, and that's where the creative thinking came in.
“We loved going to tournaments occasionally as C-grade teams,” Andy said. “That's all we were. And we watched the A-grade finals with a sense of awe. But then we began to realise that we had players that could hit the ball that far, that could play at that level. Those great plays we saw people make in tournament finals were turning up in our own practice sessions.”
So for the better Solent players, there was the lure of higher-grade tournament play. And another factor was the monotony of league domination by a single team.
“It was probably Southampton Dolphins winning five straight league championships that sparked the change,” Andy said. “It had cropped up before as well – one team wins everything and wants to go to B grade, but they're excluding themselves from the league. So that was when a few of us sat down and saw that the way forward was to decimate the Dolphins and the Sharks – and full credit to Nigel Davies of the Dolphins for recognising that – and take those players out of the league to form the Mariners.”
Revolution
The change that followed was more like a revolution. The better players from throughout the Solent League – but especially from the league's top teams – took themselves out of league play altogether and formed two graded tournament teams, Mariners A and Mariners B, who were now free to enter as many weekend tournaments as they chose. And the gamble was that a league that was never very big would be able to fill in the gaps from the bottom.
“The idea,” Andy said, “was that we could rejuvenate the league if we allowed these people to go off and play in tournaments and get better and bring their skills back to the league as coaches. And by clearing these players out, it made room for beginners.”
Integrating new players – especially those who have never played before – became one of Andy's key aims as his Chairmanship of the league progressed. “I wanted someone to be able to turn up one week, come to a practice, and play a league fixture the next week,” he said. “We're never going to keep new players if they just sit on the bench and get an inning or an at-bat here or there when a game is already won or lost.”
According to Andy, the Mariners experiment worked for the first four or five years, but there are signs that its time may be coming to an end. The continued existence of the Mariners is always an item on the agenda at the league AGM, there are occasional accusations that the Mariners are a closed shop, and maintaining two Mariners teams quickly became difficult, despite national trophies won. And many Mariners have come back to their recreational roots and gone back into the league.
“You can't stop this,” Andy said, “but that's when I started to put the emphasis on recruiting, and on Mariners players coaching their teams. And now we'll have to have a meeting to see if there is a future for the Mariners at all.”
Ups and Downs
For Andy Burgess, the biggest disappointment of his ten years in charge is that the league has not managed to achieve sustained growth in terms of teams, and has rarely cracked double figures. Occasionally, there have been as many as 10 teams and two divisions, but then numbers have fallen back.
But Andy quickly recognised the value of what the BSF, and later BSUK, could bring, and Solent has always been one of more progressive leagues in terms of development, running numerous coaching and umpire courses and hosting clinics by the GB Slowpitch Team. The league also negotiated use of the fine tournament site at the University of Southampton Sports Ground in Eastleigh that was home to the 2008 European Slowpitch Championships, and has made occasional attempts to get youth programmes off the ground, though without lasting success.
In addition, the league has hosted tournaments that are growing in popularity, and has established relationships with Guernsey Softball that now brings four or five Guernsey teams to the Solent Lastball.
“The league is more stable now,” Andy said, “and we get more people turning up to Committee meetings and social functions and getting involved. That's why I felt it was the right time for a new Chair. I've always been a big fan of spreadsheets, and I've established procedures on which the league can run. I guess I've kind of written the manual, with everything accessible and easily passed on, so the job will be easier and a little less daunting than when I took over.”
Ensuring the Future
Though Andy will be stepping down as league head, he won't necessarily be stepping back.
“Recruitment has to be the biggest issue for the league going forward,” Andy said, “and I'm planning to stay involved in that. Existing teams should be doing their own recruiting and we don't really need to shore them up any more, so I'm tempted to go back to 10 years ago and group new players into new teams, with coaching and maybe playing support from a few veteran players.
“One or two of us have won a few medals in our time; what we really enjoy now is recruiting and seeing 50 or 60 people turn up to our first outside session in March – and then, a couple of months later, make their first put out or hit their first home run. That's the way we can keep the Solent League growing.”
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The Solent League has adopted the Tom Prince Cancer Trust as its chosen charity, and raised £1422 for the Trust in 2009.
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