ASA's hand was forced last year by Gary Haning and the PGF, their knee jerk reaction to PGF was to ban all collegiate interscholastic players at Gold and all interscholastic collegiate AND collegiate club players at B, no action was taken on 18A.
What I keep hearing from people around the country that are involved in the administration of the ASA JO Program is that, they believe they made a mistake by not including 18A in the ban of Interscholastic Collegiate players, and that they intend to address that issue in November.
What is not clear is how they will treat Club Players and JC Players that still would under age restrictions have eligibility to play 18u, the bigger question in my mind is what will the other orgs, primarily NSA/USSSA/AFA do regarding college players, my gut feeling because AFA is strong in the West is they will follow PGF's lead and ban ALL College Students from their 18u division.
Personally I have told the 4 girls from our 18u team that by age would have another year that, we will work hard towards putting together and 18o/23u team, it doesn't bode well for ASA that they cancelled the 23u Nationals this year due to lack of interest, and they also cancelled the Womens Major Nationals for the same reason, the 23u might be a function of holding the event in Portland, OR.
It will be interesting to see what happens, there is also the fact that despite ASA "caving in" to almost all of PGF's demands, the rumour is that PGF is expanding to 14u next year and will cast a wider net for 16u teams for their championships that will be held the exact same week as the ASA Nationals.
I cannot see anything as divisive as this appears to be being a good thing for anyone, and particualrly the girls, where will the best exposure occur? From a strictly D1 and Major School standpoint I think PGF will pull the coaches there, but for every one of those schools there are 3-4 D2/NAIA/D3/and JC schools if not more, it will be up to the coaches from those schools to determine where best their limited recruting budget will be spent.
Sorry for going on the whole thing has my head ready to explode because of all the aspects of travel softball it will affect.
It's too bad that when Ohio starts filling their ASA/USA Nationals Berths it appears that ASA is not the clear choice for some teams...Go figure...LOL
I just saw the question about an effective date, you can bet if they make the change it will be effective for 2011, just like Gold and B were.