sports

The Philadelphia Flyers are a major professional men's ice hockey team. They were founded by Ed Snider as one of the first expansion franchises in the National Hockey League in 1967, and have experienced every level of success you can imagine since then.

Early on, the franchise struggled with the pains of restrictive expansion rules, structural problems at the Spectrum, and, crucially, on-ice success. Ed Snider strode to fix this most important issue by instructing his general manager to acquire the biggest, toughest players available. This paid off in the early 70s with the team making a name for itself by adopting an aggressive playstyle, earning the name of "The Broad Street Bullies." Within only five years, the Flyers won back-to-back Stanley Cups in both 1974 and 1975.

The list of Flyers from this era include goaltender Bernie Parent (who won the MVP award in both finals), captain Bobby Clarke, and forward Bill Barber. All three of these greats are in the Hockey Hall of Fame and have their sweater numbers retired in Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, I and many Flyers fans have never experienced this greatest of triumphs, because in my lifetime they have been just... fine.

As you can tell from the way my page is organized, this is the team that I follow the most dedicatedly. I grew up in Philadelphia and was raised in a multigenerational Flyers family. This is common for us fans, so common that it's alluded to in "The Orange and the Black" by The Boils, which has been the Flyers' victory song since April 13th, 2006.

Despite the passion of the city, the Flyers have only made the Stanley Cup Final 6 times since their wins in the 70s, including in 1976 (a three-peat would have been insane...), 1980, 1985, 1987, 1997, and 2010. Notice how none of these are in the last 15 years. Now, obviously, there are way more teams in the NHL than there were in the 70s; There were only 16 teams in the league when the Flyers won their first, compared to twice as many since 2021. As a Philadelphia sports fan, though, it is my birth-right to complain. Come on, guys.

Anyway, there have been many greats in Philly in my lifetime, including retired players like John LeClair, Éric Desjardins, Simon Gagné, and Mark Recchi. I also just barely missed Hall of Famer Eric Lindros' time as a Flyer, who remains a necessary component of any Flyers history conversation. Some of my favorite Flyers growing up were Claude Giroux, Wayne Simmonds, Brian Boucher, and Danny Brière. Giroux is still an active player at the time of writing, but if any of these four are getting their numbers retired, it will be him.

As for current Flyers, for the 2025-26 season, I have many favorites. I'm the number one goalie defender, so Dan Vladař and Sam Ersson get first spot. For defense, my faves are Jamie Drysdale, Travis Sanheim, Nick Seeler, and Cam York. As for forwards, I love to see Travis Konecny, Trevor Zegras, Matvei Michkov, Owen Tippett, Noah Cates, and Bobby Brink. There are others that I like, but if I write half the roster here I'll never forgive myself lol I'm also missing Tyson Foerster and looking forward to seeing more from Denver Barkey and Jett Luchanko in the future :)

Some miscellaneous Flyers fun facts for you:

• The "winged P" logo has been largely unchanged since its inception.
• After goals, they play the outro to "Ain't Talkin Bout Love" by Van Halen.
• Our mascot is Gritty, who you may know and love.
• The Flyers were the first NHL expansion team to win the Stanley Cup.
• Our rivalry with the Pittsburgh Penguins is called the Battle of Pennsylvania.
• Our rivalry with the New Jersey Devils is called the Battle of the Turnpike.
• Our minor league affiliates are the Lehigh Valley Phantoms and the Reading Royals.

WIP

WIP

WIP

Despite having played for over a century, organized professional women's ice hockey is fairly new. In North America, much like in other sports, the first attempts at women's league formation started in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These went about as you would expect.

In 2007, the Canadian Women's Hockey League was established, serving as the first substantial league. However, this league was launched as a non-profit, and while it paid for each centrally-run team's needs, it did not pay its players. It wasn't until 2015, when the paid National Women's Hockey League was formed in the United States, that they were forced to respond to the competition.

In 2017, the CWHL announced player stipends, but remained registered as an "amateur" league. To fund this change, they simultaneously launched a partnership with China, adding two new expansion teams based in Shenzhen. While this required some creative scheduling, it helped cover the league's expenses for the following two seasons.

You know how this story is going to end.

On March 31st, 2019, not long after the NWHL had approached them about a potential merger, the CWHL abruptly ceased operations. The league cited financial instability, including lack of viewership and sponsor fragmentation between the two leagues, as well as reduced revenue from China.

