By Bob Fromer
All five of the BSF’s 2015 Co-ed Slowpitch National Championships – Premier, Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze – were played on 22-23 August at Farnham Park, through scorching heat on Saturday and a couple of hours of rain on Sunday, in a tournament that produced close and exciting games throughout the weekend.
After three years of discussion, the great experiment of holding all five National Championship competitions at the same time and place finally came to pass, with players only able to compete in Nationals for one team at one level of play. A total of 27 teams took part across the five competitions.
Arguments will no doubt continue, and the BSF will no doubt consult its members before making a final decision on whether to continue with this format in 2016 and beyond or whether to separate the Premier Nationals from the rest, as in the past.
But this National Championship weekend did at least provide some information to feed into that decision. Combining all five competitions seemed to have the following effects: a more level playing field and closer competition across all grades of play, a heightened sense of occasion, but fewer teams taking part in the Co-ed Nationals overall.
Conclusions remain to be drawn….
Results
But what actually happened on the fields?
In the Rec division, the Bronze Nationals final was an all-East Midlands affair, with United Nations squeezing out a 10-9 win over last year’s champion Tigers. Tracey Sharpe from United Nations and Steve Boor from the Tigers were the final MVPs.
The Silver Nationals was won by the Meerkats from Manchester, who were the only team go through the weekend undefeated and who dominated the Chichester Falcons from the Solent Softball League in the final, winning by 24-4. Both final MVPs – Sonia Hine and Sam Steel – were not surprisingly Meerkats.
In the Comp Division, the Gold Nationals produced an all-London final, with SPAM hanging on at the end to beat Ninos Privados by 8-7. SPAM scored six runs in the third inning to break a 1-1 tie and took an 8-4 lead into the bottom of the seventh inning. The first three Ninos Privados batters all got hits and all came round to score, but pitcher Darren Prouty set down the next three hitters to secure the trophy. Claire Thomas and Simon Gordon from SPAM were the final MVPs.
The Platinum Nationals was won, as most people expected, by the Manchester Greensox, the only National Softball League team to play below Premier level on the weekend (the Greensox qualified through their position last year in the Manchester League). The Greensox defeated the Sheriffs from the East Midlands League by 21-5 in the final, and had both final MVPs in Linda March and Pablo Kidley.
The winner of the Premier Nationals is regarded as National Champion, and the all-conquering Chromies won their fourth national title in a row, and their eighth in the last 12 years, with a comprehensive 17-6 win over H2O in the final. The final MVPs were both Chromies: Moe Flett and Michael Sullivan.
Great competition
The striking feature of the 2015 Co-ed Nationals, from beginning to end, was how many games were close and competitive. Just over 90 games were played in the Premier, Comp and Rec round-robins, and six of them were draws, 17 were decided by a single run and 10 more finished with a margin of only two or three runs. Blowouts and mercy rule games were relatively rare.
Many players commented favourably over the two days on the fact that so many games were exciting and so few were foregone conclusions.
In the Comp Division in particular (eight teams playing a full round-robin, then separating into Platinum and Gold for semi-finals and final late on Sunday), this may well have been due to the fact that there were very few NSL players on any of the teams (except for the Manchester Greensox), unlike in the past when the Premier Nationals was played on a separate weekend. A more level playing field was generally welcomed.
Premier Nationals
The playing field also seemed pretty level in the Premier Nationals themselves, in a year in which teams like Slammers and Windsor Knights have moved up in the National Softball League standings and new teams like the Bristol Bees have made an impact. If anything, the Premier Division had more of those one-run group games than anyone else.
But some things don’t change, and one of those is the Chromies flirting with disaster during the round-robin phase of the Premier Nationals and then coming on strong at the end to win yet another title. This year was a perfect case in point.
On Saturday, the Chromies, who brought a large and talented squad to Farnham Park, lost 12-11 to Windsor Knights and 13-6 to Pioneers and were lucky to get a one-run win against Blue Steel, leaving them – at that point -- out of the playoff places.
On Sunday morning, seemingly unable to put runs on the board, they rode their luck against both the Bristol Bees and Thunder, hanging on for 5-4 victories against teams that finished sixth and eighth respectively.
But a 12-3 win over H2O in their last group game got the Chromies started and gave them a second-place finish in the round-robin standings, and from that point on they were unstoppable. In their semi-final against Blue Steel, who finished third in the round-robin, the Chromies’ defense held their opponents to just eight hits and three scattered runs. The Chromies didn’t exactly trot out the big guns either, but three runs in the first inning, one in the second and three more in the third quickly took the game out of Blue Steel’s reach and put the Chromies into the final.
Meanwhile, the team that had been generally seen as the biggest threat to the Chromies’ hegemony, Pioneers, also stuck to what has been a fairly familiar script at recent Premier Nationals. The Pioneers roared through the group phase of the tournament unbeaten, with only a 6-6 draw with H2O to mar a perfect record, and finished top of the round-robin standings, outscoring their opponents by 74 runs to 43.
The Pioneers sailed into their 1 v 4 semi-final with H2O on the back of those results and promptly went down by a score of 15-7, in a game which wasn’t even as close as that score suggests. “H2O came alive,” said the Pioneers’ Gary Hoxby afterwards, “and we just made a lot of mistakes.”
