Teams Leaving Tournaments Early

We have seen teams make team travel arrangements and not be able to take late flights due to trying to get all the players on to the same flights and being at the mercy of the airline's availability. From what I saw the 17U WWBA tournament had a series of delays due to weather and the last day ended up with a round of the tournament that most teams would not make.

I don't know what the situation is with the West Coast Summer Series as it should have pretty good weather, but it is difficult when a team does not participate in the full tournament where the tournament goes out of their way to guarantee at least a specific amount of games and a team pulls out early causing other teams to loose games.

It would be nice to think every team is going to win the tournament, but realistically, most teams are there to play ball and do not want to win by a team withdrawing from the tournament (except maybe in the winners elimination bracket and you are down on pitching ) but it is not good form to pull out because a team has been thrown into the consolation bracket.

We ran across teams "leaving early" this past week-end when in a Palamino section tournament in which 8 teams qualified, 2 of the teams had to forfeit after playing several games due to players leaving for other tournaments. So, they started in pool play and then forfeited games as they advanced.

Seems like really poor planing to me and rude to the other teams that could have played in their spots. Apparently this was the 1st year in our league that the players could play on other teams during these tournaments. I would hope the board of directors for our area will reconsider this policy to prevent this in the future.