From Retraction To Expansion In 8 Seasons

[Enorama 2,038]

For those of you who do not know me, I joined the league in the early 60s (August 2018). When I came in, the VHL was recovering from what was a very rough decade for the most part. Many would consider some of the early classes of the 60s (62, 63, and 64 especially) as the rebirth of a league that at least a few people thought could be on its last legs. So how did a league that actually had to shut down two franchises in S58 grow to the point of needing back to back expansions just 8 seasons later? I'll take a look at the timeline.

 

In my opinion, the simplest ways to examine the overall activity level of a league all involve the draft(s) in some way or another. #1 of course being the total number of players selected, and #2 being how long the draft goes on before the picks turn into what are obviously shots in the dark.

 

In the final draft before retraction, S57, let's look at those figures.

 

Total players selected: 30

Subjectively, the draft seems to turn to random picks around pick 14. Obviously there's no hard set objective way to measure this, but I think taking multiple sub-50 TPE players in the 2nd round tells us all we need to know about the overall class quality.

 

Two months later, we're hit with this announcement.

 

Goodbye Stockholm and Cologne, and the league returns to 8 teams. No surprise from me given that the average team in the last draft didn't even get 1.5 meaningful picks. As an aside here - reading that thread really makes me feel for @Advantage and I'm glad he got a shot relatively quickly thereafter with the Malmo expansion. 

 

Now, let's take a quick look at the draft classes I mentioned earlier as being a big part of the resurgence, and just stick with # of players selected to keep it simple.

S62: 29 players

S63: 32 players

S64: 32 players

 

Obviously, looking at this, you can see my argument falling apart LOL. I'm going to have to eyeball it and see how many seemingly non-random-dart picks there were in each of those.

S62: 16

S63: 25

S64: 22

 

Now we can see specifically in those last two how even though the draft may not have necessarily grown in quantity to a massive level, the quality runs quite a bit deeper. In S63 in particular that's 3 players per team (double what it was in S57!). Shortly after those drafts, S67 entered as an absolute banger with 59 players selected. By this point, just over 12 months after the VHL was forced into retraction, the league announced back to back expansion franchises. The Moscow Menace in S65 followed immediately by the Malmo Nighthawks in S66. It only took two further seasons before the D.C. Dragons and the Prague Phantoms entered the fray. Overall, not even 2 years had passed between retraction and 4 expansion franchises.

 

As for why this actually happened? Obviously there's a multitude of reasons. The number 1 thing that should jump to everyone's minds at the time is the stellar work of the recruitment team at the time, where @MubbleFubbles and @Spade18's names jump to mind. In addition to that, there were several active members that were dedicated to engaging with new members and definitely made me more likely to come back those first few weeks (shoutout to @Beaviss, @Banackock, and @ShawnGlade for filling my DMs that first month). Lastly, there is an obvious snowballing effect to recruitment, in that members who are enjoying the league are very likely to invite their friends, with Beaviss and I probably recruiting a few dozen people between the two of us in a 12 month period.

 

Anyways, thanks for coming to my annual article. I hope there were at least a few interesting tidbits here and that it wasn't all rambling. See ya!

 

 

[Gustav 6,421]

Wow this is such a cool announcement

[Enorama 2,038]

Just now, Gustav said:

Wow this is such a cool announcement

 UH OH

 

@fishy HELP

[ShawnGlade 1,010]

12 hours ago, Enorama said:

(shoutout to @Beaviss, @Banackock, and @ShawnGlade for filling my DMs that first month).

 he remembered