Relations between the US and Canadian women's leagues were tense for as long as they both existed. Unfortunately, however, that doesn't mean they always acted in the best interests of the players. In fact, none of it was ever about the players, and that's what continued to fester with them.

About a month after the collapse of the CWHL, the players had had enough. On May 2nd, over 200 players from both leagues issued a joint statement announcing that they would be boycotting the 2019-20 season for any North American league (NWHL or CWHL). Neither league had ever provided a liveable wage or health insurance, the leagues were constantly at odds with one another, and both struggled financially near constantly.

The players quickly formed the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association, a non-profit organization which would fight for a unified, financially sustainable league. While most players continued to boycott the NWHL, some defected to sign previously unheard-of contracts with the league (which had rebranded to become te Premier Hockey Federation in 2021). During this time, PWHPA players started playing exhibition games as part of the "Dream Gap" tour, which simultaneously highlighted the "gap" between men's and women's hockey and created opportunities to increase awareness and support of the PA's goals.

In order to fully realize the "dream," the PA needed backers. They started an advisory partnership with Billie Jean King, who famously has been advocating for gender equality in sports since her own professional tennis career. The PA and players also worked with the NHL and ECHL (a minor league to the NHL) to get women's hockey players on the stage during All-Star events. Eventually, in 2022, the PWHPA entered a formal partnership with Billie Jean King, as well as Mark Walter, who would both play a pivotal financial role in launching the new league.

In 2023, the PWHPA organized its labor union, the PWHLPA, which negotiated a Collective Bargaining Agreement for the league. Effective through the summer of 2031, the CBA establishes minimums for player salaries, including a mandatory $55,000 average for each team. All of these numbers would grow by 3% each season, and the contract also included major health and employment benefits. With the CBA ratified and the PHF purchased by the Mark Walter Group and BJK Enterprises in 2023, it was time to build the unified league.

The Professional Women's Hockey League was announced in August of 2023. The inaugural season began on January 1st, 2024, with six teams: Boston, Minnesota, Montreal, New York, Ottawa, and Toronto. All PWHL teams are centrally owned, and for the first season, they all were known only by their location name.

Now, despite all the talk from the old leagues about lack of viewership and income, it turns out that if you put time and effort into promoting your league and players, people will show up! The first game of the season, held at Mattamy Athletic Centre between Toronto and New York, had a record TV viewership of 2.9 million, more than any other sport or entertainment broadcast that day including the NHL's Winter Classic. In-person attendance records were also broken several times, starting with 8,318 on January 2nd and peaking at 21,105 on April 20th.

In the inaugural post-season, the league established a unique system. The top four teams would make the playoffs, and the #1 team would select their opponent for the semi-final round. PWHL Toronto selected Minnesota over Boston or Montreal, but they chose wrong. Minnesota defeated Toronto in the best-of-five series, and then Boston in the same fashion, to win the Walter Cup (named for Mark Walter, the owner of the league).

Since then, the PWHL has only gotten more exciting. In September of 2024, the league announced names and logos for each team, with new color schemes and uniforms. The original six teams became the Boston Fleet, the Minnesota Frost, the Montreal Victoire, the New York Sirens, the Ottawa Charge, and the Toronto Sceptres.

Additionally, after having played two neutral site games in Detroit and Pittsburgh during the inaugural season, the league announced the Takeover Tour, a formal neutral site program featuring several major cities across the US and Canada. The goal of the tour is to test markets and venues for potential expansion, as well as to grow the game in general. For the 2024-25 season, there were 9 unique stops, and for 2025-26, there were 16 stops across 11 unique cities.

Speaking of expansion, the league successfully expanded leading up to the 2025-26 season! They announced PWHL Vancouver and Seattle over the off-season, and later revealed their identities: the Goldeneyes and Torrent, respectively. With the current season's takeover tour coming to a close, the likely expansion teams for 2026 seem to be Edmonton, Denver, Detroit, and Quebec City, but there are plenty of other places not to count out just yet!

Anyway, I've been physically restraining myself from talking way, way too much for two days now. So, time for my faves :] My favorite team is the Boston Fleet! The Seattle Torrent are my favorite of the two expansion teams, but I also like rooting for the New York Sirens and the Ottawa Charge. As for players, my favorites are Aerin Frankel, Hilary Knight, Marie-Philip Poulin, Carly "C.J." Jackson, Sarah Nurse, Kristýna Kaltounková, and Sanni Ahola.

Before we can talk about the latest and greatest softball league in the US, we have to talk about Athletes Unlimited. And before we can do that, we have to talk about professional softball in general. Hope you're comfy!

