Player Selection

Although TSSA limits players in teams to 17, most schools only selects 12 per team. If a school also have B-teams 24 players are selected per age group.

This hinders the growth of softball.

Example

During the 2023 season AHMP selected 18 players for U14 A team, 14 for B team and for the 1st time introduced a C team with 14 players. 46 Players played in TSSA league with C team only playing 3-4 games.

Challenge

It seems that AHMP decided to only select 14 players per team, which means 4 less players will play in 2024. Taking into consideration that 72 girls signed up for trials and went through pre-season training, it means that only 42 players will play out of the 72 players interested in playing.

This represents 58% players playing but drops to 33% if only two teams are selected.

This happens across most schools.

Same Players

In most cases the same players are selected for netball, hockey, athletics and softball which eliminates even more players from the different teams.

In Structure

The other challenge is that players selected in the 1st year U9 or U14 tends to keep on being selected for teams up to U13 or U19 with maybe 1-2 players dropping out to give new players opportunity in team.

Impact

If we take an average of 15 players not being selected across all schools it paints a very sad picture, 600 players do not have any other opportunity to play softball because there is only one league available.

Home Spun the team for home schoolers joined the league to give the home school pupil an opportunity to play in a school league. With their policy that only kids being taught by their parents can join the team it also doesn’t offer opportunities for players not being selected in school teams to join their teams.