This result, however, gave some weight to a question that players had been posing throughout the tournament: why weren’t playoffs involving the last four teams (as was the case in the Premier, Platinum and Gold Nationals) set up as Page Playoffs rather than semi-finals and final, to avoid a situation in which a team can dominate the group stage of a tournament as Pioneers did, then be eliminated by one bad game? The BSF has used Page Playoffs in Nationals in the past and may want to look at this again.
Premier Final
So it was H2O and Chromies to play for the National Championship -- but in truth it always felt like it might be a game too far for an undermanned H2O team that was missing a number of key players and had done brilliantly to get this far and take out a very strong Pioneers team in the semi-final.
That feeling was strengthened when H2O went down quickly in the top of the first inning, and then the Chromies came out in one of their feeding frenzies. Eight of the first nine Chromies to come to bat got hits, including a three-run line drive home run by Michael Sullivan that shot over the fence in right centre field and back-to-back ground rule doubles by Chiya Louie and David Lee that one-hopped the fence in left centre. Eleven Chromies batted and six of them scored.
H2O finally got on the scoreboard with a run in the third inning on a triple by Neil Selvester and a single by Kirstie Leach that cut the deficit at that point to 7-1. But booming home runs in the bottom of the inning by David Lee and Grant Bergman made it 9-1, and a seven-run explosion by Chromies in the bottom of the fourth, featuring nearly identical home runs by the same pair, took the game out of reach at 16-3. The final score was 17-6.
With the win, the Chromies not only made it four National Championships in a row – a feat matched only by Baker Tomkins from 1998 through 2001 – but also assured themselves of a place in next year’s European Slowpitch Super Cup. The second Super Cup place is likely to be offered to Pioneers as NSL winners in 2014 (the Chromies won the NSL this year).
“It’s incredible,” said Doug Clouston, Chromies Hall of Fame Manager, after the game. “I don’t know … it’s just us, it’s the Nationals. This is our tournament.”
But H2O Manager Roger Grooms could not have been more happy with the effort put in by a depleted team in getting to the final. “I’m just so proud of them,” Roger said, “and their amazing achievement of making it that far, considering that a number of our stronger women and some of our key men were missing.”
Looking ahead
Following an entertaining and exciting weekend of softball, with some very high-level play across all the divisions, the BSF will need to look at a number of questions for 2016:
1. Should all five Nationals continue to be played on the same weekend?
2. If so, and if there are as few as eight teams in the Comp Division, all of them well-matched because of the absence of NSL players, does it make sense to break this down into two different National Championships (Platinum and Gold) or should there just be one competition?
3. Is there a need to look again at the basis on which dispensations are granted for teams to add players for the Nationals to cover for absence and injury, and should there be a new set of published rules regarding this?
4. If a combined Co-ed Nationals continues to be played at Farnham Park, is there a way that more teams below the Premier Division can play on the purpose-built diamonds?
5. What is the best date for the Co-ed Nationals to avoid clashing with European events and so that the maximum number of players are able to play?
6. How can the BSF persuade more teams that qualify through league position to play in the Nationals? This year, across the Comp and Rec Divisions, about the same number of teams refused places as those that actually played.
7. How can the BSF continue to enhance the amenities at the Co-ed Nationals so that it really does become a pinnacle tournament with more teams wanting to compete?
FINAL PLACINGS
Premier Nationals
1 – Chromies
2 – H2O
3 – Pioneers
4 – Blue Steel
5 – Windsor Knights
6 – Bristol Bees
7 – Slammers
8 – Thunder
Platinum Nationals
1 -- Manchester Greensox
2 -- Sheriffs (East Midlands)
3 – Raiders Gold (London)
Fuzzy Ducks (London)
Gold Nationals
1 – SPAM (London)
2 – Ninos Privados (London)
3 – Oxford Angels
Cheeky Monkeys (Leeds)
Silver Nationals
1 – Meerkats (Manchester)
2 – Falcons (Solent)
3 – Base Invaders (London)
Misfits (East Midlands)
5 – Blue Sox (Windsor)
Sharks (Manchester)
Bronze Nationals
1 – United Nations (East Midlands)
2 – Tigers (East Midlands)
3 – Coyotes (Leeds)
4 – Ad League Rookies (London)
Red Sox (Cardiff)
Past National Championship Winners
The full list of National Championship winners shows how dominant the Chromies have been over the past decade:
2015 -- Chromies
2014 – Chromies
2013 – Chromies
2012 – Chromies
2011 – Pioneers
2010 – Pioneers
2009 – Chromies
2008 – Dragons
2007 – Chromies
2006 – Chromies
2005 – Slammers
2004 – Chromies
2003 – Stingrays
2002 – Pioneers
2001 – Baker Tomkins
2000 – Baker Tomkins
1999 – Baker Tomkins
1998 – Baker Tomkins
1997 – Chromies (then known as Superchrome)
1996 – Windsor Dodgers
1995 – Genies
1994 – Slammers
1993 – Isherwood
1992 – Slammers
1991 – Meteors
1990 – Sliders
1989 – Pirates
1988 – London New Zealand
1987 – Pirates