Girls' participation in high school fastpitch have been slowly traversing the 300,000s since the 1990s [check out high school sports data here], so it should be no surprise that a professional fasatpitch league was founded in 1997: the Women's Pro Softball League. However, this league folded in 2001 and was immediately repurposed into National Pro Fastpitch, which began play in 2004. Now, the league would have a pretty substantial lifespan despite constant economic issues, but economy would ultimately be their downfall. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the NPF to cancel both the 2020 and 2021 seasons, and in August of 2021, they announced that the financial hit from this was too great. The league, which had been barely holding on since the beginning, fielding 4-6 teams each year and paying players mere 4-figure salaries to play over 40 games each summer, was dead.

Just for the record, I want to point out that even as an avid softball fan who grew up between 2004 and 2019, I never knew a single thing about this league or any of its teams. I feel like I have a very vague idea of the "Philadelphia" Force (2006-2009, based in Allentown) in the back of my mind, but I don't remember them ever being even remotely relevant. I never watched a game, never saw a piece of merchandise, never heard of the league on TV... nothing.

That's alright, though. Just as this league was dying, a new one was being formed like the phoenix from the ashes.

Athletes Unlimited was founded in 2020, the culmination of a dream discussed by the founders over breakfast only two years prior. The idea was crazy, but crazy enough to work, and it was realized just in time for the collapse of the NPF.

AU was initially launched for softball, but it would quickly expand to other women's sports. In essence, the league is designed to put players first. Rather than featuring teams that compete for a championship, like most leagues throughout history, it instead prioritizes individual performance and aims to crown a single champion each season. So, how do they do it?

The player standings in AU Pro Sports look a lot like statistical standings you would see for individuals in most other sports. For softball, for example, you can view stats like games played, at-bats, hits, runs, putouts, and so on. However, the standings are organized by points. There are three different ways to earn points in AU, and we'll use softball for all examples here.

The first is Win Points. By winning the inning (of which there are 7), every player on the team gets +10 points. The maximum number of inning win points a team can earn in a game is 60, because winning the 7th inning means you win the game, which nets your team an additional 70 points. So, a team that dominates the whole game will collectively earn 130 points, just for being there.

The second way is through MVP Points. At the end of each game, the players and fans vote for the top three performers to be named MVPs. They earn 60, 40, and 20 bonus points, respectively. There's also a chance that the players vote for a Defensive MVP, who also earns 20 points. Basically, the best performers get rewarded by their peers and the fans.

The third and final way to earn points is Individual Points. It's exactly what it sounds like: players need to perform well statistically in order to gain an edge over the rest. Most of these are offensive points, aka points earned while your team is batting. I won't get too into detail, but the system is very well balanced. In softball, however, pitchers generally do not bat, so they have their own special points system.

There are only two ways to lose points: as a batter getting caught stealing, and as a pitcher giving up an earned run. Both are -10 points, and these are in place to maintain parity.

Now, of course, it would be pretty unfair to get drafted to a really good team that dominates the whole season and eats up all the Win Points, because that would leave some great talent on the other teams out to dry. To combat this, the other primary component of AU Pro Sports is the draft system. Every week, all the players get resorted to new teams. Each team is captained by one of the top four players in the standings at that time, and they draft their teams sort of like a very professional kickball game. The teams, in order of captaincy, are gold, orange, blue, and purple.

These systems were incredibly successful for softball. The first champion of any sport was Cat Osterman, one of my all-time favorite softball players, who will forever hold the record for most points earned in an AU Pro Softball season. Since then, AU has expanded and found continued success in basketball and volleyball, as well as in lacrosse (which only shut down to make way for the new Women's Lacrosse League). With all this momentum, it was only a matter of time before the original Athletes Unlimited evolved.

The Athletes Unlimited Softball League was announced in 2024 and launched in 2025, taking the robust foundation of AU and transforming it into a more traditional league.

It began with four new team identities: the Bandits, Blaze, Talons, and Volts. These teams played a full season of 24 games each from June through July, with a best-of-three championship series between the top two teams played in late July. One of the goals of this season was for the league to tour various cities and states so that in 2026, each team would get a home. In addition to the more standard season, with real rosters and team stakes, the league would return to its roots with the All-Star Cup in August. This tournament would bring back the usual AU points systems to crown a champion from only the best players of the season.

