NexGen League Has Letters of Intent From All 18 Teams

January 8, 2013 by Wes Cronk in Featured, News with 12 Comments

Earlier today, the proposed NexGen league took another major step towards becoming a reality as Kevin Minderhout received a signed letter of intent from the last of the 18 teams included in his plan. After successfully meeting with the final holdout on Monday evening — at which time 17 of the 18 teams had already submitted signed letters — it seems that all of the necessary parties are now on-board and the NexGen league is ready to move forward with its next phase.

This is a developing story and Ultiworld will be providing updates throughout the day as more information comes in.

To provide context for this announcement, the following excerpt comes from our earlier reporting on this story:

“It’s important to realize that this is only one step of many,” said Minderhout in a statement. “A lot of work still needs to be done. When I met with teams I heard a lot of them saying ‘we want to work with USAU’, so we’re going to start there and proceed depending on where that conversation goes.”

Minderhout continues to stress his interest in partnering with USA Ultimate going forward. “I’d like to reiterate that I’m 100% committed to discussing all possible options for cooperation with USAU,” he wrote in an e-mail to team leaders. “I also believe for those discussions to be successful USAU will need to be clear on [its] objectives and specifically state what resources they are willing to commit to achieve those objectives.”

Top USA Ultimate administrators have yet to meet with Doublewide’s Kurt Gibson, who is acting as a liaison between teams and USAU. That meeting is scheduled for early this week.

The letters of intent that teams have signed only express an interest in Minderhout’s proposal. They are non-binding. We expect further news after teams meet with Boulder officials.

Tagged Kevin Minderhout, NexGen Pro League, USA Ultimate

J. Invencio

Wow! Congratulations, Kevin! You accomplished what many others were unable to do (including myself). Good luck with the next steps. –JOSE
ManlyMan

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of nexgen and interested in their proposal, but what does this actually mean? Without knowing what is in the letter, it’s tough to say how important this actually is. The letter is an “express of interest”? Pretty sure even USAU is “interested” in it, even if they hate it and find it threatening. Does the letter just mean they are open to future discussions on it? Or does it actually imply that the teams are planning to go with nexgen over TCT? That fact that they want to work with USAU makes things even more interesting. Are they looking for some sort of compromise between the two leagues? Will USAU budge at all from their current path? So many questions still remain.
- Justin Fereshetian
  
  Agreed, one thing that I could see happening after having read this, if the USAU was willing to cooperate, they could make some of these Nexgen tourney’s double as the TCT tourney’s, but that’s of course given USAU is on board, which is a huge question mark.
curious

Ultiworld keeps using the phrase “letter of intent”, but my understanding is that these are “letters of interest”, completely non-committing and non-binding. It’s merely 18 teams saying “yeah, we like this idea”, but no one has actually committed to the league. As much as I love Ultiworld and think it’s the first site covering Ultimate with a true journalistic approach, if these really are letters of interest, reporting here hasn’t been up to snuff.
- http://www.ultiworld.com/ Charlie Eisenhood
  
  Although we don’t have a copy of the letters, we have been explicit about exactly what you mention here. The first two sentences of the last paragraph above read: “The letters of intent that teams have signed only express an interest in Minderhout’s proposal. They are non-binding.”
  
  We use the phrase “letter of intent” because that is the name given to it by Kevin Minderhout. http://www.nexgentour.com/news/the-road-ahead
  - http://www.ultiworld.com/ Charlie Eisenhood
    
    I wrote some thoughts about the meaning behind teams signing this letter here: http://ultiworld.com/2013/01/07/the-frisbee-cliff-where-will-the-18-teams-fall/
M Taylor

Without knowing what these “Letters of Intent” entail, this doesn’t tell us anything. From what I’ve gathered, basically by signing these letters teams are expressing their approval of the NexGen idea, but not committing to anything, and that the letters don’t contain any binding language. The fact that 18 teams have signed them doesn’t really tell us much.
- Scott
  
  I think it is pretty telling, especially how public this has been as compared to last year in which something similar was brewing behind closed doors and only came to the public’s in the past couple of months. This gives the teams leverage against USAU/TCT as it shows that they are unified and that they’re willing to take their efforts elsewhere.
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NexGen League Has Letters of Intent From All 18 Teams

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