Although the writing was on the wall last week, it is now confirmed: there will be no NexGen League -- at least this year -- as the deadline for teams to commit to the proposal passed yesterday. NexGen founder Kevin Minderhout said, "There won't be a league structure as proposed this year."
February 12, 2013 by Charlie Eisenhood in News with 15 comments
Although the writing was on the wall last week, it is now confirmed: there will be no NexGen League — at least this year — as the deadline for teams to commit to the proposal passed yesterday.
NexGen founder Kevin Minderhout told Ultiworld last night that “there won’t be a league structure as proposed this year.”
Minderhout is still working to put together a pilot project: a series of regional tournaments with the teams he initially contacted to be involved for the league. The events would look much like the ones in the proposed league were described to look: NexGen would film many of the games and post them to their website for purchase, tickets would be available for fans to purchase, and teams would pay no bid fee.
There are still scheduling issues to be worked through, and it’s not certain at this time whether these events will happen or not. Teams will have to confirm their plans with USA Ultimate and the Triple Crown Tour first before
It is still possible — despite what Minderhout said last week — that NexGen will work with USA Ultimate to cover Triple Crown Tour events.
“[USA Ultimate and I] have exchanged a couple emails since [last week],” said Minderhout. “I think right now, if we’re anywhere, it’s just a discussion of whether or not NGN’s services make sense for USAU’s objectives. What NGN does is we film games and we put them up on NGNUltimate.com behind a paywall…So whether or not it makes sense for USA Ultimate to allow us to do that with what their objectives are is a discussion that I think will take place.”
Minderhout is no longer interested in doing contracted work for USA Ultimate as he did previously. He would be interested in covering USAU tournaments with his pay-per-view model, but not the free YouTube coverage as was seen at the 2012 Club Championships.
Minderhout called this moment a “pivot,” as he resets his focus on planning the 2013 NexGen Tour and redesigning the NGN website.
