Spring League

AWUF Feedback Form

At AWUF we do our best to keep prices as low as possible for our players. Unfortunately, this season we did have to increase our player registration, this was due to 2 reasons; Firstly, the Albury City Council reintroduced their ground hire fee (This was waived last year due to covid). Secondly, the fee that AFDA charges per player per game was also increased. If you play all 15 games during our league, it works out to be $5 per game, we believe this is still one of the cheapest sports in the area. If you would like to see some stats, please get in contact with a committee member.

In the future we are hoping to eventually run multiple divisions for our Spring League. Unfortunately we are just not there yet with numbers and amount of teams for this to be successful. We are looking into other events that we can offer during the year for those who are not looking for competitiveness.

At this stage, our Spring League is the most competitive form of Ultimate on the Border, and we are using this league to find interested players to become a part of the Albury Wodonga Ultimate Frisbee Rep Team. We feel that if we take the competitiveness away from this league it would then hinder our club's Representative Team at the next level of competition.

We did raise the number of players on the field this year to finally meet the expectations at tournaments. We also introduced a player cap and a team fee, captains had the choice not to fill all 14 spaces, however that would then make their individual player fees dearer.

Leading up to the running of our Spring League, the captains of teams are contacted regularly. They’re asked how their team numbers are going? They are reminded to update AFDA when a player is locked in. When someone contacts our page expressing interest, they are put in contact with a captain who needs players based on the information they have told our committee member. 

We have tried this in the past at a previous Spring League. We made the decision to make all games time capped due to playing 2 games in one day, as well as the need to move fields. If the final point went longer than the 15 mins between the two games, it would impact the rest time of the two teams, as well as it could potentially delay the start time of the second games. This isn’t something that we can change this year, however it will be reassessed for next year.

We understand that it can sometimes be difficult to find players, however our decision to have 4 male match-up players and 3 female match-up players on the field is to meet the expectations at tournaments. It has taken the club 8 years to finally reach this milestone. We also raised the cap on registered players to try and combat the issue of not having enough players each week. As well as raising the amount of female match up players on the field is to encourage more females in our sport. We will consider raising the cap next year to potentially combat not having enough players each week.

This was something we have offered in the past, unfortunately it created more issues than it solved. We are already time poor, relying on a small number of volunteers to keep our league running. If there was a fill-in player option, a committee member would need to ensure they were registered before they played as well as chase up payments each week from these players. Would these players be able to accrue any MVP votes? Then how many games can a fill-in play before they’re considered a full time player? If fill-ins are required during finals, how many games do they need to play to qualify for finals? (this would also take time to ensure the requirements are met). In the past we had a very skilled player fill-in for two games, they altered the outcomes of those games, dramatically changing the ladder positions. Would we then only allow new players to fill in? To combat this we decided to up the cap on players per team, hoping that having more available players on a team would reduce the use/need for fill-ins. This is something we will continue to look into and hopefully come up with a solution that helps all concerned.

This change was made with direct feedback from the previous year's Spring League (2021). We were informed that game times were too long (due to playing 2 games) and also that teams needed more time to change fields between games. However, last year's weather was entirely different to what we are experiencing this year. This will be a discussion point before the 2023 Spring League.