posted Jan 25th, 2007 - The Southwest Skydiving League has finalized its schedule for the 2007 season. Actually, the new schedule includes only the events at the two major hosts in California, Skydive Elsinore and Perris Valley Skydiving. The Southwest Skydiving League will be split up and turn into one league in California and the other one in Arizona.

The travel distance between California (Perris/Elsinore) and Arizona (Eloy) is significantly longer compared to other leagues in the country and has been in the way for the SSL teams. There were a few occasions when teams made the long trip in the past, mostly from California to Arizona and rarely the other direction.

The management in Perris, Elsinore and the NSL agreed with the separation, while teams and competitors in Arizona now have the opportunity to run the whole competition season in Eloy. The SSL schedules of the past years included meets in Eloy only at the very beginning of the season, while Perris and Elsinore took turns with the later meets.

There will be no major changes for the new California Skydiving League. Perris and Elsinore, represented by Dan BC, Perris Fury members and John Hamilton in Elsinore, decided to continue with hosting two meets each during the regular season. The teams and competitors of both skydiving centers have only a 30-minute drive from one place to the other.

The situation will be different in Arizona. Eloy is currently hosting three different team projects: Arizona Airspeed, Arizona Divewerkz and AZ Directe. These teams and the additional participants of their projects will have the opportunity to attend more meets on home turf and without travel efforts later in the season.

However, the planning phase in Arizona has not come to a conclusion so far, and meets have not been scheduled yet. Airspeed's team captain Craig Girard is currently discussing the options with the other potential participants. Teams from Arizona would still have the option to compete at the meets in Perris and Elsinore, and vice versa.

The planning phase and preparations in California are in full swing in the meantime. The management group has discussed several options to offer incentives to the 2007 participants. Perris Fury and Elsinore Gravity members already split up at meets in 2006 and created player coach line-ups, which were very attractive to new competitors.

Perris and Elsinore may work together even closer to apply this concept at some meets. Dan BC encouraged the more experienced teams to participate in such a project:

"We can plan one or two specific meets where we break up our best teams (Fury, Gravity and others) as well as our most experienced competitors and have each person put their own team together. I know both teams did this last year, but it may be a good idea to actually decide together on one or two meets that we all do that. The numbers of teams at those meets will be drastically increased and we'll be turning a lot of people on to competition."

The 4-way veterans in California may use this concept during the first two meets. Dan BC also suggested to possibly save the last two meets for the top teams' own competition experience in 2007. The NSL News will follow up with more information of the leagues on the west coast, and the meet dates will be posted on the according pages soon.