As you can imagine, the inaugural AUSL season was a resounding success. The MLB invested in the league and broadcast many of its games, while the rest were available on ESPN. Games were sold out, attendance records were broken, and viewership was on the order of hundreds of thousands each week. The league even reached $1M in merchandise sales! Naturally, expansion was a must, and the off-season brought a brand new team. It also brought in an independent team, the Oklahoma City Spark, which had been part of two now-defunct leagues in 2023 and 2024.

So, what about those new home cities? They got them! The new Cascade were placed in Portland, Oregon, and the inaugural teams became the Chicago Bandits, Carolina Blaze, Utah Talons, and Texas Volts. Together with OKC, the now six-team league is slated for an even bigger and better year.

For 2026, all regular-season games will take place at the home fields of each team (I'll miss the grand tour, but this was the goal lol so I can't complain). The season will once again run from June through July, and the All-Star Cup will again run through August in Rosemont, Illinois.

I'm so very excited for the upcoming AUSL season :) As for my faves, for the inaugural season, I cheered for the Volts. Since the expansion, the rosters are a bit different, so I'll have to decide who I wanna root for this year. As for players, my favorites as of the 2025 season are Rachel Garcia, Jessi Warren, Michaela Edenfield, Keilani Ricketts, Odicci Alexander, Montana Fouts, and Sierra Romero.

Unrivaled is a women's basketball league, founded in 2023 by pro ballers Napheesa "Phee" Collier and Breanna Stewart. The league is based in Miami, Florida, where they own and operate their own practice facility and arena, and currently consists of 8 teams.

Players participate in three-on-three games spanning a short, two-month season, with games happening on weekends from Friday through Monday. After the regular-season, they hold three single-elimination playoff rounds to crown their champion. The top four The first team to win the championship in 2025 was Rose BC.

Thanks to its unique systems, Unrivaled basketball is exciting and easy to digest. Unlike in typical five-on-five basketball, Unrivaled teams hold rosters of only seven players. Instead of four 15-minute quarters, Unrivaled plays three 7-minute periods, followed by a fourth period that shifts gears to an untimed "first-to" system. During this period, they add 11 points to the highest score, and the first team to beat that score, from their existing point total, wins the game. So, if a team is losing 42-50 after the third period, they can still win if they make it to 61 before the other team does.

The craziest thing about Unrivaled is that it was made by the players, for the players. Despite what other leagues might want us to think, running a league really just takes money and values. If you have a great plan and the financial backing to make it happen, you can make a company that serves its staff well, and that proves true for Unrivaled. The facility in Miami has everything the players could want or need to take care of themselves and their families and improve their game. To top it off, the league has performed so well thus far that they're actually paying their players even more than what they initially estimated would be possible! They even claim that their average player salary is the highest in women's sport, reportedly sitting at over $200,000. And that's for a league that only runs from January to March!

Additionally, the league hosts in-season competitions for cash prizes. In February, they play a one-on-one tournament, open to players voted on by the fans. The top four at the end of the tournament split a prize pool of $300,000, with the champion taking home a hefty $200,000. And that isn't all: there's even a free-throw competition that spans most of the season, where the most reliable player at the line (most FTM with the highest FT%) wins another $50,000. Plus, every member of the championship team wins $50,000! So, theoretically, a player could win up to $300,000 in cash prizes, on top of their six-figure salary. Ho-ly!

Now, I know my whole page just screams "Philly is the best," but they held the first ever Unrivaled tour in Philadelphia on January 30th, 2026. That game broke the record for the highest attendance at a regular-season professional women's basketball game with 21,490 fans, so. Tell me I'm wrong lol you cannot convince me that Philly is not where it's at.

Anyway, time to tell you about my faves! Of the 8 teams, my favorite is Phantom BC. I love their colors and vibes (ghost gang!), as well as their 2026 roster! My favorite players of the 48 in the league are Natasha Cloud, Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman (the StudBudz), Chelsea Gray, Brittney Griner, Aliyah Boston, Kahleah Copper, Kelsey Plum, Li Yueru, and Rhyne Howard :]

You may be wondering, Orion, if you love women's sports so much, and actually watch basketball from time to time, then why didn't you list the WNBA?

For those unaware, the Women's National Basketball Association was established in 1996. It is partnered with the NBA, which is largely what brought it success over its now-long-defunct competitor, the American Basketball League (1996-1998). Besides superior funding and tv deals to entice star players to their league, the WNBA also benefitted—and still benefits—from being a summer league, which allows them to operate in NBA venues during the men's off-season.

