The start of April came around and to be perfectly honest there was nothing that was pecking my noodle that I thought I wanted to talk about, so there was a doubt as to whether I’d be able to keep our run of monthly blogs going, but then on Tuesday night something magical happened.
Our leagues became officially FULL!
Now I know I need to get this blog out there quickly as you never know if a team is going to drop out tomorrow, but if they dropped out of Sunday, Monday or Tuesday we even have the start of a waiting list of teams ready to take a space! On a technicality we probably do have 6 spaces available as we want to get that 5th division in on a Sunday by next month, but for now the existing league spaces we have are all taken.
The mantra we have worked to over the majority of our 18 months in existence has been to make sure not to get carried away when things are going well, but also to try not to get too down when things weren’t. Sometimes in both cases it’s hard to stick to that, we could have one good week where we thought we’d cracked it, followed by a week where we’d want to jack it all in. Obviously at the minute things are going pretty well, but we know we have to continue to try and keep doing the right things otherwise we know that things can quickly change.
March 2017 was the month where I really started wondering whether this was really going work out. Looking back now it’s ridiculous to think that, as we were barely 6 months into something we knew would take time to take off, but I’m impatient and didn’t want to wait for the work we were putting in to pay off! Any time a team looked like dropping out of the league there was internal panic, as we were at a point where losing just two or three teams on each of our league nights could have caused major damage. The reputation of the business and our leagues is at the forefront of our thinking at all times, so to have had leagues dropping numbers at that time would have damaged the reputation. The bank balance too…… It started to turn around this time last year as we approached the end of the 11’s season and the lighter nights came into play.
By the time we got to May, June and July we were in a financial position to start looking at the idea of the shirts for the teams who’d been with us a year, and fortunately we’ve been able to continue doing that as we promised. In some cases the shirts have been cursed and the teams that were given them quickly ran into problems.
We still don’t have a team photo of Deportivo Lack Of Talent, who’ve had their shirts for months as they’ve not had their full team out in all that time, Pathetico Madrid unfortunately left us after a struggle to continue to field a team having been with us from week 1, and El Caliente’s head honcho picked up an injury recently that has meant the team has had an overhaul which has rendered the named shirts mostly redundant. Strikeforce got their shirts, ordered two more for a couple of lads who were looking to get back into it, then folded a few weeks later, while more recently Kipsta Cobras were another team who made the decision to have names put on their shirts, only for two of the lads to then leave and set up a new team! At least Dench and SK Dons made their decision to drop out just before they were due, but being the awesome kind of company that we are, as soon as those two teams decide they are ready to come back in we will honour the offer and sort out shirts for them. If we can find them a space……
We’ll just settle with the knowledge that those lads who have shirts but aren’t currently playing probably have those shirts hanging in a frame from their bedroom wall……
Before we know it we will have been going for two years (hopefully) and we’ve already started the thought process as to how we can top or even match the idea of giving teams shirts. Chances are this year it will be a combination of things, maybe with teams having a certain choice over what they receive, maybe we can offer extra shirts for teams who have added players in over the past 12 months? We’ve got a few ideas up our sleeve, but within reason we wouldn’t mind hearing what people think.
With pitch space at the club currently limited, any further growth within the current Ballers set up would probably involve finding another venue that could house a potential Ballers Thursday league, or increase the size of one of our existing league nights. Even if we could find somewhere that could do that there is no guarantee that all of the teams would be happy with a shift of venue, while adding a 5th league night would be a massive decision. We’ve made no particular enquiries into making that happen as of yet, but we quite like having the 4 nights we have that can house up to 60 league teams as this allows us to maintain the close communication we have with our teams which we wouldn’t want to lose by diluting our time. Anything more than this would more than likely be too much for the current regime to cope with, would probably involve extra staffing being required with the training needed to run things the way that we do, hence it becomes a far from straightforward decision.
Maybe in a few months time our blog might be spelling out the exciting future plans going into the tricky third year…….