SHOCKWAVE Baseball

The summer of 2012 will mark the Inaugural Season of a concept that will forever change summer baseball for the better.  After careful consideration, and feedback from the nation’s top travel baseball coaches, the World Scout League (WSL) has been born. By increasing the level of play from opposing competition, the result will be a marked improvement over the current formats and avoid the frustration with the current overall experience of summer baseball that includes watered-down competition, rising entry fees, travel coach burnout, and disorganized overall structure.

Two industry pioneers, Prospect Wire founder Matt Bomeisl, and the original Team One Baseball founder Jeff Spelman, are attempting to fix the current summer baseball setup of expensive, cattle-call tournament play, by combining their ideas from the past 14 months of meetings with the goal to change summer baseball for the better.

"Travel baseball is at a crossroads," said Bomeisl. "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."

"Our goal has been to form something that the top teams could participate in," Spelman said. "Tournament hosts don’t draw college coaches and pro scouts, talent does. So we’re trying to get the best of the best together so that they can always play the best competition. I think it’s pretty special being tied into something nationally that the best teams from the rest of the country are participating in." 

The WSL promises to not occupy a team’s entire summer schedule, and allows flexible scheduling and the freedom to join events that are a tradition on each team’s schedule. They will have 5 team Leagues nationwide.  WSL teams will participate in local, regional, and national  events within their league structure holding elite 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.

"At the end of the summer we split the country in half the way USA Baseball does. All of the teams from Texas to California will go to Arizona for the ‘World Finals West’ and from Louisiana to the East will go to Florida for the ‘World Finals East.’  What you’ll end up having are 100-team super tournaments that will be a tremendous scouting attraction to close out the summer with," Spelman said.

"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."

League scorekeepers will be present at every game played nationwide and their job will be will be tracking real-time stats and scores from every game across the country using Sport NGIN’s newly designed iPad Baseball Scorekeeping 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."

NOTES:

• Under the WSL format, only one team per age per organization is allowed to play in the same 5 team league.  SC ShockWave has committed to join the WSL in the 15U, 16U, 17U and 18U age groups. 
• League schedule has been reduced to one LOCAL, one REGIONAL and one NATIONAL event.    

WSL website under development:  www.worldscoutleague.com