This all sounds pretty great, and it is. So, what's the problem?

Throughout the years, the WNBA has been considered "unprofitable" by countless sources. Granted, in the 90s and 00s, it probably was, but the one thing that set it above the ABL is part of why the league has been said to "make no money." When you have to pay your investors more than half of the money your company brings in, it's really hard to turn a profit. The NBA alone gets a 40% cut, and there have been more recent investors since. I'm not going to get into it in detail, because there are way better sources of information out there, but if you're someone who believes that the WNBA doesn't make money, just ask yourself: why would anyone invest in a company that doesn't make money?

Now that that's out of the way, there's another problem: a company that has to meet crazy profit margins really would rather not pay their employees properly. WNBA players have been getting paid the bare minimum for decades, and they're pretty much done with it. The Player's Association (aka union) and the league have failed to negotiate a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA, aka contract) to cover the upcoming season. If they continue without one into the spring, the players will still be on strike when the preseason begins.

The WNBA is basically pretending that none of this is an issue, but please try to pay attention if you haven't been already, because this is a huge deal. If the players get what they're asking for (which really isn't much, all things considered), it will be a monumental win, especially considering the playerbase is largely composed of black women. Women's sports have absolutely been blossoming these last few years, and it would really be a shame if the WNBA had to miss out on an historic year over weights and measures.

So, yeah, until the league pays the players what they're owed, I will not be writing any posts here about the WNBA, what teams I follow, the upcoming Philadelphia team, etc. It just does not sit right with me at all. Good luck to the Player's Association in the ongoing negotiations!

Before we get into it, this one is gonna need some background.

Despite what you may have been led to believe, women play baseball. They have been since the 19th century, although most people in the United States have only ever heard of the "league of their own" era around World War II. During this time, women played professionally while the MLB pros were away at war. However, this is far from the only era or place where women could be found on the diamond.

Take, for example, the Little League Baseball. Girls have been on Little League Baseball rosters around the world for decades, although Little League had banned girls from participating in 1951. Years later, in 1972, Maria Pepe being the first girl to start a game after this ban, and although she was forced out of the league, she attracted the attention of the National Organization for Women (NOW). NOW supported a court case on her behalf that eventually led to girls being allowed to play Little League again.

Since then, there have been 24 girls to appear in the World Series, the first being Victoria Roche (Belgium) in 1984. Easily the most famous, though, was Mo'ne Davis. A Philadelphia native, she competed with her team representing the Mid-Atlantic region in 2014. There, she became the first girl to pitch a win and a shutout in the World Series.

Now, the fact that I'm telling you about the Little League World Series may have hinted at what's coming next. If you guessed that I'd start talking about professional women's baseball outside of the US, you're right!

I'm physically restraining myself from going into crazy detail, so I will simply finish this section by talking about the Women's Baseball World Cup :) This is an international tournament that has been running every other year since 2004. It's been sitting at a record high 12 participant nations since 2016, and has represented 16 total nations! These include the reigning 7-time gold medalist Japan; 2-time gold USA; 2-time silver Canada; 1-time silver Chinese Taipei; 1-time bronze Venezuela; and non-medaling participants Cuba, Dominican Republic, France, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Netherlands, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, and South Korea. China and the Philippines were also slated to participate in 2020, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Cup was postponed and eventually cancelled.

So, now you know that women and girls play baseball, but with all this high-end talent from around the world, what if there were a league where the best could compete every year?

The Women's Pro Baseball League was founded and announced in 2024. Its goal is to commence play in the summer of 2026, and it will hopefully serve as the first sustainable women's baseball league in the United States since the 1950s. The four inaugural teams based in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and San Fransisco will compete at a neutral site: the historic Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois. This is where the first women's baseball game, for which the players were paid and fans were charged admission, was played back in 1875.

Since the league is still in it's infancy and has yet to start their first season, let's talk about the process of building this league. Things really started to ramp up in 2025. Open tryouts were held in August at Nationals Park in Washington, DC. Over 600 players registered for the tryouts, and the league narrowed their draft-eligible list to 130 viable pros. One of these pros was—surprise!—Mo'ne Davis, from Philadelphia!

In October, the league announced their teams, and a virtual player draft was held in November. The first overall pick in the draft was famed women's baseballer and Banana Baller Kelsie Whitmore, selected by San Fransisco. Interesting note on Whitmore: she and several other players selected and signed in the WPBL will be continuing to play Banana Ball with their respective teams leading up to and following their season, because Jesse Cole is a saint.

