I'm so tired of all of SBA vs. VHL nonsense. To be honest, I probably shouldn't even be typing this up, but I'm just so sick of it.
For anyone not aware, I'm a member of the BoD (or BoG here). I'm doing this on my own and does not reflect anything "official" by the SBA, so please do not use it out of context. This is my own personal experience.
This issue keeps resurfacing, and every time it does I just get so mad for no reason at the amount of misinformation.
I understand that this league is the one primarily affected, but I think the original intent behind cutting affiliation has been lost and is now an "us vs. them" or a "holier than thou" mindset. I'd like to give a timeline of what I have experienced in order to hopefully clear some confusion.
Some time ago, several leagues decided to allow certain users (mostly admins of each league + simmer + anyone else doing a lot of league work) to automatically claim 12 points in the other leagues in order to increase enjoyment of leagues overall for these users since they dedicate so much time to their primary league. I genuinely don't know too much about hockey, but the other SBA admins were into it, so I tagged along. We joined up on Houston as that team could sign all of us. I was mostly a system player since I don't know the league or the sport very well, but I was still having a good time. We actually made it to the championship, which I guess isn't a huge surprise when a lot of the team were auto claiming 12.
Then comes the championship and I'm not going to remind every body of what happened. If you want my opinion on the matter looking back, I think we went about the things the wrong way (especially as admins in a different league). I don't know if the public thread was the best way to go about it, but it's the path we did in the moment. That isn't to say that I personally liked the response from the staff. Regardless, what happened happened.
I want to interject here that there is definitely a culture difference between this league and the SBA, and that's fine. We do in fact try monitor language for anything that we consider intolerant of certain things (religion, gender, orientation, etc.). Things here are, or were, a little different, and if that is the way that the league wants to be run, then that's fine. We aren't here to police that, nor do we want to. Again, we aren't saying we are better than you, but that's how it keeps coming off every time this resurfaces. Simply put, we didn't feel comfortable affiliating with a league that had such a community. That's really it. It's unfortunate that members are technically caught in the crossfire, but we aren't trying to punish anyone. It's difficult to try and have a league that monitors tolerance while simultaneously saying "check out this league that has an anything goes policy!" I really want to say one final time that that is in no way trying to say that we are better or whatever. It's just a different way of running things.
From this point, since we didn't like the response that we got, we decided to look a bit further into the community here and I think you guys understand most of the rest of it. But we did not ever do this before the conclusion of the finals. We were never keeping a tally on things, it was all after the fact. I keep seeing everywhere that we've just been waiting for a moment to end affiliation, but that just plainly isn't the case.
The rest of everything including the back and forth between Bek and E/Mo is not my portion of the story that I want to tell.
So like I said, this is my own personal experience, and I hope that at the very least if anyone wants to discuss my experience that it can be approached rationally.