Pioneers and Blitz Bombers continue to lead NSL standings

Monday 1 June — The second round of games this season in the National Softball League, played at the second Diamond Series tournament on 15-16 June at Farnham Park, has seen the leaders maintain their momentum in title races that look like going to the wire.

Pioneers still lead NSL1 after the second round of play, but four other teams are with a game-and-a-half of the them, while NSL 2 is even tighter.  The Blitz Bombers retain the lead, but the top three teams are all on three losses and are separated only by the number of draws each of them has played.

Meanwhile, the more important races in the National Softball League at this stage are arguably the struggle to make the top eight and secure a place in the NSL Nationals at the end of the season.

Here, too, the races are tight.  In NSL1, just three games separate the sixth and tenth place teams, while the margin between sixth and tenth in NSL2 is just two-and-a-half games.

So there will be a lot still to play for when the third and final round of NSL regular-season games takes place in July.

This season, unusually, those final rounds will be split.  The 12 NSL2 teams will play a final weekend of NSL games at Diamond Series 3, on 20-21 July.

But because of the European Slowpitch Championship taking place in Hungary from 15-20 July and pulling key players away from many NSL1 teams, the final round of NSL1 play will be a standalone event at Farnham Park on the weekend of 27-28 July.

NSL1

In NSL1, the Pioneers cruised through most of their games, including an astonishing 31-2 win over the KKs, who are holding down ninth place in the division.  But they ran into trouble against H2O, drawing 8-8, and suffered their only loss of the weekend to the old enemy, the Chromies, by 13-11.

The Chromies, who have been jousting with the Pioneers at the top of A-grade softball for the past few years, only managed a 4-3 record in the first round of NSL games in May and that left them in fifth place, with some people writing them off.  But the Chromies have bounced back, going 6-1 at Diamond 2, and now sit in third place, just a game-and-a-half out of the top spot.

The Chromies beat up on some of the lower-placed teams in the division at Diamond 2, with wins over LNZ by 22-2 and the Mavericks by 21-0 and they also trounced the fifth-place Travelling Dodgers 26-5 and the second-place Knights 15-6.  But Chromies are always prone to the odd banana-skin result, and this past weekend it came in the form of a 15-12 loss to the eighth-place Greensox.

Meanwhile, one of the more consistent teams over the first two weekends of NSL play has been the Knights, who went 5-2 on the opening weekend and 5-1-1 this past weekend and thus remain in second place, just one game behind the Pioneers and hoping to strike for their first-ever NSL title.

In the race for NSL Nationals places, the top five teams – Pioneers, Knights, Chromies, H2O and the Travelling Dodgers, are looking safe.

But that leaves three places to be contested by Blue Steel and Legends on seven losses, the Greensox on eight losses, the KKs on nine, and even the Mavericks on 10 losses have at least a chance.

Pioneers start where they left off as the 2019 NSL season begins

The first weekend of National Softball League play in 2019 took place at the Diamond Series 1 Tournament at Farnham Park on 18-19 May, and there was a familiar team sitting at the top of the NSL 1 standings when play finished on Sunday evening.

Pioneers, the reigning National Champions, NSL winners and European Slowpitch Cup gold medallists, finished the weekend with a 6-1 record, with their only loss coming at the hands of Legends by a score of 7-6 in the last game of the day on Saturday.

There were some less familiar names at the top of the NSL 2 standings after the weekend, however, with Blitz Bombers and Tempest (formerly Drizzle) both on 5-2 records and separated only by a wafer-thin head-to-head result in which the Bombers beat Tempest by a score of 11-10.

As usual, there are 12 teams competing in both NSL 1 and NSL 2, and eight of them will qualify for National Championships at the end of the season after two more weekends of play.

Results on the first weekend suggest there could be a lot of volatility in the standings over the summer, with parity the order of the day and a lot of teams bunched tightly behind the leaders in both competitions.

In addition, teams have yet to play all of their opposition, and match-ups yet to come could also trigger movement in the league tables.

NSL 1

For Pioneers, it was partly business at usual at Diamond 1, as they were comfortable winners over LNZ, Blue Steel, Mavericks and the Travelling Dodgers, one of the teams expected to challenge for the NSL 1 title this season.

But Pioneers had to struggle to beat the Knights by 10-9 and the Greensox 9-7, and were upended 7-6 by Legends — and Pioneers have yet to play long-standing rivals Chromies and H2O, so more challenges lie ahead.

Nor have Pioneers managed to open anything like a gap on the chasing pack.  The Knights, Travelling Dodgers and H2O all sit just a game behind the current champions with a 5-2 record, and just behind that group are Chromies and Legends on 4-3.

Meanwhile, those teams will be looking over their shoulder at four more teams on 3-4: the Greensox and the newly-promoted Mavericks from Manchester plus Blue Steel and the KKs.  Altogether, nine teams chasing the Pioneers are separated by just two games in the standings.

Only the Bristol Tigers, at 1-6, and traditional relegation battlers LNZ, on 0-7, look genuinely out of the title race after the first weekend of play.