The tentative schedule and format for the season is as follows: starting in May, there will be a 4-week regular season, with teams playing two games per week. Then, there will be an all-star game, and finally a 2-week postseason tournament. Hopefully, all plans run smoothly!

Now, to name my faves :) I think I will be rooting for Los Angeles, as they have drafted and signed my favorite players: Mo'ne Davis (obviously), and Ashton Lansdell (another Banana Baller!). I also appreciate that New York is running with the tradition of professional women's sports teams based in NYC wearing liberty teal. I think it's fun!

And... that's all I've got for you, so far! I hope to add more to this as more happens (team branding? the season? playoffs? expansion?). Until then, I hope you enjoyed!

Banana Ball is amazing, and I need more people to know about it.

The Savannah Bananas started as a collegiate summer baseball team in 2016. They were fairly successful in the Coastal Plain League, winning three championships through 2022, but D-class college baseball isn't what got them 10.5M followers on TikTok. Starting in 2018, the team developed an alternative rule set for baseball called "Banana Ball." From then on, as popularity grew, the team started functioning as two different teams playing two different sports, with Banana Ball happening primarily in the off-season.

The rules of Banana Ball are similar to regular baseball, but the differences are quite stark. The main quality of Banana Ball is the emphasis on "trick plays," which is why the Bananas get compared to the Harlem Globetrotters so often. A trick play is when a player executes a normal play (such as throwing a pitch or catching a fly-ball) while putting some sort of extra spin on it. Common tricks include backflips, throwing behind the back, or dribbling the ball in various ways.

There are also changes to the rules themselves, 12 in total. Rather than collecting points in the form of runs, the team that scores the most runs in an inning wins a single point for that inning. There's also a two-hour time limit on the game, and once the last playable inning is reached, every run scored during that inning counts as a point (like in normal baseball). Any fly-ball caught cleanly by a spectator (which would normally be a foul ball) is considered an out on the field. The batter is not allowed to bunt or step out of the batter's box, but they are allowed to steal first base at any time. Also, instead of walks, Banana Ball uses a "four-ball sprint" system, where after ball four, the batter may advance as far as they want around the bases until every fielded player has touched the ball. There are some other rules, too, but I will end with the "Fan Challenge," allowing fans to call for a review on the previous play once per game.

This might sound overwhelming in text-form. I know that just reading the Banana Ball rules can make even my head hurt, but I promise it's a lot less serious than it seems. At it's roots, Banana Ball is a version of baseball designed to be entertaining and engaging for the fans.

So, back to the history. In 2020, due to the shortned CPL season, the Bananas debuted the Party Animals, an opponent team for home games in Savannah. In 2021, the Bananas played in their "One City World Tour," where they barnstormed Hank Aaron Stadium in Mobile, Alabama, and sold out both nights. Then, once the 2022 CPL season had ended, the Bananas announced that they were folding their collegiate program and diving into full-time Banana Ball. With this, the Bananas expanded their "world tour" to 14 cities.

From there, Banana Ball has continued to grow exponentially. They officially formed the Banana Ball Championship League in 2023. The Party Animals became a proper team in 2024, along with the addition of the new Firefighters team. From there, they added a development team called the Visitors, and then the new Texas Tailgaters. Then, in 2025, they unveiled two new teams, the Loco Beach Coconuts and the Indianapolis Clowns (based on the real Clowns, who were an entertainment baseball team in the Negro Leagues and were around from the 1930s to the 1980s!).

The main thing I want to express here is that Banana Ball gets bigger and bigger every single year, and the owners, Fans First Entertainment, really understand what it means to put out a quality sport entertainment product. They ensure that their merchandise is affordable, their tickets are distributed fairly, and their on-field product is always going to be something you've never seen before. These are the key points that founder Jesse Cole is always preaching, and he lives up to it. It's truly amazing to see the growth of something like this in such a short span of time!

For my favorites, I can't really say! I just love watching the games and seeing whatever they're going to do next. I'm hoping to get to go to one of the games this upcoming season, and if I do, I just know it will be absolutely spectacular! As for players, though, I do love to see Ashton Lansdell and Kelsie Whitmore tearing it up, plus Dakota "Stilts" Albritton, who is just delightful (he bats, fields, and pitches on stilts and is listed at 10'9").

Anyway, I urge you to watch a game or check out their social media if you've never done so. And check out the teams on their website, as you'll be sure to see some fantastic characters. Banana Ball is a blast!