It was agreed at the AGM that the Committee should decide on the division structure for the upcoming season at the beginning of October, once there was more certainty around the number of participating teams.
The committee can now share that we have 11 confirmed teams. This has presented a problem with regard to maintaining the existing two division structure and providing teams with an appropriate number of matches.
The Committee has therefore decided that a one division structure will be implemented for this season. This is with the aspiration that additional teams will join for the 2023-24 season and we can then return to the traditional two division structure. In order to keep the number of games to a manageable number, it was further decided to implement a ‘split’ league structure similar to that seen in the Scottish Premiership (football), where teams initially play in a single division, but are then split into two sections later in the season.
Structure Outline
- One division of eleven teams.
- First ‘half’ of the season, every team plays each other once in a round robin.
- Following this set of fixtures, the league is split in two with six teams in the ‘Championship’ (top) half and five teams in the ‘Shield’ (bottom) half; determined by league position at the time of the split - i.e at the end of Week 11.
- Teams will then play the other teams in their section once, with reverse venues as to the first half of the season. Every team will therefore play 14 or 15 matches over the course of the season.
- Final league standings are determined by total points across the whole of the season. However, teams in the Shield ‘half’ cannot move up into the Championship ‘half’ and vice versa.
Further points of note:
- Final league standings will be used to determine division assignment for the 2023-24 season should we return to two divisions.
- There will be recognition of both Championship and Shield winners based on final standings.
- There is a designated split point (end of week 11) in the fixtures with spare weeks to allow teams the time to catch up on any postponed fixtures.
- All first ‘half’ fixtures need to be completed by the time of the split. This means that any unplayed fixtures will result in defaults for one or both teams depending on the circumstances.
- Because of the way that fixtures are determined for the second ‘half’ of the season, it is possible that some teams will see an unbalanced number of home and away fixtures across the season as a whole.
- If a team drops out of the league during the first ‘half’ of the season, then the second ‘half’ will revert to a 5-5 split of teams.
Rationale
The Committee came to this decision because:
- It was thought that providing teams with 14-15 fixtures in the season was a sensible number to maintain a consistent length of season, and provide weeks off for KO fixtures and school holidays
- Two divisions would give teams too few matches, or too many if we had to revert to teams playing each other twice home and away.
- It was thought that one division would give teams a better experience of playing against a variety of teams rather than the same three or four week in and out.
- Attempting one division with everyone playing each other twice, would lead to an extraordinarily long season (22 weeks worth of league fixtures vs 16 in our split structure). We would struggle to finish prior to mid-summer, especially whilst attempting to maintain space in the schedule for the existing weeks off and KO weeks.
- Creating two separate divisions of 6 and 5 teams would have required teams previously in Division 1 to be relegated without notice to the lower division.
- If a team were to withdraw from a two division set up, this would leave remaining teams with even fewer matches.
- League fees are being reintroduced from this season, and to justify these the season should be of a satisfactory length.
- Maintaining a May finish to the league and KO competitions will allow us to trial a new Summer League/Season. This was raised at the AGM as something people/teams would be interested in.
Update: A 12th team (Imperial) has now joined the league. All of the above information is still broadly applicable, except that all teams will play 16 matches, since both the Championship and the Shield will contain 6 teams.
Update #2: We’re back down to 11 teams as Bee & Cue have unfortunately dropped out of the league.